The two young people, with John Pat and the basket close behind, stood at last upon the very summit of Gabriel—a wild and desolate jumble of naked rocks piled helter-skelter about them, and at their feet a strange, little, circular lake, which in all the ages had mirrored no tree or flowering rush or green thing whatsoever, but knew only of the clouds and of the lightning’s play and of the gathering of the storm-demons for descent upon the homes of men.
A solemn place is a mountain-top. The thin, spiritualized air is all alive with mysteries, which, down below in the sordid atmosphere, visit only the brains of men whom we lock up as mad. The drying-up of the great globe-floods; the slow birth of vegetation; the rank growth of uncouth monsters; the coming of the fleet-footed, bare-skinned savage beast called man; the primeval aeons of warfare wherein knowledge of fire, of metals, of tanned hides and habitations was laboriously developed and the huger reptiles were destroyed; the dawn of history through the clouds of sun and serpent worship; the weary ages of brutish raids and massacres, of barbaric creeds and cruel lusts—all this the mountain-tops have stood still and watched, and, so far as in them lay, understood.
Some have comprehended more of what they saw than others. The tallest man is not necessarily the wisest. So there are very lofty mountains which remain stupid, despite their advantages, and there are relatively small mountains which have come to be almost human in their understanding of and sympathy with the world-long drama they have watched unfolding itself. The Brocken, for example, is scarcely nipple-high to many another of its German brethren, yet which of the rest has such rich memories, stretching back through countless centuries of Teuton, Slav, Alemanni, Suevi, Frank and Celt to the days when nomad strove with troglodyte, and the great cave-bear grappled with the mammoth in the silent fastnesses of the Harz.
In Desmond, the broad-based, conical Gabriel has as unique a character of another kind. There is nothing of the frank and homely German familiarity in the reputation it enjoys at home. To be sure, the mountain is scarred to the throat by bogcutters; cabins and the ruins of cabins lurk hidden in clefts of rocks more than half-way up its gray, furze-clad sides; yet it produces the effect of standing sternly aloof from human things. The peasants think of it as a sacred eminence. It has its very name from the legend of the archangel, who flying across Europe in disgust at man’s iniquities, could not resist the temptation to descend for a moment to touch with his foot this beautiful mountain gem in the crown of Carbery.
Kate explained this legend to her young companion from Houghton County, and showed him the marks of the celestial visitor’s foot plainly visible in the rock. He bestowed such critical, not to say professional, scrutiny upon these marks that she made haste to take up another branch of the ancient fable.
“And this little round lake here,” she went on, “they’ll all tell you ’t was made by bodily lifting out a great cylinder of rock and carting it miles through the air and putting it down in the sea out there, where it’s ever since been known as Fasnet Rock. They say the measurements are precisely the same. I forget now if ’t was the Archangel Gabriel did that, too, or the divil.”
“The result comes to about the same thing,” commented the engineer. “Whoever did it,” he went on, scanning the regularly rounded sides of the pool, “made a good workmanlike job of it.”
“No one’s ever been able to touch the bottom of it,” said Kate, with pride.
“Oh, come, now—I’ve heard that of every second lake in Ireland.”
“Well—certainly I’ve not tested it,” she replied, frostily, “but ’t is well known that if you sink a bottle in this lake ’t will be found out there in Dun-manus Bay fourteen hundred feet below us.”
“Why, the very first principle of hydrostatics,” began Bernard, with controversial eagerness. Then he stopped short, stroked his smooth chin, and changed the subject abruptly. “Speaking of bottles,” he said, “I see your man there is eying that lunch basket with the expression of a meat-axe. Wouldn’t it be a clever idea to let him unpack it?” The while John Pat stripped the basket of its contents, and spread them upon a cloth in the mossy shadow of an overhanging boulder, the two by a common impulse strolled over to the eastern edge of the summit.
“Beyond Roaring Water Bay the O’Driscoll Castles begin,” said Kate. “They tell me they’re poor trifles compared wid ours.”
“I like to hear you say ‘ours,’” the young man broke in. “I want you to keep right on remembering all the while that I belong to the family. And—and I wish to heaven there was something I could do to show how tickled to death I am that I do belong to it!”
“I have never been here before,” Kate said, in a musing tone, which carried in it a gentle apology for abstraction. “I did not know there was anything so big and splendid in the world.”
