Bernard had never before had occasion to look into the small and ominously black muzzle of a loaded revolver. An involuntary twitching seized upon his muscles as he did so now, but his presence of mind did not desert him.
“No! Don’t shoot!” he called out. The words shook as he uttered them, and seemed to his nervously acute hearing to be crowded parts of a single sound. “That’s rank foolishness!” he added, hurriedly. “There’s no trick! Nobody dreams of touching you. I give you my word I’m more astonished than you are!”
The major seemed to be somewhat impressed by the candor of the young man’s tone. He did not lower the weapon, but he shifted his finger away from the trigger.
“That may or may not be the case,” he said with a studious affectation of calm in his voice. “At all events, you will at once do as I said.”
“But see here,” urged Bernard, “there’s an explanation to everything. I’ll swear that old O’Daly was put in here by our friend here—Jerry Higgins. That’s straight, isn’t it, Jerry?”
“It is, sir!” said Jerry, fervently, with eye askance on the revolver.
“And it’s evident enough that he couldn’t have got out by himself.”
“That he never did, sir.”
“Well, then—let’s figure. How many people know of this place?”
“There’s yoursilf,” responded Jerry, meditatively, “an’ mesilf an’ Linsky—me cousin, Joseph Higgins, I mane. That’s all, if ye l’ave O’Daly out. An’ that’s what bothers me wits, who the divil did l’ave him out?”
“This cousin of yours, as you call him,” put in the resident magistrate—“what did he mean by speaking of him as Linsky? No lying, now.”
“Lying, is it, your honor? ’T is aisy to see you’re a stranger in these parts, to spake that word to me. Egor, ’t is me truth-tellin ’s kept me the poor man I am. I remember, now, sir, wance on a time whin I was only a shlip of a lad—”
“What did you call him Linsky for?” Major Snaffle demanded, peremptorily.
“Well, sir,” answered Jerry, unabashed, “’t is because he’s freckles on him. ‘Linsky’ is the Irish for a ‘freckled man!’ Sure, O’Daly would tell you the same—if yer honor could find him.”
The major did not look entirely convinced.
“I don’t doubt it,” he said, with grim sarcasm; “every man, woman and child of you all would tell the same. Come now—we’ll get up out of this. Link your arms together, and give me the lantern.”
“By your lave, sir,” interposed Jerry, “that trick ye told us of your father—w’u’d that have been in a marteller tower, on the coast beyant Kinsale? Egor, sir, I was there! ’T was me tuk the gun-rags from your father’s mouth. Sure, ’t is in me ricolliction as if ’t was yesterday. There stud The O’Mahony—”
At the sound of the name on his tongue, Jerry stopped short. The secret of that expedition had been preserved so long. Was there danger in revealing it now.
To Bernard the name suggested another thought. He turned swiftly to Jerry.
“Look here!” he said. “You forgot something. The O’Mahony knew of this place.”
“Well, thin, he did, sir,” assented Jerry. “’T was him discovered it altogether.”
“Major,” the young man exclaimed, wheeling now to again confront the magistrate with his revolver, “there’s something queer about this whole thing. I don’t understand it any more than you do. Perhaps if we put our heads together we could figure it out between us. It’s foolishness to stand like this. Let me light the candles here, and all of us sit down like white men. That’s it,” he added as he busied himself in carrying out his suggestion, to which the magistrate tacitly assented. “Now we can talk. We’ll sit here in front of you, and you can keep out your pistol, if you like.”
“Well?” said Major Snaffle, inquiringly, when he had seated himself between the others and the door, yet sidewise, so that he might not be taken unawares by any new-comer.
“Tell him, Jerry, who this O’Mahony of yours was,” directed Bernard.
“Ah, thin—a grand divil of a man!” said Jerry, with enthusiasm. “’T was he was the master of all Muirisc. Sure ’t was mesilf was the first man he gave a word to in Ireland whin he landed at the Cove of Cork. ‘Will ye come along wid me?’ says he. ‘To the inds of the earth!’ says I. And wid that—”
“He came from America, too, did he?” queried the major. “Was that the same man who—who played the trick on my father? You seem to know about that.”
“Egor, ’t was the same!” cried Jerry, slapping his fat knee and chuckling with delight at the memory. “’T was all in the winkin’ of an eye—an’ there he had him bound like a calf goin’ to the fair, an’ he cartin’ him on his own back to the boat. Up wint the sails, an’ off we pushed, an’ the breeze caught us, an’ whin the soldiers came, faith, ’t was safe out o’ raych we were. An’ thin The O’Mahony—God save him!—came to your honor’s father—”
“Yes, I know the story,” interrupted the major. “It doesn’t amuse me as it does you. But what has this man—this O’Mahony—got to do with this present case?”
“It’s like this,” explained Bernard, “as I understand it: He left Ireland after this thing Jerry’s been telling you about and went fighting in other countries. He turned his property over to two trustees to manage for the benefit of a little girl here—now Miss Kate O’Mahony. O’Daly was one of the trustees. What does he do but marry the girl’s mother—a widow—and lay pipes to put the girl in a convent and steal all the money. I told you at the beginning that it was a family squabble. I happened to come along this way, got interested in the thing, and took a notion to put a spoke in O’Daly’s wheel. To manage the convent end of the business I had to go away for two or three days. While I was gone, I thought it would be safer to have O’Daly down here out of mischief. Now you’ve got the whole story. Or, no, that isn’t all, for when I got back I find that the young lady herself has disappeared; and, lo and behold, here’s O’Daly turned up missing, too!”
