The stern natural law of mutability—of ceaseless growth, change and decay—which the big, bustling, preoccupied outside world takes so indifferently, as a matter of course, finds itself reduced to a bare minimum of influence in such small, remote and out-of-the-way places as Muirisc. The lapse of twelve years here had made the scantest and most casual of marks upon the village and its inhabitants. Positively no one worth mentioning had died—for even snuffy and palsied old Father Harrington, though long since replaced at the convent by a younger priest, was understood to be still living on in the shelter of some retreat for aged clergymen in Kerry or Clare. The three old nuns were still the sole ladies of the Hostage’s Tears, and, like the rest of Muirisc, seemed only a trifle the more wrinkled and worn under this flight of time.
Such changes as had been wrought had come in a leisurely way, without attracting much attention. The mines, both of copper and of pyrites, had prospered beyond the experience of any other section of Munster, and this had brought into the immediate district a considerable alien population. But these intrusive strangers had fortunately preferred to settle in another hamlet in the neighborhood, and came rarely to Muirisc. The village was still without a hotel, and had by this time grown accustomed to the existence within its borders of a constabulary barracks. Its fishing went forward sedately and without much profit; the men of Muirisc only half believed the stories they heard of the modern appliances and wonderful hauls at Baltimore and Crook-haven—and cared even less than they credited. The lobster-canning factory had died a natural death years before, and the little children of Muirisc, playing about within sight of its roofless and rotting timbers, avoided closer contact with the building under some vague and formless notion that it was unlucky. The very idea that there had once been a man who thought that Muirisc desired to put up lobsters in tins seemed to them comic—and almost impious as well.
But there was one alteration upon which the people of Muirisc bestowed a good deal of thought—and on occasion and under their breath, not a few bitter words.
Cormac O’Daly, whom all the elders remembered as a mere “pote” and man of business for the O’Mahonys, had suddenly in his old age blossomed forth as The O’Daly, and as master of Muirisc. Like many other changes which afflict human recollection, this had all come about by reason of a woman’s vain folly. Mrs. Fergus O’Mahony, having vainly cast alluring glances upon successive relays of mining contractors and superintendents, and of fish-buyers from Bristol and the Isle of Man, and even, in the later stages, upon a sergeant of police—had at last actually thrown herself in marriage at the grizzled head of the hereditary bard. It cannot be said that the announcement of this ill-assorted match had specially surprised the good people of Muirisc. They had always felt that Mrs. Fergus would ultimately triumph in her matrimonial resolutions, and the choice of O’Daly, though obviously enough a last resort, did not shock their placid minds. It was rather satisfactory than otherwise, when they came to think of it, that the arrangement should not involve the introduction of a stranger, perhaps even of an Englishman.
But now, after nearly three years of this marriage, with a young O’Daly already big enough to walk by himself among the pigs and geese in the square—they said to themselves that even an Englishman would have been better, and they bracketed the connubial tendencies of Mrs. Fergus and the upstart ambition of Cormac under a common ban of curses.
O’Daly had no sooner been installed in the castle than he had raised the rents. Back had come the odious charge for turf-cutting, the tax on the carrigeens and the tithe-levy upon the gathered kelp. In the best of times these impositions would have been sorely felt; the cruel failure of the potatoes in 1877 and ’78 had elevated them into the domain of the tragic.
For the first time in its history Muirisc had witnessed evictions. Half way up the cliff stood the walls of four cottages, from which the thatched roofs had been torn by a sheriff’s posse of policeman during the bleakest month of winter. The gloomy spectacle, familiar enough elsewhere throughout Ireland, had still the fascination of novelty in the eyes of Muirisc. The villagers could not keep their gaze from those gaunt, deserted walls. Some of the evicted people—those who were too old or too young to get off to America and yet too hardy to die—still remained in the neighborhood, sleeping in the ditches and subsisting upon the poor charity of the cottagers roundabout. The sight of their skulking, half-clad forms and hunger-pinched faces filled Muirisc with wrathful humiliation.
Almost worst still were the airs which latterly O’Daly had come to assume. Even if the evictions and the rack-renting could have been forgiven, Muirisc felt that his calling himself The O’Daly was unpardonable. Everybody in Ivehagh knew that the O’Dalys had been mere bards and singers for the McCarthys, the O’Mahonys, and other Eugenian houses, and had not been above taking service, later on, under the hatred Carews. That any scion of the sept should exalt himself now, in the shoes of an O’Mahony, was simply intolerable.
In proportion as Cormac waxed in importance, his coadjutor Jerry had diminished. There was no longer any talk heard about Diarmid MacEgan; the very pigs in the street knew him now to be plain Jerry Higgins. Only the most shadowy pretense of authority to intermeddle in the affairs of the estate remained to him. Unlettered goodnature and loyalty had stood no chance whatever against the will and powers of the educated Cormac. Muirisc did indeed cherish a nebulous idea that some time or other the popular discontent would find him an effective champion, but Jerry did nothing whatever to encourage this hope. He had grown stout and red-faced through these unoccupied years, and lived by himself in a barely habitable nook among the ruins of the castle, overlooking the churchyard. Here he spent a great deal of his time, behind barred doors and denying himself to all visitors—and Muirisc had long since concluded that the companion of his solitude was a bottle.