The spell of this mighty spectacle at once enchanted and oppressed her. She stood gazing down upon it for some minutes, holding up her hand as a plea for silence when her companion would have spoken. Then, with a lingering sigh, she turned away and led the slow walk back toward the lake.
“’Twas like dreaming,” she said with gravity; “and a strange thought came to me: ’Twas that this lovely Ireland I looked down upon was beautiful with the beauty of death; that ’twas the corpse of me country I was taking a last view of. Don’t laugh at me! I had just that feeling. Ah, poor, poor Ireland!”
Bernard saw tears glistening upon her long, black lashes, and scarcely knew his own voice when he heard it, in such depths of melancholy was it pitched.
“Better times are coming now,” he said. “If we open up the mines we are counting on it ought to give work to at least two hundred men.”
She turned sharply upon him.
“Don’t talk like that!” she said, in half command, half entreaty. “’T is not trade or work or mines that keeps a nation alive when ’tis fit to die. One can have them all, and riches untold, and still sink wid a broken heart. ’T is nearly three hundred years since the first of the exiled O’Mahonys sailed away yonder—from Skull and Crookhaven they wint—to fight and die in Spain. Thin others wint—Conagher and Domnal and the rest—to fight and die in France; and so for centuries the stream of life has flowed away from Ireland wid every other family the same as wid ours. What nation under the sun could stand the drain? ’T is twelve years now since the best and finest of them all sailed away to fight in France, and to—to die—oh, wirra!—who knows where? So”—her great eyes flashed proudly through their tears—“don’t talk of mines to me! ’T is too much like the English!”
Bernard somehow felt himself grown much taller and older as he listened to this outburst of passionate lamentation, with its whiplash end of defiance, and realized that this beautiful girl was confiding it all to him. He threw back his shoulders, and laid a hand gently on her arm.
“Come, come,” he pleaded, with a soothing drawl, “don’t give away like that! We’ll take a bite of something to eat, and get down again where the grass grows. Why, you’ve no idea—the bottom of a coal-mine is sociable and lively compared with this. I’d get the blues myself up here, in another half-hour!”
A few steps were taken in silence, and then the young man spoke again, with settled determination in his voice.
“You can say what you like,” he ground out between his teeth, “or, rather, you needn’t say any more than you like; but I’ve got my own idea about this convent business, and I don’t like it, and I don’t for a minute believe that you like it. Mind, I’m not asking you to tell me whether you do or not—only I want you to say just this: Count on me as your friend—call it cousin, too, if you like; keep me in mind as a fellow who’ll go to the whole length of the rope to help you, and break the rope like a piece of paper twine if it’s necessary to go further. That’s all.”
It is the property of these weird mountain-tops to make realities out of the most unlikely things. On a lower terrestrial level Kate’s mind might have seen nothing but fantastic absurdity in this proffer of confidential friendship and succor, from a youth whom she met twice. Here in the finer and more eager air, lifted up to be the companion of clouds, the girl looked with grave frankness into his eyes and gave him her hand in token of the bond.
Without further words, they rejoined John Fat, and sat down to lunch.
Indeed, there were few further words during the afternoon which John Pat was not privileged to hear. He sat with them during the meal, in the true democratic spirit of the sept relation, and he kept close behind them on their rambling, leisurely descent of the mountain-side. From the tenor of their talk he gathered vaguely that the strange young man was some sort of relation from America, and as relations from America present, perhaps, the one idea most universally familiar to the Irish peasant’s mind, his curiosity was not aroused. Their conversation, for the most part, was about that remarkable O’Mahony who had gone away years ago and whom John Pat only dimly remembered.
A couple of miles from Muirisc, the homeward-bound trio—for Bernard had tacitly made himself a party to the entire expedition and felt as if he, too, were going home—encountered, in the late afternoon, two men sitting by the roadside ditch.
“Oh, there’s Jerry,” said Kate to her companion—“Mr. Higgins, I mane—wan of my trustees. I’ll inthroduce you to him.”
Jerry’s demeanor, as the group approached him, bore momentary traces of embarrassment. He looked at the man beside him, and then cast a backward glance at the ditch, as if wishing that they were both safely hidden behind its mask of stone wall and furze. But this was clearly impossible; and the two stood up at an obvious suggestion from Jerry and put as good a face upon their presence as possible.