“What’s that you say?” asked Major Snaffle. “The young lady gone, also?”
“Is it Miss Kate?” broke in Jerry. “Oh, thin, ’t is the divil’s worst work! Miss Kate not to be found—is that your m’aning? ’T is not consayvable.”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s anything serious in that,” said Bernard. “She’ll turn out to be safe and snug somewhere when everything’s cleared up. But, in the meantime, where’s O’Daly? How did he get out of here?”
The major rose and walked over to the door. He examined its fastenings and lock with attention.
“It can only be opened from the outside,” he remarked as he returned to his seat.
“I know that,” said Bernard. “And I’ve got a notion that there’s only one man alive who could have come and opened it.”
“Is it Lin—me cousin, you mane?” asked Jerry.
“Egor! He was never out of me sight, daylight or dark, till they arrested us together.”
“No,” replied Bernard. “I didn’t mean him. The man I’m thinking of is The O’Mahony himself.”
Jerry leaped to his feet so swiftly that the major instinctively clutched his revolver anew. But there was no menace in Jerry’s manner. He stood for a moment, his fat face reddened in the candle’s pale glow, his gray eyes ashine, his mouth expanding in a grin of amazed delight. Then he burst forth in a torrent of eager questioning.
“Don’t you mane it?” he cried. “The O’Mahony come back to his own ag’in? W’u’d he—is it—oh, thin, ‘t is too good to be thrue, sir! An’ we sittin’ here! An’ him near by! An’ me not—ah, come along out ’o this! An’ ye’re not desayvin’ us, sir? He’s thruly come back to us?”
“Don’t go too fast,” remonstrated Bernard “It’s only guess-work There’s nothing sure about it at all. Only there’s no one else who could have come here.”
“Thrue for ye, sir!” exclaimed Jerry, all afire now with joyous confidence. “’T is a fine, grand intelligince ye have, sir. An’ will we be goin’, now, major, to find him?”
Under the influence of Jerry’s great excitement, the other two had risen to their feet as well.
The resident magistrate toyed dubiously with his revolver, casting sharp glances of scrutiny from one to the other of the faces before him, the while he pondered the probabilities of truth in the curious tale to which he had listened.
The official side of him clamored for its entire rejection as a lie. Like most of his class, with their superficial and hostile observation of an alien race, his instincts were all against crediting anything which any Irish peasant told him, to begin with. Furthermore, the half of this strange story had been related by an Irish-American—a type regarded by the official mind in Ireland with a peculiar intensity of suspicion. Yes, he decided, it was all a falsehood.
Then he looked into the young man’s face once more, and wavered. It seemed an honest face. If its owner had borne even the homeliest and most plebeian of Saxon labels, the major was conscious that he should have liked him. The Milesian name carried prejudice, it was true, but—
“Yes, we will go up,” he said, “in the manner I described. I don’t see what your object would be in inventing this long rigmarole. Of course, you can see that if it isn’t true, it will be so much the worse for you.”
“We ought to see it by this time,” said Bernard, with a suggestion of weariness. “You’ve mentioned it often enough. Here, take the lantern. We’ll go up ahead. The door locks itself. I have the key.”
The three men made their way up the dark, tortuous flight of stairs, replaced the lantern and key on their peg in Jerry’s room, and emerged once more into the open. They filled their lungs with long breaths of the fresh air, and then looked rather vacuously at one another. The major had pocketed his weapon.
“Well, what’s the programme?” asked Bernard.
Before any answer came, their attention was attracted by the figure of a stranger, sauntering about among the ancient stones and black wooden crosses scattered over the weed-grown expanse of the churchyard. He was engaged in deciphering the names on the least weather-beaten of these crosses, but only in a cursory way and with long intermittent glances over the prospect of ivy-grown ruins and gray walls, turrets and gables beyond. As they watched him, he seemed suddenly to become aware of their presence. Forthwith he turned and strolled toward them.
As he advanced, they saw that he was a tall and slender man, whose close-cut hair and short mustache and chin tuft produced an effect of extreme whiteness against a notably tanned and sun-burnt skin. Though evidently well along in years, he walked erect and with an elastic and springing step. He wore black clothes of foreign, albeit genteel aspect. The major noted on the lapel of his coat a tell-tale gleam of red ribbon—and even before that had guessed him to be a Frenchman and a soldier. He leaped swiftly to the further assumption that this was The O’Mahony, and then hesitated, as Jerry showed no sign of recognition.
The stranger halted before them with a little nod and a courteous upward wave of his forefinger.
“A fine day, gentlemen,” he remarked, with politeness.
Major Snaffle had stepped in front of his companions.
“Permit me to introduce myself,” he said, with a sudden resolution, “I am the stipendiary magistrate of the district. Would you kindly tell me if you are informed as to the present whereabouts of Mr. Cormac O’Daly, of this place?”