“I’ve a word more to whisper into your ear, Higgins,” said O’Daly, this very evening, at the conclusion of some unimportant conversation about the mines.
The supper had been cleared away, and a tray of glasses flanking a decanter stood on the table at which the speaker sat with his pipe. The buxom and rubicund Mrs. Fergus—for so Muirisc still thought and spoke of her—dozed comfortably in her arm-chair at one side of the bank of blazing peat on the hearth, an open novel turned down on her lap. Opposite her mother, Kate sat and sewed in silence, the while the men talked. It was the room in which The O’Mahony had eaten his first meal in Muirisc, twelve years before.
“‘A word to whishper,’” repeated O’Daly, glancing at Jerry with severity from under his beetling black brows, and speaking so loudly that even Mrs. Sullivan in the kitchen might have heard—“times is that hard, and work so scarce, that bechune now and midsummer I’d have ye look about for a new place.”
Jerry stared across the table at his co-trustee in blank amazement. It was no surprise to him to be addressed in tones of harsh dislike by O’Daly, or to see his rightful claims to attention contemptuously ignored. But this sweeping suggestion took his breath away.
“What place do ye mane?” he asked confusedly. “Where else in Muirisc c’u’d I live so aisily?”
“’T is not needful ye should live in Muirisc at all,” said O’Daly, with cold-blooded calmness. “Sure, ’t is manny years since ye were of anny service here. A lad at two shillings the week would more than replace ye. In these bad times, and worse cornin’, ’t is impossible ye should stay on here as ye’ve been doin’ these twelve years. I thought I’d tell ye in sayson, Higgins—not to take ye unawares.”
“Glory-be-to-the-world?” gasped Jerry, sitting upright in his chair, and staring open-eyed.
“’T is a dale of other alterations I have in me mind,” O’Daly went on, hurriedly. “Sure, things have stuck in the mire far too long, waiting for the comin’ to life of a dead man. ’T is to stir ’em up I will now, an’ no delay. Me step-daughter, there, takes the vail in a few days, an’ ’t is me intintion thin to rebuild large parts of the convint, an’ mek new rules for it whereby gerrels of me own family can be free to enter it as well as the O’Mahonys. For, sure, ’t is now well known an’ universally consaded that the O’Daly’s were the most intellectual an’ intelligent family in all the two Munsters, be rayson of which all the ignorant an’ uncultivated ruffians like the MacCarthys an’ The O’Mahony’s used to be beseechin’ ’em to make verses and write books an’ divert ’em wid playin’ on the harp—an ’t is high time the O’Daly’s came into their own ag’in, the same that they’d never lost but for their wake good-nature in consintin’ to be bards on account of their supayrior education. Why, man,” the swart-visaged little lawyer went on, his black eyes snapping with excitement—“what d’ ye say to me great ancestor, Cuchonnacht O’Daly, called na Sgoile, or ‘of the school,’ who died at Clonard, rest his soul, Anno Domini 1139, the most celebrated pote of all Oireland? An’ do ye mind thim eight an’ twenty other O’Dalys in rigular descint who achaved distinction—”
“Egor! If they were all such thieves of the earth as you are, the world’s d———d well rid of ’em!” burst in Jerry Higgins.
He had sprung to his feet, and stood now hotfaced and with clenched fists, glaring down upon O’Daly.
The latter pushed back his chair and instinctively raised an elbow to guard his head.
“Have a care, Higgins!” he shouted out—“you’re in the presence of witnesses—I’m a p’aceable man—in me own domicile, too!”
“I’ll ‘dommycille’ ye, ye blagyard!” Jerry snorted, throwing his burly form half over the table.
“Ah, thin, Jerry! Jerry!” A clear, bell-toned voice rang in his confused ears, and he felt the grasp of a vigorous hand upon his arm. “Is it mad ye are, Jerry, to think of striking the likes of him?”
Kate stood at his side. The mere touch of her hand on his sleeve would have sufficed for restraint, but she gripped his arm sharply, and turned upon him a gaze of stern reproval.
“’Tis elsewhere ye left your manners, Jerry!” she said, in a calm enough voice, though her bosom was heaving. “When our bards became insolent or turned rogues, they were sent outside to be beaten. ’T was niver done in the presence of ladies.”
Jerry’s puzzled look showed how utterly he failed to grasp her meaning. There was no such perplexity in O’Daly’s mind. He, too, had risen, and stood on the hearth beside his wife, who blinked vacuous inquiries sleepily at the various members of the group in turn.
“And we,” he said, with nervous asperity, “when our children become impertinent, we trounce them off to their bed.”
“Ah-h! No child of yours, O’Daly!” the girl made scornful answer, in measured tones.
“Well, thin,” the little man snarled, vehemently, “while ye’re under my roof, Miss O’Mahony, ye’ll heed what I say, an’ be ruled by ’t. An’ now ye force me to ’t, mark this: I’ll have no more of your gaddin’ about with that old bag-o’-bones of a Murphy. ’T is not dacint or fittin’ for a young lady—more especially when she’s to be a—wanderin’ the Lord knows where, or—”
Kate broke in upon his harangue with shrill laughter, half hysterical.