“This is a relation of moine from Ameriky, too,” said Jerry, after some words had passed, indicating the tall, thin, shambling, spectacled figure beside him, “Mr. Joseph Higgins, of—of—of—”
“Of Boston,” said the other, after an awkward pause.
He seemed ill at ease in his badly fitting clothes, and looked furtively from one to another of the faces before him.
“An’ what d’ ye think, Miss Katie?” hurriedly continued Jerry. “Egor! Be all the miracles of Moses, he’s possessed of more learnin’ about the O’Mahonys than anny other man alive, Cormac O’Daly ’d be a fool to him. An’, egor, he used to know our O’Mahony whin he was in Ameriky, before ever he came over to us!”
“Ye’re wrong, Jerry,” said Mr. Joseph Higgins, with cautious hesitation, “I didn’t say I knew him. I said I knew of him. I was employed to search for him, whin he was heir to the estate, unbeknownst to himself, an’ I wint to the town where he’d kept a cobbler’s shop—Tecumsy was the name of it—an’ I made inquiries for Hugh O’Mahony, but—”
“What’s that you say! Hugh O’Mahony—a shoemaker in Tecumseh, New York?” broke in young Bernard, with sharp, almost excited emphasis.
“’T is what I said,” responded the other, his pale face flushing nervously, “only—only he’d gone to the war.”
“An’ that was our O’Mahony,” explained Jerry.
“Glory be to God, he learned of the search made for him, an’ he came to us afther the war.”
Bernard was not sure that he had got the twitching muscles of his face under control, but at least he could manage his tongue.
“Oh, he came over here, did he?” he said, with a fair affectation of polite interest.
“You spoke as if you knew him,” put in Kate, eagerly.
“My father knew him as well—as well as he knew himself,” answered Bernard, with evasion, and then bit his lip in fear that he had said too much.
Within the next few days the people of Muirisc found themselves becoming familiar with the spectacle of two strange figures walking about among their narrow, twisted streets or across the open space of common between the castle and the quay. The sight of new-comers was still unusual enough in Muirisc to disturb the minds of the inhabitants—but since the mines had been opened in the district the old-time seclusion had never quite come back, and it was uneasily felt that in the lapse of years even a hotel might come to be necessary.
One of these strangers, a rickety, spindling, weirdeyed man in spectacles, was known to be a cousin of Jerry Higgins, from America. The story went that he was a great scholar, peculiarly learned in ancient Irish matters. Muirisc took this for granted all the more readily because he seemed not to know anything else—and watched his shambling progress through the village streets by Jerry’s side with something of the affectionate pity which the Irish peasant finds always in his heart for the being he describes as a “nathural”.
The other new-comer answered vastly better to Muirisc’s conceptions of what a man from America should be like. He was young, fresh-faced and elastic of step—with square shoulders, a lithe, vigorous frame and eyes which looked with frank and cheerful shrewdness at all men and things. He outdid even the most communicative of Muirisc’s old white-capped women in polite salutations to passers-by on the highway, and he was amiably untiring in his efforts to lure with pennies into friendly converse the wild little girls of Muirisc, who watched him with twinkling, squirrels’ eyes from under their shawls, and whisked off like so many coveys of partridges, at his near approach; the little boys, with the stronger sense of their sex, invariably took his pennies, but no more than their sisters could they be induced to talk.
There was a delightful absence of reserve in this young man from America. Muirisc seemed to know everything about him all at once. His name was O’Mahony, and his father had been a County-Cork man; he was a mining engineer, and had been brought over to Europe by a mining company as an expert in copper-ores and the refining of barytes; he was living at Goleen, but liked Muirisc much better, both from a miner, a logical point of view and socially; he was reckless in the expenditure of money on the cars from Goleen and back and on the hire of boatmen at Muirisc; he was filled to the top and running over with funny stories, he was a good Catholic, he took the acutest interest in all the personal narratives of the older inhabitants, and was free with his tobacco; truly a most admirable young man!
He had been about Muirisc and the immediate vicinity for a week or so—breaking up an occasional rock with his hammer when he was sure people were watching him, but more often lounging about in gossip on the main street, or fishing in the harbor with a boatman who would talk—when he made in a casual way the acquaintance of O’Daly.