The other showed no trace of surprise on his browned face.
“Mr. O’Daly and his step-daughter,” he replied, affably enough, “are just now doing me the honor of being my guests, aboard my vessel in the harbor.”
Then a twinkle brightened his gray eyes as he turned their glance upon Jerry’s red, moon-like face. He permitted himself the briefest of dry chuckles.
“Well, young man,” he said, “they seem to have fed you pretty well, anyway, since I saw you last.” For another moment Jerry stared in round-eyed bewilderment at the speaker. Then with a wild “Huroo!” he dashed forward, seized his hand and wrung it in both of his.
“God bless ye! God bless ye!” he gasped, between little formless ejaculations of dazed delight. “God forgive me for not knowin’ ye—you’re that althered! But for you’re back amongst us—aloive and well—glory be to the world!”
He kept close to The O’Mahony’s side as the group began now to move toward the gate of the churchyard, pointing to him with his fat thumb, as if to call all nature to witness this glorious event, and murmuring fondly to himself: “You’re come home to us!” over and over again.
“I am much relieved to learn what you tell me, Mr.—— Or rather, I believe you are O’Mahony without the mister,” said Major Snaffle, as they walked out upon the green. “I dare say you know—this has been a very bad winter all over the west and south’, and crime seems to be increasing, instead of the reverse, as spring advances. We have had the gravest reports about the disaffection in this district—especially among your tenants. That’s why we gave such ready credence to the theory of murder.”
“Murder?” queried The O’Mahony. “Oh, I see—you thought O’Daly had been murdered?”
“Yes, we arrested your man Higgins, here, yesterday. I was just on the point of starting with him to Bantry jail, an hour ago, when this young gentleman—” the major made a backward gesture to indicate Bernard—“came and said he knew where O’Daly was. He took me down to that curious underground chamber—”
“Who took you down, did you say?” asked The O’Mahony, sharply. He turned on his heel as he spoke, as did the major.
To their considerable surprise, Bernard was no longer one of the party. Their dumfounded gaze ranged the expanse of common round about. He was nowhere to be seen.
The O’Mahoney looked almost sternly at Jerry.
“Who is this young man you had with you—who seems to have taken to running things in my absence?” he demanded.
Poor Jerry, who had been staring upward at the new-comer with the dumb admiration of an affectionate spaniel, cowered humbly under this glance and tone.
“Well, yer honor,” he stammered, plucking at the buttons of his coat in embarrassment, “egor, for the matter of that—I—I don’t rightly know.”
The young man from Houghton County, strolling along behind these three men, all so busily occupied with one another, had, of a sudden, conceived the notion of dropping silently out of the party.
He had put the idea into execution and was secure from observation on the farther side of the ditch, before the question of what he should do next shaped itself in his mind. Indeed, it was not until he had made his way to the little old-fashioned pier and come to an enforced halt among the empty barrels, drying nets and general marine odds and ends which littered the landing-stage, that he knew what purpose had brought him hither.
But he perceived it now with great clearness. What other purpose, in truth, did existence itself contain for him?
“I want to be rowed over at once to that vessel there,” he called out to John Pat, who made one of a group of Muirisc men, in white jackets and soft black hats, standing beneath him on the steps. As he descended and took his seat in one of the waiting dingeys, he noted other clusters of villagers along the shore, all concentrating an eager interest upon the yawl-rigged craft which lay at anchor in the harbor. They pointed to it incessant as they talked, and others could be seen running forward across the green to join them. He had never supposed Muirisc capable of such a display of animation.
“The people seem tickled to death to get The O’Mahony back again,” he remarked to John Pat, as they shot out under the first long sweep of the oars.
“They are, sir,” was the stolid response.
“Did your brother come back with him—that one-armed man who went after him—Malachy, I think they called him?”
“He did, sur,” said Pat, simply.
“Well”—Bernard bent forward impatiently—“tell me about it! Where did he find him? What do people say?”
“They do be saying manny things,” responded the oarsman, rounding his shoulders to the work.
Bernard abandoned the inquiry, with a grunt of discouragement, and contented himself perforce by watching the way in which the strange craft waxed steadily in size as they sped toward her. In a minute or two more, he was alongside and clambering up a rope-ladder, which dangled its ends in the gently heaving water.
Save for a couple of obviously foreign sailors lolling in the sunshine upon a sail in the bows, there was no one on deck. As he looked about, however, in speculation, the apparition of a broad, black hat, with long, curled plumes, rose above the companionway. He welcomed it with an exclamation of delight, and ran forward with outstretched hands.
The wearer of the hat, as she stepped upon the deck and confronted this demonstration, confessed to surprise by stopping short and lifting her black brows in inquiry. Bernard sheepishly let his hands fall to his side before the cool glance with which she regarded him.
“Is it viewing the vessel you are?” she asked. “Her jigger lug-sail is unusual, I’m told.”
The young man’s blue eyes glistened in reproachful appeal.
“What do I know about lugger jig-sails, or care, either,” he asked. “I hurried here the moment I heard, to—to see you!”
“’T is flattered I am, I’m sure,” said Kate, dryly, looking away from him to the brown cliffs beyond.