“Is it an O’Daly that I hear discoorsin’ on dacency to an O’Mahony!” she called out, ironically incredulous. “Well, thin—while that I’m under your roof—-”
“Egor! Who made it his roof?” demanded Jerry. “Shure, be the papers The O’Mahony wrote out wid his own hand for us—”
“Don’t be interruptin’, Jerry!” said Kate, again with a restraining hand on his arm. “I say this, O’Daly: The time I stop under this roof will be just that while that it takes me to put on me hat. Not an instant longer will I stay.”
She walked proudly erect to the chest in the corner, took up her hat and put it on her head.
“Come now, Jerry,” she said, “I’ll walk wid you to me cousins, the Ladies of the Hostage’s Tears. ’T will be grand news to thim that the O’Dalys have come into their own ag’in!”
Cormac O’Daly instinctively moved toward the door to bar her egress. Then a glance at Jerry’s heavy fists and angered face bred intuition of a different kind, and he stepped back again.
“Mind, once for all! I’ll not have ye here ag’in—neither one or other of ye!” he shouted.
Kate disdained response by even so much as a look. She moved over to the arm-chair, and, stooping for an instant, lightly brushed with her lips the flattened crimps which adorned the maternal forehead. Then, with head high in air and a tread of exaggerated stateliness, she led the way for Jerry out of the room and the house.
Mrs. Fergus heard the front door close with a resounding clang, and the noise definitely awakened her. She put up a correcting hand, and passed it over her front hair. Then she yawned meditatively at the fire, and, lifting the steaming kettle from the crane, filled one of the glasses on the tray with hot water. Then she permitted herself a drowsy halfsmile at the disordered appearance presented by her infuriated spouse.
“Well, thin, ’tis not in Mother Agnes O’Mahony’s shoes I’m wishin’ myself!” she said, upon reflection. “It’s right ye are to build thick new walls to the convint. They’ll be needed, wid that girl inside!”
Though by daylight there seemed to lie but a step of space between the ruined Castle of Muirisc and the portal of the Convent of the Hostage’s Tears, it was different under the soft, starlit sky of this April evening. The way was long enough, at all events, for the exchange of many views between Kate and Jerry.
“’Tis flat robbery he manes, Jerry,” the girl said, as the revolted twain passed out together under the gateway. “With me safe in the convint, sure he’s free to take everything for his son—me little stepbrother—an’ thin there’s an ind to the O’Mahony’s, here where they’ve been lords of the coast an’ the mountains an’ the castles since before St. Patrick’s time—an’, luk ye! an O’Daly comes on! I’m fit to tear out me eyes to keep them from the sight!”
“But, Miss Katie,” put in Jerry, eagerly, “I’ve a thought in me head—egor! The O’Mahony himself put writin’ to paper, statin’ how every blessed thing was to be yours, the day he sailed away. Sure ’twas meself was witness to that same, along wid O’Daly an’ your mother an’ the nuns. To-morrow I’ll have the law on him!”
“Ah, Jerry,” the girl sighed and shook her head; “ye’ve a good heart, but it’s only grief ye’ll get tryin’ to match your wits against O’Daly’s. What do you know about papers an’ documents, an’ the like of that, compared wid him? Why, man, he’s an attorney himself! ’T is thim that putts the law on other people—worse luck!”
“An’ him that usen’t to have a word for anny-thing but the praises of The O’Mahonys!” exclaimed Jerry, lost once more in surprise at the scope of O’Daly’s ambitions.
“I, for one, never thrusted him!” said Kate, with emphasis. “’T was not in nature that anny man could be that humble an’ devoted to a family that wasn’t his own, as he pretinded.”
“Weil, I dunno,” began Jerry, hesitatingly; “’t is my belafe he mint honest enough, till that boy o’ his was born. A childless man is wan thing, an’ a father’s another. ’T is that boy that’s turnin’ O’Daly’s head.”
Kate’s present mood was intolerant of philosophy. “Faith, Jerry,” she said, with sharpness, “’t is my belafe that if wan was to abuse the divil in your hearin’, you’d say: ‘At anny rate, he has a fine, grand tail.’”
Jerry’s round face beamed in the vague starlight with a momentary smile. “Ah, thin, Miss Katie!” he said, in gentle deprecation. Then, as upon a hasty afterthought: “Egor! I’ll talk with Father Jago.”
“Ye’ll do nothing of the kind!” Kate commanded.
“He’s a young man, an’ he’s not Muirisc born, an’ he’s O’Daly’s fri’nd, naturally enough, an’ he’s the chaplain of the convint. Sure, with half an eye, ye can see that O’Daly’s got the convint on his side. My taking the vail will profit thim, as well as him. Sure, that’s the point of it all.”
“Thin why not putt yer fut down,” asked Jerry, “an’ say ye’ll tek no vail at all?”
“I gave me word,” she answered, simply.
“But aisy enough—ye can say as Mickey Dugan did on the gallus, to the hangman: ‘Egor!’ said he, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’”
“We don’t be changin’ our minds!” said Kate, with proud brevity; and thereupon she ran up the convent steps, and, after a little space, filled with the sound of jangling bells and the rattle of bars and chains, disappeared.
Jerry pursued the small remnant of his homeward course in a deep, brown study. He entered his abode by the churchyard postern, bolted the door behind him and lighted a lamp, still in an absent-minded way. Such flickering rays as pierced the smoky chimney cast feeble illumination upon a sort of castellated hovel—a high, stone-walled room with arched doorways and stately, vaulted ceiling above, but with the rude furniture and squalid disorder of a laborer’s cottage below.