The little old man, white-haired now, but with the blue-black shadows of clean shaving still staining high up his jaws and sunken cheeks, had come down the street, nodding briefly to such villagers as saluted him, and carrying his hands clasped at the buttons on the back of his long-tailed coat. He had heard rumors of this young miner from America, and paused now on the outskirts of a group in front of the cobbler’s shop, whom Bernard was entertaining with tales of giant salmon in the waters of Lake Superior.
“Oh, this is Mr. O’Daly, I believe,” the young man had on the instant interrupted his narrative to remark. “I’m glad to meet you, sir. I’d been thinking of calling on you every day, but I know you’re a busy man, and it’s only since yesterday that I’ve felt that I had real business with you. My name’s O’Mahony, and I’m here for the South Desmond Barytes Syndicate. Probably you know the name.”
The O’Daly found his wrinkled old paw being shaken warmly in the grasp of this affable young man before he had had time to be astonished.
“O’Daly’s my name,” he said, hesitatingly. “And you have business with me, you said?”
“I guess you’ll think so!” responded the other. “I’ve just got word from my superiors in London to go ahead, and naturally you’re the first man I want to talk with.” And then they linked arms.
“Well,” said the cobbler, as they watched the receding figures of the pair, “my word, there’s more ways of killin’ a dog than chokin’ him wid butter!”
An hour later, Bernard sat comfortably ensconced in the easiest chair afforded by the living-room of the castle, with the infant O’Daly on his knee and a trio of grown-up people listening in unaffected pleasure to his sprightly talk. He had at the outset mistaken Mrs. O’Daly for a married sister of Kate’s—an error which he managed on the instant to emphasize by a gravely deliberate wink at Kate—and now held the mother’s heart completely by his genial attentions to the babe. He had set old O’Daly all aglow with eager interest by his eulogy of Muirisc’s mineral wealth as against all other districts in West Carbery. And all the time, through anecdote, business converse, exchange of theories on the rearing and precocity of infants and bright-flowing chatter on every subject tinder the sun, he had contrived to make Kate steadily conscious that she was the true object of his visit. Now and again the consciousness grew so vivid that she felt herself blushing over the embroidered altar-cloth at which she worked, in the shadow between the windows.
“Well, sir,” said Bernard, dandling the infant tenderly as he spoke, “I don’t know what I wouldn’t give to be able, when I go back, to tell my father how I’d seen the O’Mahony castles here, and all that, right on the family’s old stamping-ground.”
“Yer father died, ye say, manny years ago?” remarked O’Daly.
“Sure, ‘manny’s not the word for it,” put in Mrs. O’Daly, with a flattering smile. “He’s but a lad yet, for all he’s seen and done.”
“Nobody could grow old in such an air as this,” said the young man, briskly. “You, yourself, bear witness to that, Mrs. O’Daly. Yes, my father died when I was a youngster. We moved out West after the War—I was a little shaver then—and he didn’t live long after that.”
“And would he be in the moines, too?” asked Cormac.
“No; in the leather business,” answered Bernard, without hesitation. “To the end of his days, he was always counting on coming back here to Ireland and seeing the home of the O’Mahonys again. To hear him talk, you’d have thought there wasn’t another family in Ireland worth mentioning.”
“’T was always that way wid thim O’Mahonys,” said O’Daly, throwing a significant glance over his wife and step-daughter. “I can spake freely to you, sir; for I’ll be bound ye favor yer mother’s side and ye were not brought up among them; but bechune ourselves, there’s a dale o’ nonsinse talked about thim same O’Mahonys. Did you ever hear yer father mintion an O’Daly?”
“Well—no—I can’t say I did,” answered the young man, bending his mind to comprehension of what the old man might be driving at.
“There ye have it!” said Cormac, bringing his hand down with emphasis on the table. “Sir, ’t is a hard thing to say, but the ingrathitude of thim O’Mahonys just passes belafe. Sure, ’t was we that made thim. What were they but poyrutts and robbers of the earth, wid no since but for raids an’ incursions, an’ burnin’ down abbeys an’ holy houses, and makin’ war on their neighbors. An’ sure, ’t was we civilized ’em, we O’Dalys, that they trate now as not fit to lace up their shoes. ’T was we taught thim O’Mahonys to rade an’ write, an’ everything else they knew in learnin’ and politeness. An’ so far as that last-mintioned commodity goes”—this with a still more meaning, sidelong glance toward the women—“faith, a dale of our labor was wasted intoirely.”