“Come, be fair!” Bernard pleaded. “Tell me what the matter is. I thought I had every reason to suppose you’d be glad to see me. It’s plain enough that you are not; but you—you might tell me why. Or no,” he went on, with a sudden change of tone, “I won’t ask you. It’s your own affair, after all. Only you’ll excuse the way I rushed up to you. I’d had my head full of your affairs for days past, and then your disappearance—they thought you were drowned, you know—and I—I—”
The young man broke off with weak inconclusiveness, and turned as if to descend the ladder again. But John Pat had rowed away with the boat, and he looked blankly down upon the clear water instead.
Kate’s voice sounded with a mellower tone behind him.
“I wouldn’t have ye go in anger,” she said.
Bernard wheeled around in a flash.
“Anger!” he cried, with a radiant smile chasing all the shadows from his face. “Why, how on earth could I be angry with you? No; but I was going away most mightily down in the mouth, though—that is,” he added, with a rueful kind of grin, “if my boat hadn’t gone off without me. But, honestly, now, when I drove in here this morning from Skibbereen, I felt like a victorious general coming home from the wars. I’d done everything I wanted to do. I had the convent business blocked, and I had O’Daly on the hip; and I said to myself, as we drove along: ‘She’ll be glad to see me.’ I kept saying that all the while, straight from Skibbereen to Muirisc. Well, then—you can guess for yourself—it was like tumbling backward into seven hundred feet of ice-water!”
Kate’s face had gradually lost its implacable rigidity, and softened now for an instant into almost a smile.
“So much else has happened since that drive of yours,” she said gently. “And what were ye doing at Skibbereen?”
“Well, you’ll open your eyes!” predicted Bernard, all animation once again; and then he related the details of his journey to Skibbereen and Cashel, of his interviews with the prelates and of the manner in which he had, so to speak, wound up the career of the convent of the Hostage’s Tears. “It hadn’t had any real, rightdown legitimate title to existence, you know,” he concluded, “these last five hundred years. All it needed was somebody to call attention to this fact, you see, and, bang, the whole thing collapsed like a circus-tent in a cyclone!”
The girl had moved over to the gunwale, and now leaning over the rail, looked meditatively into the water below.
“And so,” she said, with a pensive note in her voice, “there’s an end to the historic convent of the O’Mahonys! No other family in Ireland had one—’t was the last glory of our poor, hunted and plundered and poverty-striken race; and now even that must depart from us.”
“Well—hang it all!” remonstrated Bernard—“it’s better that way than to have you locked up all your life. I feel a little blue myself about closing up the old convent, but there’s something else I feel a thousand times more strongly about still.”
“Yes—isn’t it wonderful?—the return of The O’Mahony!” said Kate. “Oh, I hardly know still if I’m waking or not. ’T was all like a blessid vision, and ’t was supernatural in its way; I’ll never believe otherwise. There was I on the strand yonder, with the talisman he’d given me in me arms, praying for his return—and, behold you there was this boat of his forninst me! Oh! Never tell me the age of miracles is past?”
“I won’t—I promise you!” said Bernard, with fervor. “I’ve seen one myself since I’ve been here. It was at the Three Castles. I had my gun raised to shoot a heron, when an enchanted fairy—”
“Nothing to do but he’d bring me on board,” Kate put in, hastily. “Old Murphy swam out to him ahead of us, screaming wid delight like one possessed. And we sat and talked for hours—he telling strange stories of the war’s he’d been in wid the French, and thin wid Don Carlos, and thin the Turks, and thin wid some outlandish people in a Turkish province—until night fell, and he wint ashore. And whin he came back he brought O’Daly wid him—where in the Lord’s name he found him passes my understanding, and thin we up sail and beat down till we stood off Three Castle Head. There we lay all night—O’Mahony gave up his cabin to me—and this morning back we came again. And now—the Lord be praised!—there’s an ind to all our throubles!”
“Well,” said Bernard, with deliberation, “I’m glad. I really am glad. Although, of course, it’s plain enough to see, there’s an end to me, too.”
A brief time of silence passed, as the two, leaning side by side on the rail, watched the slow rise and sinking of the dull-green wavelets.
“You’re off to Ameriky, thin?” Kate finally asked, without looking up.
The young man hesitated.
“I don’t know yet,” he said, slowly. “I’ve got a curious hand dealt out to me. I hardly know how to play it. One thing is sure, though: hearts are trumps.”
He tried to catch her glance, but she kept her eyes resolutely bent upon the water.
“You know what I want to say,” he went on, moving his arm upon the rail till there was the least small fluttering suggestion of contact with hers. “It must have said itself to you that day upon the mountain-top, or, for that matter, why, that very first time I saw you I went away head over heels in love. I tell you, candidly, I haven’t thought or dreamed for a minute of anything else from that blessed day. It’s all been fairyland to me ever since. I’ve been so happy! May I stay in fairyland, Kate?”
She made no answer. Bernard felt her arm tremble against his for an instant before it was withdrawn. He noted, too, the bright carmine flush spring to her cheek, overmantle her dark face and then fade away before an advancing pallor. A tear glittered among her downcast lashes.