But another idea did occur to him while he sat on the side of his bed, vacantly staring at the floor—an idea which set his shrewd, brown eyes aglow. He rose hastily, took a lantern down from a nail on the whitewashed wall and lighted it. Then with a key from his pocket, he unlocked a door at the farther end of the room, behind the bed, and passed through the open passage, with a springing step, into the darkness of a low, stone-walled corridor.
The staircase down which we saw the guns and powder carried in secrecy, on that February night in 1867, led Jerry to the concealed doorway in the rounded wall which had been discovered. He applied the needful trick to open this door; then carefully closed it behind him, and made his way, crouching and stealthily, through the passage to the door at its end. This he opened with another key and entered abruptly.
“God save all here!” he called out upon the threshold, in the half-jesting, half-sincere tone of one who, using an ancient formula at the outset by way of irony, grows to feel that he means what it says.
“God save you kindly!” was the prompt response, in a thin, strangely vibrant voice: and on the instant the speaker came forward into firelight.
He was a slender man of middle age, with a pale, spectacled face, framed by a veritable mane of dingy reddish hair thrown back from temples and brow. This brow, thus bared, was broad and thoughtful besides being wonderfully white, and, with the calm gray eyes, which shone steadily through the glasses, seemed to constitute practically the whole face. There were, one noted at a second glance, other portions of this face—a weak, pointed nose, for example, and a mouth and chin hidden under irregular outlines of straggling beard; but the brow and the eyes were what the gaze returned to. The man wore a loose, nondescript sort of gown, gathered at the waist with a cord. Save for a table against the wall, littered with papers and writing materials and lighted by a lamp in a bracket above, the chamber differed in little from its appearance on that memorable night when the dead monk’s sleep of centuries had been so rudely broken in upon.
“I’m glad ye’ve come down ag’in to-day,” said the man of the brow and eyes. “Since this mornin’, I’ve traced out the idintity of Finghin—the one wid the brain-ball I told ye of—as clear as daylight. Not a man-jack of ’em but ’ll see it now like the nose on their face.”
“Ah, thin, that’s a mercy,” said Jerry, seating himself tentatively on a corner of the table. “Egor! It looked at one toime there as if his identity was gone to the divil intoirely. But l’ave you to smoke him out!”
“It can be proved that this Finghin is wan an’ the same wid the so-called Fiachan Roe, who married the widow of the O’Dubhagain, in the elevinth cintury.”
“Ah, there ye have it!” said Jerry, shaking his head dejectedly. “He wud marry a widdeh, w’u’d he? Thin, be me sowl, ’tis a marvel to grace he had anny idint—whatever ye call it—left at all. Well, sir, to tell ye the truth, ’tis disappointed I am in Finghin. I credited him with more sinse than to be marryin’ widdehs. An’ I suppose ye’ll l’ave him out of your book altogether now. Egor, an’ serve him right, too!”
The other smiled; a wan and fleeting smile of the eyes and brow.
“Ah, don’t be talkin!” he said, pleasantly, and then added, with a sigh: “More like he’ll l’ave me, wid me work undone. You’ll bear me witness, sir, that I’ve been patient, an’ thried me best to live continted here in this cave of the earth, an’ busy me mind wid work; but no man can master his drames. ’Tis that that’s killin’ me. Every night, the moment I’m asleep, faith, I’m out in the meadehs, wid flowers on the ditches an’ birds singin’, an’ me fishin’ in the brook, like I was a boy ag’in; an’ whin I wake up, me heart’s broke intirely! I tell ye, man, if ’t wasn’t for me book here, I’d go outside in spite of ’em all, an’ let ’em hang me, if they like—jist for wan luk at the sky an’ wan breath of fresh air.”
Jerry swung his legs nonchalantly, but there was a new speculation twinkling in his eyes as he regarded his companion.
“Ah, it won’t be long now, Major Lynch,” he said, consolingly. “An’ have ye much more to state in your book?”
“All the translatin’ was finished long since, but ‘t is comparin’ the various books together I am, an’ that takes a dale o’ time. There’s the psalter o’ Timoleague Abbey, an’ the psalter o’ Sherkin, an’ the book o’ St. Kian o’ Cape Clear, besides all the riccords of Muirisc that lay loose in the chest. Yet I’m far from complainin’. God knows what I’d a’ done without ’em.”
There are many marvels in Irish archaeology. Perhaps the most wonderful of all is the controlling and consuming spell it had cast over Linksy, making it not only possible for him to live twelve years in an underground dungeon, fairly contented, and undoubtedly occupied, but lifting him bodily out of his former mental state and up into an atmosphere of scholarly absorption and exclusively intellectual exertion. He had entered upon this long imprisonment with only an ordinary high-school education, and no special interest in or bent toward books. By the merest chance he happened to have learned to speak Irish, as a boy, and, later, to have been taught the written alphabet of the language. His first days of solitude in the subterranean chamber, after his recovery from the terrible blow on the head, had been whiled away by glancing over the curious parchment writings and volumes in the chest. Then, to kill time, he had essayed to translate one of the manuscripts, and Jerry had obligingly furnished him with paper, pens and ink. To have laboriously traced out the doubtful thread of continuity running through the confused and legendary pedigrees of the fierce Eugenian septs, to have lived for twelve long years buried in ancient Munster genealogies, wearing the eyesight out in waking hours upon archaic manuscripts, and dreaming by night of still more undecipherable parchment chronicles, may well seem to us, who are out in the busy noonday of the world, a colossal waste of time. No publisher alive would have thought for a moment of printing Linsky’s compilations at his own risk, and probably not more than twenty people would have regretted his refusal the whole world over. But this consideration has never operated yet to prevent archaeologists from devoting their time and energies and fortunes to works which nobody on earth is going to read, much less publish; Jerry was still contemplating Linsky with a grave new interest.