Even if Kate would have taken up the challenge, the young man gave her no time.
“Oh, of course,” he broke in, “I’ve heard of the O’Dalys all my life. Everybody knows about them!”
“Luk at that now!” exclaimed Cormac, in high triumph. “Sure, ’t is Ameriky’ll set all of us right, an’ keep the old learning up. Ye’ll have heard, sir, of Cuchonnacht O’Daly, called ‘na Sgoile, or ‘of the school’—”
“What, old Cocoanut!” cried Bernard, with vivacity, “I should think so!”
“’T was he was our founder,” pursued Cormac, excitedly. “An’ after him came eight-an’-twinty descindants, all the chief bards of Ireland. An’ in comparatively late toimes they had a school at Drumnea, in Kilcrohane, where the sons of the kings of Spain came for their complate eddication, an’ the princes doid there, an’ are buried there in our family vault—sure the ruins of the college remain to this day—”
“You don’t mean to say you’re one of that family, Mr. O’Daly?” asked Bernard, with eagerness.
“’T is my belafe I’m the head of it,” responded Cormac, with lofty simplicity. “I’m an old man, sir, an’ of an humble nature, an’ I’d not be takin’ honors on meself. But whin that bye there—that bye ye howld on yer knee—grows up, an’ he the owner of Muirisc an’ its moines an’ the fishin’, wid all his eddication an’ foine advantages—sure, if it pl’ases him to asshume the dignity of The O’Daly, an’ putt the grand old family wance more where it belongs, I’m thinkin’ me bones ’ll rest the aiser in their grave.”
Bernard looked down with an abstracted air at the unpleasantly narrow skull of the child on his knee, with its big ears and thin, plastered ringlets that suggested a whimsical baby-caricature of the mother’s crimps. He heard Kate rise behind him, walk across the floor and leave the room with an emphatic closing of the door. To be frank, the impulse burned hotly within him to cuff the infantile head of this future chief of the O’Dalys.
“I’ve a pome on the subject, which I composed last Aister Monday,” O’Daly went on, “which I’d be deloighted to rade to ye.”
“Unfortunately I must be hurrying along now,” said Bernard, rising on the instant, and depositing the child on the floor. “I’m sorry, sir, but—”
“Sure, ’t is you do be droivin’ everybody from the house wid yer pomes,” commented Mrs. O’Daly, ungenerously.
“Oh, no, I assure you!” protested the young man. “I’ve often heard of Mr. O’Daly’s verses, and very soon now I’m coming to get him to read them all to me. Have you got some about Cocoanut, Mr. O’Daly?”
“This particular one,” said Cormac, doggedly, “trates of a much later period. Indeed, ’t is so late that it hasn’t happened at all yit. ’T is laid in futurity, sir, an’ dales wid the grand career me son is to have whin he takes his proud position as The O’Daly, the proide of West Carbery.”
“Well, now, you’ve got to read me that the very first thing when I come next time,” said Bernard. Then he added, with a smile: “For, you know, I want you to let me come again.”
“Sir, ye can’t come too soon or stop too long,” Mrs. O’Daly assured him. “Sure, what wid there bein’ no railway to Muirisc an’ no gintry near by, an’ what wid the dale we hear about the O’Dalys an’ their supayriority over the O’Mahonys, an’ thim pomes, my word, we do be starvin’ for the soight of a new face!”
“Then I can’t be too glad that my face is new,” promptly put in Bernard, wreathing the countenance in question with beaming amiability. “And in a few days I shall want to talk business with Mr. O’Daly, too, about the mining rights we shall need to take up.”
“Ye’ll be welcome always,” said O’Daly.
And with that comforting pledge in his ears, the young man shook hands with the couple and made his way out of the room.
“Don’t trouble yourselves to come out,” he begged. “I feel already at home all over the house.”
“Now that’s a young man of sinse,” said the O’Daly, after the door had closed behind their visitor. “’T is not manny ye’ll foind nowadays wid such intelligince insoide his head.”
“Nor so comely a face on the outside of it,” commented his wife.
At the end of the hallway this intelligent young man was not surprised to encounter Kate, and she made no pretense of not having waited for him. Yet, as he approached, she moved to pass by.
“’T is althered opinions you hold about the O’Mahonys and the O’Dalys,” she said, with studied coldness and a haughty carriage of her dark head.