“You mustn’t deny me my age of miracles!” he murmuringly pleaded. “It was a miracle that we should have met as we did; that I should have found you afterward as I did; that I should have turned up just when you needed help the most; that the stray discovery of an old mediæval parchment should have given me the hint what to do. Oh, don’t you feel it, Kate? Don’t you realize, too, dear, that there was fate in it all? That we belonged from the beginning to each other?”
Very white-faced and grave, Kate lifted herself erect and looked at him. It was with an obvious effort that she forced herself to speak, but her words were firm enough and her glance did not waver.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “your miracle has a trick in it. Even if ’t would have pleased me to believe in it, how can I, whin ’t is founded on desate.”
Bernard stared at her in round-eyed wonderment.
“How ‘deceit’?” he stammered. “How do you mean? Is it about kidnapping O’Daly? We only did that—”
“No, ’t is this,” said Kate—“we ‘ll be open with each other, and it’s a grief to me to say it to you, whom I have liked so much, but you ‘re no O’Ma-hony at all.”
The young man with difficulty grasped her meaning.
“Well, if you remember, I never said I knew my father was one of the O’Mahonys, you know. All I said was that he came from somewhere in County Cork. Surely, there was no deceit in that.”
She shook her head.
“No; what ye said was that your name was O’Mahony.”
“Well, so it is. Good heavens! That isn’t disputed, is it?”
“And you said, moreover,” she continued, gravely, “that your father knew our O’Mahony as well almost as he knew himsilf.”
“Oh-h!” exclaimed Bernard, and fell thereupon into confused rumination upon many thoughts which till then had been curiously subordinated in his mind.
“And, now,” Kate went on, with a sigh, “whin I mintion this to The O’Mahony himself, he says he never in his life knew any one of your father’s name. O’Daly was witness to it as well.”
Bernard had his elbows once more on the rail. He pushed his chin hard against his upturned palms and stared at the skyline, thinking as he had never been forced to think before.
“Surely there was no need for the—the misstatement,” said Kate, in mournful recognition of what she took to be his dumb self-reproach. “See now how useless it was—and a thousand times worse than useless! See how it prevints me now from respecting you and being properly grateful to you for what you’ve done on me behalf, and—and—”
She broke off suddenly. To her consternation she had discovered that the young man, so far from being stricken speechless in contrition, was grinning gayly at the distant landscape.
Turning with abruptness she walked indignantly aft. Cormac O’Daly had come up from below, and stood wistfully gazing landward over the taffrail. She joined him, and stood at his side flushed and wrathful.
Bernard was not wholly able to chase the smile from his face as he rose and sauntered over toward her. She turned her back as he approached and tapped the deck nervously with her foot. Nothing dismayed, he addressed himself to O’Daly, who seemed unable to decide whether also to look the other way or not.
“Good morning, sir,” he said affably. “You’re quite a stranger, Mr. O’Daly.”
Kate, at his first word, had walked briskly away up the deck. Cormac’s little black eyes snapped viciously at the intruder.
“At laste I’m not such a stranger,” he retorted, “but that me thrue name is known, an’ I’m here be the invitation of the owner.”
“I’m sorry you take things so hard, Mr. O’Daly,” said Bernard. “An easy disposition would come very handy to you, seeing the troubles you ’ve got to go through with yet.”
The small man gazed apprehensively at his tormentor.
“I don’t folly ye,” he stammered.
“I’m going to propose that you shall follow me, sir,” replied the young man in an authoritative tone. “I understand that in conversation last night between your step-daughter and you and The—the owner of this vessel, the question of my name was brought up, and that it was decided that I was a fraud. Now, I’m not much given to making a fuss, but there are some things, especially at certain times, that I can’t stand—not for one little minute. This is one of ’em. Now I’m going to suggest that we hail one of those boats there and go ashore at once—you and Miss Kate and I—and clear this matter up without delay.”
“We’ll remain here till The O’Mahony returns!” said O’Daly, stiffly. “’T was his request. ’T is no interest of mine to clear the matther up, as you call it.”
“Well, it was no interest of mine, Mr. O’Daly,” remarked Bernard, placidly, “to go over the mining contracts you’ve made as trustee during the past dozen years and figure out all the various items of the estate’s income; but I’ve done it. It makes a very curious little balance-sheet. I had intended to fetch it down with me to-day and go over it with you in your underground retreat.”
“In the devil’s name, who are you?” snarled Cormac, with livid face and frightened eyes. “That’s just what I proposed we should go right and settle. If you object, why, I shall go alone. But in that case, it may happen that I shall have to discuss with the gentleman who has just arrived the peculiarities of that balance-sheet I spoke of. What do you think, eh?”
O’Daly did not hesitate.
“Sur, I’ll go wid you,” he said. “The O’Mahony has no head for figures. ’T would be flat injustice to bother him wid ’em, and he only newly landed.” Bernard walked lightly across the deck, humming a little tune to himself as he advanced, and baiting a short foot from where Kate stood.
“O’Daly’s going ashore with me,” he remarked. “He dare not!” she answered, over her shoulder. “The O’Mahony bade him stop here.”
“Well, this is more or less of a free country, and he’s changed his mind. He’s going with me. I—I want you to come, too.”