“Ye’ve changed that much since—since ye came down here for your health. ’Tis my belafe not a mother’s son of ’em ’u’d recognize ye up above,” he said, reflectively.
Linsky spoke with eagerness:
“Man alive! I’m jist dyin’ to make the attimpt!”
“What—an’ turn yer back on all these foine riccords an’ statements that ye’ve kept yer hand to so long?”
The other’s face fell.
“Sure, I c’u’d come down ag’in,” Linsky said, hesitatingly.
“We’ll see; we’ll see,” remarked Jerry. Then, in a careless manner, as if he had not had this chiefly in mind from the beginning, he asked: “Usen’t ye to be tellin’ me ye were a kind of an attorney, Major Lynch?”
“I was articled to an attorney, wance upon a time, but I’d no time to sthick to it.”
“But ye’d know how to hev the law on a man, if he was yer inemy?”
“Some of it is in me mind still, maybe,” replied Linsky, not with much confidence.
Jerry sprang lightly down from the table, walked over to the fire, and stood with his back to it, his legs wide apart and his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes, as he had seen The O’Mahony bear himself.
“Well, Linsky, I’ve a bargain to offer ye,” he said, bluntly.
Linsky stared in wild-eyed amazement. He had not heard the sound of this name of his for years.
“What—what was that name ye called?” he asked, with a faltering voice.
“Ah, it’s all right,” remarked Jerry, with assurance. “Faith, I knew ye wor Linsky from the beginning. An’ bechune ourselves, that’s but a drop in the bucket to the rest I know.”
Linsky’s surprise paralyzed his tongue. He could only pluck nervously at the cord about his waist and gaze in confusion at his jailer-friend.
“You believed all this time that ye were hid away down here by your fri’nds, to save ye from the poliss, who were scourin’ the counthry to arrest Fenians. Am I right?” Jerry asked, with a dawning smile on his red face.
The other nodded mechanically, still incomplete mystification.
“An’ you all the time besachin’ to go out an’ take yer chances, an’ me forever tellin’ ye ’twould be the ruin of the whole thund’rin’ Brotherhood if ye were caught?” Jerry continued, the smile ripening as he went on.
Again Linsky’s answer was a puzzled nod of acquiescence.
“Well, thin, there’s no Brotherhood left at all, an’ ’t is manny years since the poliss in these parts had so much as a drame of you or of anny Fenian under the sun.”
“But why,” stammered Linsky, at last finding voice—“why—thin—”
“Why are ye here?” Jerry amiably asked the question for him. “Only a small matther of discipline, as his reverence w’u’d say, when he ordered peas in our boots. To be open an’ above-board wid ye, man, ye were caught attimptin’ to hand over the lot of us to the sojers, that day we tried to take the fort. ’T is the gallus we might ’a’ got by rayson of your informin’. Do ye deny that same?” Linsky made no answer, but he looked now at the floor instead of at Jerry. In truth, he had been so long immured, confronted daily with the pretense that he was being hidden beyond the reach of the castle’s myrmidons, that this sudden resurrection of the truth about his connection with Fenianism seemed almost to refer to somebody else.
“Well, thin,” pursued Jerry, taking instant advantage of the other’s confusion, “egor, ’t was as a traitor ye were tried an’ condimned an’ sintenced, while ye lay, sinseless wid that whack on the head. There wor thim that w’u’d—uv—uv—well, not seen ye wake this side of purgatory, or wherever else ye had yer ticket for. But there was wan man that saved yer life from the rest—and he said: ‘No, don’t kill him, an’ don’t bate him or lay a finger to him, an’ I’ll be at the expinse of keepin’ him in a fine, grand place by himsilf, wid food of the best, an’ whishky aich day, an’ books an’ writin’s to improve his learnin’, an’ no work to do, an’ maybe, be the grace o’ God, he’ll come to think rightly about it all, an’ be ashamed of himsilf an’ his dirty doin’s, an be fit ag’in to come out an’ hold up his head amongst honest min.’ That’s the m’anin’ of what he said, an’ I’m the man he said it to—an’ that’s why I’m here now, callin’ ye by yer right name, an’ tellin’ ye the thruth.”
Linsky hesitated for a minute or two, with downcast gaze and fingers fidgeting at the ends of his waist-cord. Then he lifted his face, which more than ever seemed all brow and eyes, and looked frankly at Jerry.
“What ye say is a surprise to me,” he began, choosing his words as he went. “Ye never let on what your thoughts were concernin’ me, an’ I grew to forget how it was I came. But now you spake of it, sure ’tis the same to me as if I’d niver been thinkin’ of anything else. Oh, thin, tell that man who spoke up for me, whoever he may be, that I’ve no word but praise for him. ’T was a poor divil of a wake fool he saved the life of.”