He caught her sleeve as she would have passed him.
“See here,” he whispered, eagerly, “don’t you make a goose of yourself. I’ve told more lies and acted more lies generally this afternoon for you than I would for all the other women on earth boiled together. Sh-h! Just you keep mum, and we’ll see you through this thing slick and clean.”
“I want no lies told for me, or acted either,” retorted Kate.
Her tone was proud enough still, but the lines of her face were relenting.
“No, I don’t suppose for a minute you do,” he murmured back, still holding her sleeve, and with his other hand on the latch. “You’re too near an angel for that. I tell you what: Suppose you just start in and do as much praying as you can, to kind o’ balance the thing. It’ll all be needed; for as far as I can see now, I’ve got some regular old whoppers to come yet.”
Then the young man released the sleeve, snatched up the hand at the end of that sleeve, kissed it, and was gone before Kate could say another word.
When she had thought it all over, through hours of seclusion in her room, she was still very much at sea as to what that word would have been had time been afforded her in which to utter it.
Having left the castle, Bernard walked briskly away across the open square, past the quay and along the curling stretch of sands which led to the path under the cliffs. He had taken the hammer from his pocket and swung it as he strode onward, whistling as he went.
A mile or so along the strand, he turned off at a footway leading up the rocks, and climbed this nimbly to the top, gaining which, he began to scan closely the broad expanse of dun-colored bog-plain which dipped gradually toward Mount Gabriel. His search was not protracted. He had made out the figures he sought, and straightway set out over the bog, with a light, springing step, still timed to a whistled marching tune, toward them.
“Well, I’ve treed the coon!” was his remark when he had joined Jerry and Linsky. “It was worth waiting for a week just to catch him like that, with his guard down. Wait a minute, then I can be sure of what I’m talking about.”
The others had not invited this adjuration by any overt display of impatience, and they watched the young man now take an envelope from his pocket and work out a sum on its back with a pencil in placid if open-eyed contentment. They both studied him, in fact, much as their grandfathers might have gazed at the learned pig at a fair—as a being with resources and accomplishments quite beyond the laborious necessity of comprehension.
He finished his ciphering, and gave them, in terse summary, the benefit of it.
“The way I figure the thing,” he said, with his eye on the envelope, “is this: The mines were going all right when your man went away, twelve years ago. The output then was worth, say, eight thousand pounds sterling a year. Since then it has once or twice gone as high at twenty thousand pounds, and once it’s been down to eleven thousand pouunds. From all I can gather the average ought to have been, say, fourteen thousand pounds. The mining tenants hold on the usual thirty-one-year lease, paying fifty pounds a year to begin with, and then one-sixteenth on the gross sales. There is a provision of a maximum surface-drainage charge of two pounds an acre, but there’s nothing in that. On my average, the whole royalties would be nine hundred and twenty-five pounds a year. That, in twelve years, would be eleven thousand pounds. I think, myself, that it’s a good deal more; but that’ll do as a starter. And you say O’Daly’s been sending the boss two hundred pounds a year?”
“At laste for tin years—not for the last two,” said Jerry.
“Very well, then; you’ve got nine thousand pounds. The interest on that for two years alone would make up all he sent away.”
“An’ ’t is your idea that O’Daly has putt by all that money?”
“And half as much more; and not a cent of it all belongs to him.”
“Thrue for you; ’t is Miss Katie’s money,” mourned Jerry, shaking his curly red head and disturbing his fat breast with a prolonged sigh. “But she’ll never lay finger to anny of it. Oh, Cormac, you’re the divil!”
The young man sniffed impatiently.
“That’s the worst of you fellows,” he said, sharply. “You take fright like a flock of sheep. What the deuce are you afraid of? No wonder Ireland isn’t free, with men who have got to sit down and cry every few minutes!” Then the spectacle of pained surprise on Jerry’s fat face drove away his mood of criticism. “Or no; I don’t mean that,” he hastened to add; “but really, there’s no earthly reason why O’Daly shouldn’t be brought to book. There’s law here for that sort of thing as much as there is anywhere else.”
“’T was Miss Katie’s own words that I’d be a fool to thry to putt the law on Cormac O’Daly, an’ him an attorney,” explained Jerry, in defiant self-defense.