“’Tis loikely!” she said, with a derisive sniff.
“Kate,” he said, drawing nearer to her by a step and speaking in low, earnest tones, “I hate to plead this sort of thing; but you have nothing but candid and straightforward friendship from me. I’ve done a trifle of lying for you, perhaps, but none to you. I’ve worked for you as I never worked for myself. I’ve run risks for you which nothing else under the sun would have tempted me into. All that doesn’t matter. Leave that out of the question. I did it because I love you. And for that selfsame reason I come now and ask this favor of you. You can send me away afterward, if you like; but you can’t bear to stop here now, thinking these things of me, and refusing to come out and learn for yourself whether they are true or false, for that would be unfair, and it’s not in your blood—in our blood—to be that.”
The girl neither turned to him nor spoke, but he could see the outline of her face as she bowed her head and gazed in silence at the murmuring water; and something in this sight seemed to answer him.
He strode swiftly to the other side of the vessel, and exultantly waved his handkerchief in signal to the boatmen on the shore.
The O’Mahony sat once more in the living-room of his castle—sat very much at his ease, with a cigar between his teeth, and his feet comfortably stretched out toward the blazing bank of turf on the stone hearth.
A great heap of papers lay upon the table at his elbow—the contents of O’Daly’s strong-box, the key to which he had brought with him from the vessel—but not a single band of red tape had been untied. The O’Mahony’s mood for investigation had exhausted itself in the work of getting the documents out. His hands were plunged deep into his trousers’ pockets now, and he gazed into the glowing peat.
His home-coming had been a thing to warm the most frigid heart. His own beat delightedly still at the thought of it. From time to time there reached his ears from the square without a vague braying noise, the sound of which curled his lips into the semblance of a grin. It seemed so droll to him that Muirisc should have a band—a fervent half-dozen of amateurs, with ancient and battered instruments which successive generations of regimental musicians bad pawned at Skibbereen or Bantry, and on which they played now, neither by note nor by ear, but solely by main strength.
The tumult of discord which they produced was dreadful, but The O’Mahony liked it. He had been pleasurably touched, too, by the wild enthusiasm of greeting with which Muirisc had met him when he disclosed himself on the main street, walking up to the police-station with Major Snaffle and Jerry. All the older inhabitants he knew, and shook hands with. The sight of younger people among them whom he did not know alone kept alive the recollection that he had been absent twelve long years. Old and young alike, and preceded by the hurriedly summoned band, they had followed him in triumphal procession when he came down the street again, with the liberated Jerry and Linsky at his heels. They were still outside, cheering and madly bawling their delight whenever the bandsmen stopped to take breath. Jerry, Linsky and the one-armed Malachy were out among them, broaching a cask of porter from the castle cellar; Mrs. Fergus and Mrs. Sullivan were in the kitchen cutting up bread and meat to go with the drink.
No wonder there were cheers! Small matter for marvel was it, either, that The O’Mahony smiled as he settled down still more lazily in his arm-chair and pushed his feet further toward the fire.
Presently he must go and fetch O’Daly and Kate from the vessel—or no, when Jerry came in he would send him on that errand. After his long journey The O’Mahony was tired and sleepy—all the more as he had sat up most of the night, out on deck, talking with O’Daly. What a journey it had been! Post-haste from far away, barbarous Armenia, where the faithful Malachy had found him in command of a Turkish battalion, resting after the task of suppressing a provincial rebellion. Home they had wended their tireless way by Constantinople and Malta and mistral-swept Marseilles, and thence by land across to Havre. Here, oddly enough, he had fallen in with the French merchant to whom he had sold the Hen Hawk twelve years before—the merchant’s son had served with him in the Army of the Loire three years later, and was his friend—and he had been able to gratify the sudden fantastic whim of returning as he had departed in the quaint, flush-decked, yawl-rigged old craft. It all seemed like a dream!
“If your honor plazes, there’s a young gintleman at the dure—a Misther O’Mahony, from America—w’u’d be afther having a word wid ye.”
It was the soft voice of good old Mrs. Sullivan that spoke.
The O’Mahony woke with a start from his complacent day-dream. He drew his feet in, sat upright, and bit hard on his cigar for a minute in scowling reflection.
“Show him in,” he said, at last, and then straightened himself truculently to receive this meddling new-comer. He fastened a stern and hostile gaze upon the door.
Bernard seemed to miss entirely the frosty element in his reception. He advanced with a light step, hat in hand, to the side of the hearth, and held one hand with familiar nonchalance over the blaze, while he nodded amiably at his frowning host.
“I skipped off rather suddenly this morning,” he said, with a pleasant half-smile, “because I didn’t seem altogether needful to the party for the minute, and I had something else to do. I’ve dropped in now to say that I’m as glad as anybody here to see you back again. I’ve only been about Muirisc a few weeks, but I already feel as if I’d been born and brought up here. And so I’ve come around to do my share of the welcoming.”
“You seem to have made yourself pretty much at home, sir,” commented The O’Mahony, icily.