“Wid a mixin’ of rogue as well,” put in Jerry, by way of conscientious parenthesis.
“’Tis the same thing—the worst fool is the rogue; but I tuk to ’t to keep soul an’ body together. Sure, I got into throuble in Cork, as manny another boy did before me, an’ fled to Ameriky, an’ there I listed, an’ came in at the tail of the war, an’ was shot down an’ robbed where I lay, an’ was in the hospital for months; an’ whin I came out divil a thing was there for me to putt me hand to; an’ the Fenians was started, an’ I j’ined ’em. An’ there was a man I knew who made a livin’ be sellin’ information of what winton, an’ the same offer came to me through him—an’ me starvin’; an’ that’s the way of it.”
“An’ a notorious bad way, at that!” said Jerry, sternly.
“I’m of that same opinion,” Linsky went on, in all meakness. “Don’t think I’m defindin’ meself. But I declare to ye, whin I look back on it, ’t is not like it was meself at all.”
“Ay, there ye have it!” exclaimed Jerry. “Luk now! Min do be changin’ and alterin’ all the while. I know a man—an old man—who used to be honest an’ fair-spoken, an’ that devoted to a certain family, egor, he’d laid down his life for ’em; an’ now, be rayson that he’s married a widdeh, an’ got a boy of his own, what did he but turn rogue an’ lie awake nights schamin’ to rob that same family! ’Tis that way we are! An’ so wid you, Linsky, ’tis my belafe that ye began badly, an’ that ye’re minded to ind well. Ye’re not the man ye were at all. ’T is part by rayson, I think, of your studyin’ in thim holy books, an’ part, too,” his eyes twinkled as he added, “be rayson of enjoyin’ my society every day.” Linsky passed the humorous suggestion by unheeded, his every perception concentrated upon the tremendous possibility which had with such strange suddenness opened before him.
“An’ what is it ye have in mind?” he asked breathlessly. “There was word of a bargain.”
“’Tis this,” explained Jerry: “An old thief of the earth—him I spoke of that married the widdeh—is for robbin’ an’ plunderin’ the man that saved your life. There’s more to the tale than I’m tellin’ ye, but that’s the way of it; an’ I’ll die for it but I’ll prevint him; an’ ’t is beyant my poor wits to do that same; an’ so ’t is your help I’m needin’. An’ there ye have it!”
The situation thus outlined did not meet the full measure of Linsky’s expectations. His face fell.
“Sure ye might have had me advice in anny case,” he said “if that’s all it comes to; but I thought I was goin’ out.”
“An’ why not?” answered Jerry. “Who’s stop-pin’ ye but me, an’ me needin’ ye outside?”
Linsky’s eyes glowed radiantly through their glasses.
“Oh, but I’ll come!” he exclaimed. “An’ whatever ye bid me that I’ll do!”
“Ah, but,” Jerry shook his head dubiously, “’t is you that must be biddin’ me what to do.”
“To the best of me power that I’ll do, too,” the other affirmed; and the two men shook hands.
“On to-morrow I’ll get clothes for ye at Bantry,” Jerry said, an hour later, at the end of the conference they had been holding, “an’ nixt day we’ll inthroduce ye to daylight an’ to—O’Daly.”
A vast sunlit landscape under a smiling April sky—a landscape beyond the uses of mere painters with their tubes and brushes and camp-stools, where leagues of mountain ranges melted away into the shimmering haze of distance, and where the myriad armlets of the blue Atlantic in view, winding themselves about their lovers, the headlands, and placidly nursing their children, the islands, marked as on a map the coastwise journeys of a month—stretched itself out before the gaze of young Bernard O’Mahony, of Houghton County, Michigan—and was scarcely thanked for its pains.
The young man had completed four-fifths of the ascent of Mount Gabriel, from the Dunmanus side, and sat now on a moss-capped boulder, nominally meditating upon the splendors of the panorama spread out before him, but in truth thinking deeply of other things. He had not brought a gun, this time, but had in his hand a small, brand-new hammer, with which, from time to time, to point the shifting phases of his reverie, he idly tapped the upturned sole of the foot resting on his knee.
From this coign of vantage he could make out the white walls and thatches of at least a dozen hamlets, scattered over the space of thrice as many miles. Such of these as stood inland he did not observe a second time. There were others, more distant, which lay close to the bay, and these he studied intently as he mused, his eyes roaming along the coast-line from one to another in baffled perplexity. There was nothing obscure, about them, so far as his vision went. Everything—the innumerable croft-walls dividing the wretched land below him into holdings; the dark umber patches where the bog had been cut; the serried layers of gray rock sloping transversely down the mountain-side, each with its crown of canary-blossomed furze; the wide stretches of desolate plain beyond, where no human habitation could be seen, yet where he knew thousands of poor creatures lived, all the same, in moss-hidden hovels in the nooks of the rocks; the pale sheen on the sea still further away, as it slept in the sunlight at the feet of the cliffs—everything was as sharp and distinct as the picture in a telescope.
But all this did not help him to guess where the young woman in the broad, black hat lived.