“Perhaps that’s true about your putting the law on him,” Bernard permitted himself to say. “But you’re a trustee, you tell me, as much as he is, and others can act for you and force him to give his accounts. That can be done upon your trust-deed.”
“Me paper, is it?”
“Yes, the one the boss gave you.”
“Egor! O’Daly has it. He begged me for it, to keep ’em together. If I’d ask him for it, belike he’d refuse me. You’ve no knowledge of the characther of that same O’Daly.”
For just a moment the young man turned away, his face clouded with the shadows of a baffled mind. Then he looked Jerry straight in the eye.
“See here,” he said, “you trust me, don’t you? You believe that I want to act square by you and help you in this thing?”
“I do, sir,” said Jerry, simply.
“Well, then, I tell you that O’Daly can be made to show up, and the whole affair can be set straight, and the young lady—my cousin—can be put into her own again. Only I can’t work in the dark. I can’t play with a partner that ‘finesses’ against me, as a whist-player would say. Now, who is this man here? I know he isn’t your cousin any more than he is mine. What’s his game?”
Linsky took the words out of his puzzled companion’s mouth.
“’T is a long story, sir,” he said, “an’ you’d be no wiser if you were told it. Some time, plase God, you’ll know it all. Just now’t is enough that I’m bound to this man and to The O’Mahony, who’s away, an’ perhaps dead an’ buried, an’ I’m heart an’ sowl for doin’ whatever I can to help the young lady. Only, if you’ll not moind me sayin’ so, she’s her own worst inemy. If she takes the bit in her mouth this way, an’ will go into the convint, how, in the name of glory, are we to stop her or do anything else?”
“There are more than fifteen hundred ways of working that” replied the young man from Houghton County, simulating a confidence he did not wholly feel. “But let’s get along down toward the village.”
They entered Muirisc through the ancient convent churchyard, and at his door-way Jerry, as the visible result of much cogitation, asked the twain in. After offering them glasses of whiskey and water and lighting a pipe, Jerry suddenly resolved upon a further extension of confidence. To Linsky’s astonishment, he took the lantern down from the wall, lighted it, and opened the door at the back of the bed.
“If you’ll come along wid us, sir,” he said to Bernard, “we’ll show you something.”
“There, here we can talk at our aise,” he remarked again, when finally the three men were in the subterranean chamber, with the door closed behind them. “Have you anything like this in Ameriky?”
Bernard was not so greatly impressed as they expected him to be. He stolled about the vault-like room, sounding the walls with his boot, pulling-aside the bed-curtains and investigating the drain.
“Curious old place,” he said, at last. “What’s the idea?”
“Sure, ’t is a sacret place intoirely,” explained Jerry. “Besides us three, there’s not a man aloive who knows of it, exceptin’ The O’Mahony, if be God’s grace he’s aloive. ’T was he discovered it. He’d the eyes of a him-harrier for anny mark or sign in a wall. Well do I remimber our coming here first. He lukked it all over, as you’re doing.
“‘Egor!’ says he, ‘It may come in handy for O’Daly some day.’ There was a dead man there on the bed, that dry ye c’u’d ’a’ loighted him wid a match.”
“’T is a part of the convint,” Linsky took up the explanation, “an’ the chest, there, was full of deeds an’ riccorcls of the convint for manny cinturies. ‘T was me work for years to decipher an’ thranslate thim, unbeknownst to every soul in Muirisc. They were all in Irish.”
“Yes, it’s a queer sort of hole,” said Bernard, musingly, walking over to the table and holding up one of the ancient manuscripts to the lamplight for investigation. “Why, this isn’t Irish, is it?” he asked, after a moment’s scrutiny. “This is Latin.”
“’T is wan of half a dozen ye see there on the table that I couldn’t make out,” said Linsky. “I’m no Latin scholar meself. ’T was me intintion to foind some one outside who c’u’d thranslate thim.” Bernard had kept his eyes on the faded parchment.
“Odd!” he said. “It’s from a bishop—Matthew O’Finn seems to be the name—”
“He was bishop of Ross in the early part of the fourteenth cintury,” put in Linsky.
“And this thing is a warning to the nuns here to close up their convent and take in no more novices, because the church can’t recognize them or their order. It’s queer old Latin, but that’s what I make it out to be.”
“’T is an illegant scholar ye are, sir!” exclaimed Jerry, in honest admiration.