“You mean putting O’Daly down in the family vault?” queried the young man. “Yes, perhaps it was making a little free, but, you see, time pressed. I couldn’t be in two places at once, now, could I? And while I went off to settle the convent business, there was no telling what O’Daly mightn’t be up to if we left him loose; so I thought it was best to take the liberty of shutting him up. You found him there, I judge, and took him out.”
The O’Mahony nodded curtly, and eyed his visitor with cool disfavor.
“As long as you’re here, sir, you might as well take a seat,” he said, after a minute’s pause. “That ’s it. Now, sir, first of all, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me who you are and what the devil you mean, sir, by coming here and meddling in this way with other people’s private affairs.”
“Curious, isn’t it,” remarked the young man from Houghton County, blandly, “how we Americans lug in the word ‘sir’ every other breath? They tell me no Englishman ever uses it at all.”
The O’Mahony stirred in his chair.
“I’m not as easy-going a man or as good-natured as I used to be, my young friend,” he said, with an affectation of calm, through which ran a threatening note.
“I shouldn’t have thought it,” protested Bernard. “You seemed the pink of politeness out there in the graveyard this morning. But I suppose years of campaigning—”
“See here!” the other interposed abruptly. “Don’t fool with me. It’s a risky game! Unless you want trouble, stop monkeying and answer my question straight: Who are you?”
The young man had ceased smiling. His face had all at once become very grave, and he was staring at The O’Mahony with wide-open, bewildered eyes.
“True enough!” he gasped, after his gaze had been so protracted that the other half rose from his seat in impatient anger. “Why—yes, sir! I’ll swear to it—well—this does beat all!”
“Your cheek beats all!” broke in The O’Mahony, springing to his feet in a gust of choleric heat.
Bernard stretched forth a restraining hand.
“Wait a minute,” he said, in evidently sincere anxiety not to be misunderstood, and picking his words slowly as he went along, “hold on—I’m not fooling! Please sit down again. I’ve got something important, and mighty queer, too, to say to you.”
The O’Mahony, with a grunt of reluctant acquiescing, sat down once more. The two men looked at each other with troubled glances, the one vaguely suspicious, the other still round-eyed with surprise.
“You ask who I am,” Bernard began. “I’ll tell you. I was a little shaver—oh, six or seven years old—just at the beginning of the War. My father enlisted when they began raising troops. The recruiting tent in our town was in the old hay-market by the canal bridge. It seems to me, now, that they must have kept my father there for weeks alter he ’d put his uniform on. I used to go there every day, I know, with my mother to see him. But there was another soldier there—this is the queer thing about a boy’s memory—I remember him ever so much better than I do my own father. It’s—let’s see—eighteen years now, but I’d know him to this day, wherever I met him. He carried a gun, and he walked all day long up and down in front of the tent, like a polar bear in his cage. We boys thought he was the most important man in the whole army. Some of them knew him—he belonged to our section originally, it seems—and they said he’d been in lots of wars before. I can see him now, as plainly as—as I see you. His name was Tisdale—Zeb, I think it was—no, Zeke Tisdale.”
Perhaps The O’Mahony changed color. He sat with his back to the window, and the ruddy glow from the peat blaze made it impossible to tell. But he did not take his sharp gray eye off Bernard’s face, and it never so much as winked.
“Very interesting,” he said, “but it doesn’t go very far toward explaining who you are. If I’m not mistaken, that was the question.”
“Me?” answered Bernard, “Oh, yes, I forgot that. Well, sir, I am the only surviving son of one Hugh O’Mahony, who was a shoemaker in Tecumseh, who served in the same regiment, perhaps the same company, with this Zeke Tisdale I’ve told you about, and who, after the War, moved out to Michigan where he died.”
An oppressive silence settled upon the room. The O’Mahony still looked his companion straight in the face, but it was with a lack-luster eye and with the effect of having lost the physical power to look elsewhere. He drummed with his fingers in a mechanical way on the arms of the chair, as he kept up this abstracted and meaningless gaze.
There fell suddenly upon this long-continued silence the reverberation of an exceptionally violent outburst of uproar from the square.
“Cheers for The O’Mahony!” came from one of the lustiest of the now well-lubricated throats; and then followed a scattering volley of wild hurroos and echoing yells.
As these died away, a shrill voice lifted itself, screaming:
“Come out, O’Mahony, an’ spake to us! We’re dyin’ for a sight of you!”
The elder man had lifted his head and listened. Then he squinted and blinked his eyelids convulsively and turned his head away, but not before Bernard had caught the glint of moisture in his eyes.
The young man had not been conscious of being specially moved by what was happening. All at once he could feel his pulses vibrating like the strings of a harp. His heart had come up into his throat. Nothing was visible to him but the stormy affection which Muirisc bore for this war-born, weather-beaten old impostor. And, clearly enough, he himself was thinking of only that.
Bernard rose and stepped to the hearth, instinctively holding one of his hands backward over the fire, though the room was uncomfortably hot.
“They’re calling for you outside, sir,” he said, almost deferentially.
The remark seemed stupid after he had made it, but nothing else had come to his tongue.
The lurking softness in his tone caught the other’s ear, and he turned about fiercely.
“See here!” he said, between his teeth. “How much more of this is there going to be? I’ll fight you where you stand—here!—now!—old as I am—or I’ll—I’ll do something else—anything else—but d——m me if I’ll take any slack or soft-soap from you!”