Bernard had thought a great deal about this young woman during the forty-eight hours which had elapsed since she stood up in the boat and waved her hand to him in farewell. In a guarded way he had made some inquiries at Goleen, where he was for the moment domiciled, but only to learn that people on the east side of the peninsula are conscious of no interest whatever in the people reputed to live on the west side. They are six or eight Irish miles apart, and there is high land between them. No one in Goleen could tell him anything about a beautiful dark young woman with a broad, black hat. He felt that they did not even properly imagine to themselves what he meant. In Goleen the young women are not beautiful, and they wear shawls on their heads, not hats.
Then he had conceived the idea of investigating the west shore for himself. On the map in his guide-book this seemed a simple enough undertaking, but now, as he let his gaze wander again along the vast expanse of ragged and twisted coast-line, he saw that it would mean the work of many days.
And then—then he saw something else—a vision which fairly took his breath away.
Along the furze-hedge road which wound its way up the mountain-side from Dunmanus and the south, two human figures were moving toward him, slowly, and still at a considerable distance. One of these figures was that of a woman, and—yes, it was a woman!—and she wore, a hat—as like as could be to that broad-brimmed, black hat he had been dreaming of. Bernard permitted himself no doubts. He was of the age of miracles. Of course it was she!
Without a moment’s hesitation he slid down off his rocky perch and seated himself behind a clump of furze. It would be time enough to disclose his presence—if, indeed he did at all—when she had come up to him.
No such temptation to secrecy besets us. We may freely hasten down the mountain-side to where Kate, walking slowly and pausing from time to time to look back upon the broadening sweep of land and sea below her, was making the ascent of Mount Gabriel.
Poor old Murphy had been left behind, much against his will, to nurse and bemoan his swollen ankle. The companion this time was a younger brother of the missing Malachy, a lumpish, silent “boy” of twenty-five or six, who slouched along a few paces behind his mistress and bore the luncheon basket. This young man was known to all Muirisc as John Pat, which was by way of distinguishing him from the other Johns who were not also Patricks. As it was now well on toward nine centuries since the good Brian Boru ordained that every Irishman should have a surname, the presumption is that John Pat did possess such a thing, but feudal Muirisc never dreamed of suggesting its common use. This surname had been heard at his baptism; it might be mentioned again upon the occasion of his marriage, though his wife would certainly be spoken of as Mrs. John Pat, and in the end, if he died at Muirisc, the surname would be painted in white letters on the black wooden cross set over his grave. For all the rest he was just John Pat.
And mediaeval Muirisc, too, could never have dreamed that his age and sex might be thought by outsiders to render him an unsuitable companion for Miss Kate in her wanderings over the countryside. In their eyes, and in his own, he was a mere boy, whose mission was to run errands, carry bundles or do whatever else the people of the castle bade him do; in return for which they, in one way or another, looked to it that he continued to live, and even on occasion, gave him an odd shilling or two.
“Look, now, John Pat,” said Kate, halting once more to look back; “there’s Dunbeacon and Dun-manus and Muirisc beyant, and, may be if it wasn’t so far, we could see the Three Castles, too; and whin we’re at the top, we should be able to see Rosbrin and the White Castle and the Black Castle and the strand over which Ballydesmond stood, on the other side, as well. ’Tis my belafe no other family in the world can stand and look down on sevin of their castles at one view.”
John Pat looked dutifully along the coast-line as her gesture commanded, and changed his basket into the other hand, but offered no comment.
“And there, across the bay,” the girl went on, “is the land that’s marked on the Four Masters’ map for the O’Dalys. Ye were there many’ times, John Pat, after crabs and the like. Tell me, now, did ever you or anny one else hear of a castle built there be the O’Dalys?”
“Sorra a wan, Miss Katie.”
“There you have it! My word, the impidince of thim O’Dalys—strolling beggars, and hedge teachers, and singers of ballads be the wayside! ’Tis in the books, John Pat, that wance there was a king of Ireland named Hugh Dubh—Hugh the Black—and these bards so perplexed and brothered the soul out of him wid claims for money and fine clothes and the best places at the table, and kept the land in such a turmoil by rayson of the scurrilous verses they wrote about thim that gave thim less than their demands—that Hugh, glory be to him, swore not a man of ’em should remain in all Ireland. ‘Out ye go,’ says he. But thin they raised such a cry, that a wake, kindly man—St. Columbkill that was to be—tuk pity on ’em, and interceded wid the king, and so, worse luck, they kept their place. Ah, thin, if Hugh Dugh had had his way wid ’em ’t would be a different kind of Ireland we’d see this day!”
“Well, this Hugh Dove, as you call him”—spoke up a clear, fresh-toned male voice, which was not John Pat’s—“even he couldn’t have wanted a prettier Ireland than this is, right here in front of us!”
Kate, in vast surprise, turned at the very first sound of this strange voice. A young man had risen to his feet from behind the furze hedge, close beside her, his rosy-cheeked face wreathed in amiable smiles. She recognized the wandering O’Ma-hony from Houghton County, Michigan, and softened the rigid lines into which her face had been startled, as a token of friendly recognition.
“Good morning,” the young man added, as a ceremonious afterthought. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
“You seem to be viewing our country hereabouts wid great complateness,” commented Kate, with a half-smile, not wholly free from irony. There really was no reason for suspecting the accidental character of the encounter, save the self-conscious and confident manner in which the young man had, on the instant, attached himself to her expedition. Even as she spoke, he was walking along at her side.