“No,” said Bernard; “only they started me in for a priest, and I got to know Latin as well as I did English, or almost. But my godliness wasn’t anywhere near high-water mark, and so I got switched off into engineering. I dare say the change was a good thing all around. If it’s all the same to you,” he added, turning to Linsky, “I’ll put this parchment in my pocket for the time being, I want to look it over again more carefully. You shall have it back.”
The two Irishmen assented as a matter of course. This active-minded and capable young man, who had mining figures at his finger’s ends, and could read Latin, and talked lightly of fifteen hundred ways to outwit O’Daly, was obviously one to be obeyed without questions. They sat now and watched him with rapt eyes and acquiescent nods as he, seated on the table with foot on knee, recounted to them the more salient points of his interview with O’Daly.
“He was a dacent ould man when I knew him first,” mused Jerry, in comment, “an’ as full of praises for the O’Mahonys as an egg is of mate. ’T is the money that althered him; an’ thin that brat of a bye of his! ’T is since thin that he behaved like a nagur. An ’t is my belafe, sir, that only for him Miss Katie’d never have dr’amed of interin’ that thunderin’ old convint. The very last toime I was wid him, egor, he druv us both from the house. ’T was the nuns made Miss Katie return to him next day. ’T is just that, sir, that she’s no one else bechune thim nuns an’ O’Daly, an’ they do be tossin’ her from wan to the other of ’em like a blessid ball.”
“The wonder is to me she’s stood it for a minute,” said Bernard; “a proud girl like her.”
“Ah, sir,” said Jerry, “it isn’t like in Ameriky, where every wan’s free to do what phases him. What was the girl to do? Where was she to go if she defied thim that was in authority over her? ’T is aisy to talk, as manny’s the toime she’s said that same to me; but ’t is another matther to do!”
“There’s the whole trouble in a nutshell,” said Bernard. “Everybody talks and nobody does anything.”
“There’s truth in that sir,” put in Linsky; “but what are you proposin’ to do? There were fifteen hundred ways, you said. What’s wan of ’em?”
“Oh, there are fifteen hundred and two now,” responded Bernard, with a smile. “You’ve helped me to two more since I’ve been down here—or, rather, this missing O’Mahony of yours has helped me to one, and I helped myself to the other.”
The two stared in helpless bewilderment at the young man.
“That O’Mahony seems to have been a right smart chap,” Bernard continued. “No wonder he made things hum here in Muirisc. And a prophet too. Why, the very first time he ever laid eyes on this cave here, by your own telling, he saw just what it was going to be good for.”
“I don’t folly ye,” said the puzzled Jerry.
“Why, to put O’Daly in, of course,” answered the young man, lightly. “That’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
“Egor! ’T is a grand idea that same!” exclaimed Jerry, slapping his thigh. “Only,” he added, with a sinking enthusiasm, “suppose he wouldn’t come?”
Bernard laughed outright.
“That’ll be easy enough. All you have to do is to send word you want to see him in your place up stairs; when he comes, tell him there’s a strange discovery you’ve made. Bring him down here, let him in, and while he’s looking around him just slip out and shut the door on him. I notice it’s got a spring-lock from the outside. A thoughtful man, that O’Mahony! Of course, you’ll want to bring down enough food and water to last a week or so, first; perhaps a little whiskey, too. And I’d carry up all these papers, moreover, and put ’em in your room above. Until the old man got quieted down, he might feel disposed to tear things.”
“Egor! I’ll do it!” cried Jerry, with sparkling eyes and a grin on his broad face. “Oh, the art of man!”
The pallid and near-sighted Linsky was less alive to the value of this bold plan.
“An’ what’ll ye do nixt?” he asked, doubtfully.
“I’ve got a scheme which I’ll carry out to-morrow, by myself,” said Bernard. “It’ll take me all day; and by the time I turn up the day after, you must have O’Daly safely bottled up down here. Then I’ll be in a position to read the riot act to everybody. First we’ll stand the convent on its head, and then I’ll come down here and have a little confidential talk with O’Daly about going to prison as a fraudulent trustee.”
“Sir, you’re well-named ‘O’Mahony,’” said Jerry, with beaming earnestness, “I do be almost believin’ ye’re his son!”
Bernard chuckled as he sprang off the table to his feet.
“There might be even stranger things than that,” he said, and laughed again.