This unexpected resentment of his sympathetic mood impressed Bernard curiously. Without hesitation, he stretched forth his hand. No responsive gesture was offered, but he went on, not heeding this. .
“My dear sir,” he said, “they are calling for you, as I said. They are hollering for ‘The O’Mahony of Muirisc.’ You are The O’Mahony of Muirisc, and will be till you die. You hear me!”
The O’Mahony gazed for a puzzled minute into his young companion’s face.
“Yes—I hear you,” he said, hesitatingly.
“You—are The—O’Mahony—of—Muirisc!” repeated Bernard, with a deliberation and emphasis; “and I’ll whip any man out of his boots who says you’re not, or so much as looks as if he doubted it!”
The old soldier had put his hands in his pockets and began walking slowly up and down the chamber. After a time he looked up.
“I s’pose you can prove all this that you’ve been saying?” he asked, in a musing way.
“No—prove nothing! Don’t want to prove anything!” rejoined Bernard, stoutly.
Another pause. The elder man halted once more in his meditative pacing to and fro.
“And you say I am The—The O’Mahony of Muirisc?” he remarked.
“Yes, I said it; I mean it!”
“Well, but—”
“There’s no ‘but’ about it, sir!”
“Yes, there is,” insisted The O’Mahony, drawing near and tentatively surrendering his hand to the other’s prompt and cordial clasp. “Supposing it all goes as you say—supposing I am The O’Mahony—what are you going to be?”
The young man’s eyes glistened and a happy change—half-smile, half-blush—blossomed all over his face.
“Well,” he said, still holding the other’s hand in his, “I don’t know just how to tell you—because I am not posted on the exact relationships; but I’ll put it this way: If it was your daughter that you ’d left on the vessel there with O’Daly, I’d say that what I propose to be was your son-in-law. See?”
It was only too clear that The O’Mahony did see. He had frowned at the first adumbration of the idea. He pulled his hand away now, and pushed the young man from him.
“No, you don’t!” he cried, angrily. “No, sirree! You can’t make any such bargain as that with me! Why—I’d ’a’ thought you’d ’a’ known me better! Me, going into a deal, with little Katie to be traded off? Why, man, you’re a fool!”
The O’Mahony turned on his heel contemptuously and strode up and down the room, with indignant sniffs at every step. All at once he stopped short.
“Yes,” he said, as if in answer to an argument with himself, “I’ll tell you to get out of this! You can go and do what you like—just whatever you may please—but I’m boss here yet, at all events, and I don’t want anybody around me who could propose that sort of thing. Me make Kate marry you in order to feather my own nest! There’s the door, young man!”
Bernard looked obdurately past the outstretched forefinger into the other’s face.
“Who said anything about your making her marry me?” he demanded. “And who talked about a deal? Why, look here, colonel”—the random title caught the ear of neither speaker nor impatient listener—“look at it this way: They all love you here in Muirisc; they’re just boiling over with joy because they’ve got you here. That sort of thing doesn’t happen so often between landlords and tenants that one can afford to bust it up when it does occur. And I—well—a man would be a brute to have tried to come between you and these people. Well, then, it’s just the same with me and Katie. We love each other—we are glad when we’re together; we’re unhappy when we’re apart. And so I say in this case as I said in the other, a mane between you and these people. Well, then, it’s just the same with me and Katie. We love each other—we are glad when we’re together; we’re unhappy when we’re apart. And so I say in this case as I said in the other, a man would be a brute—”
“Do you mean to tell me—” The O’Mahony broke in, and then was himself cut short.
“Yes, I do mean to tell you,” interrupted Bernard; “and, what’s more, she means to tell you, too, if you put on your hat and walk over to the convent.” Noting the other’s puzzled glance, he hastened on to explain: “I rowed over to your sloop, or ship, or whatever you call it, after I left you this morning, and I brought her and O’Daly back with me on purpose to tell you.”
Before The O’Mahony had mastered this confusing piece of information, much less prepared verbal comment upon it, the door was thrust open; and, ushered in, as it were, by the sharply resounding clamor of the crowd outside, the burly figure of Jerry Higgins appeared.
“For the love o’ God, yer honor,” he exclaimed, in a high fever of excitement, “come along out to ‘em! Sure they’re that mad to lay eyes on ye, they’re ’ating each other like starved lobsters in a pot! Ould Barney Driscoll’s the divil wid the dhrink in him, an’ there he is ragin’ up an’ down, wid his big brass horn for a weapon, crackin’ skulls right an’ left; an’ black Clancy’s asleep in his drum—‘t was Sheehan putt him into it neck an’ crop—an’ ’t is three constables work to howld the boys from rollin’ him round in it, an—an—”
“All right, Jerry,” said The O’Mahony; “I’ll come right along.”
He put on his hat and relighted his cigar, in slow and silent deliberation. He tarried thereafter for a moment or two with an irresolute air, looking at the smoke-rings abstractedly as he blew them into the air.
Then, with a sudden decision, he walked over and linked Bernard’s arm in his own. They went out together without a word. In fact, there was no need for words.