“Oh, yes,” he answered, cheerfully, “I’m mixing up business and pleasure, don’t you see, all the while I’m here—and really they get so tangled up together every once in a while, that I can’t tell which is which. But just at this moment—there’s no doubt about it whatever—pleasure is right bang-up on top.”
“It is a fine, grand day,” said Kate, with a shade of reserve. The frankly florid compliment of the Occident was novel to her.
“Yes, simply wonderful weather,” he pursued. “Only April, and here’s the skin all peeling off from my nose.”
Kate could not but in courtesy look at this afflicted feature. It was a short good-humored nose, with just the faintest and kindliest suggestion of an upward tilt at the end. One should not be too serious with the owner of such a nose.
“You have business here, thin?” she asked. “I thought you were looking at castles—and shooting herons.”
He gave a little laugh, and held up his hammer as a voucher.
“I’m a mining engineer,” he explained: “I’ve been prospecting for a company all around Cappagh and the Mizzen Head, and now I’m waiting to hear from London what the assays are like. Oh, yes—that reminds me—I ought to have asked before—how is the old man—the chap we had to carry to the boat? I hope his ankle’s better.”
“It is, thank you,” she replied.
He chuckled aloud at the recollections which the subject suggested.
“He soured on me, right from the start, didn’t hee?” the young man went on. “I’ve laughed a hundred times since, at the way he chiseled me out of my place in the boat—that is to say, some of the time I’ve laughed—but—but then lots of other times I couldn’t see any fun in it at all. Do you know,” he continued, almost dolefully, “I’ve been hunting all over the place for you.”
“I’ve nothing to do wid the minerals on our lands,” Kate answered. “’T is a thrushtee attinds to all that.”
“Pshaw! I didn’t want to talk minerals to you.”
“And what thin?”
“Well—since you put it so straight—why—why, of course—I wanted to ask you more about our people, about the O’Mahonys. You seemed to be pretty well up on the thing. You see, my father died seven or eight years ago, so that I was too young to talk to him much about where he came from, and all that. And my mother, her people were from a different part of Ireland, and so, you see—”
“Ah, there’s not much to tell now,” said Kate, in a saddened tone. “They were a great family once, and now are nothing at all, wid poor me as the last of the lot.”
“I don’t call that ‘nothing at all,’ by a jugful,” protested Bernard, with conviction.
Kate permitted herself a brief cousinly smile.
“All the same, they end with me, and afther me comes in the O’Dalys.”
Lines of thought raised themselves on the young man’s forehead and ran down to the sunburnt nose.
“How do you mean?” he asked, dubiously.
“Are you—don’t mind my asking—are you going to marry one of that name?”
She shrugged her shoulders, to express repugnance at the very thought.
“I’ll marry no one; laste of all an O’Daly,” she said, firmly. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she decided upon a further explanation. “I’m goin’ to take me vows at the convint within the month,” she added.
Bernard stared open-eyed at her.
“I-gad!” was all he said.
The girl’s face lightened at the sound of this exclamation, bringing back as it did a flood of welcome memories.
“I know you by that word for a true O’Mahony,—‘an American O’Mahoney,” she said, with eager pleasure beaming in her deep-gray eyes. She turned to her retainer: “You remimber that same word, John Pat. Who was it used always to be saying ‘I-gad?’”
John Pat searched the landscape with a vacuous glance.
“W’u’d it be Father Harrington?” he asked.
“Huh!” sniffed Kate, in light contempt, and turned again to the young engineer, with a backward nod toward John Pat. “He’s an honest lad,” she said, apologetically, “but the Lord only knows what’s inside of his head. Ah, sir, there was an O’Mahony here—‘tis twelve years now since he sailed away; ah, the longest day Muirisc stands she ’ll not see such another man—bold and fine, wid a heart in him like a lion, and yit soft and tinder to thim he liked, and a janius for war and commence and government that made Muirisc blossom like a rose. Ah, a grand man was our O’Mahony!”
“So you live at Muirisc, eh?” asked the practical Bernard.
“’T was him used always to say ‘I-gad!’ whin things took him by surprise,” remarked Kate, turning to study the vast downward view attentively.
“Well I said it because I was taken by surprise,” said the young man. “What else could a fellow say, with such a piece of news as that dumped down on him? But say, you don’t mean it, do you—you going to be a nun?”
She looked at him through luminous eyes, and nodded a grave affirmative.
Bernard walked for a little way in silence, moodily eying the hammer in his hand. Once or twice he looked up at his companion as if to speak, then cast down his eyes again. At last, after he had helped her to cross a low, marshy stretch at the base of a ridge of gray rock, and to climb to the top of the boulder—for they had left the road now and were making their way obliquely up the barren crest—he found words to utter.
“You don’t mind my coming along with you,” he asked, “under the circumstances?”
“I don’t see how I’m to prevint you, especially wid you armed wid a hammer,” she said, in gentle banter.
“And I can ask you a plain question without offending you?” he went on; and then, without waiting for an answer, put his question: “It’s just this—I’ve only seen you twice, it’s true, but I feel as if I’d known you for years, and, besides, we’re kind of relations—are you going to do this of your own free will?”
Kate, for answer, lifted her hand and pointed westward toward the pale-blue band along the distant coast-line.
“That castle you see yonder at the bridge—” she said, “’t was there that Finghin, son of Diarmid Mor O’Mahony, bate the MacCarthys wid great slaughter, in Anno Domini 1319.”