Chapter IX: Part 9

Such is the record of Kearmit, Kearmit, the holy of Cumanac,
Truthful the word he has written—blessed the writing!
Truthful the warning to tribes of the Cumanac,
Truthful that warning!
Against Alba whose own sons they sold in the market,
and they not in hunger,
Against that people whose daughters were coming like calves
and sold like the cattle,
Against that land whose mothers were sold
and they with the unborn!—
They are the men lacking blood but the blood of the liver,
They are the men. The diolamhan fight all their battles.
Loud is their laugh that Brabanters are fighting their battles,
loud in their mocking!
Evil was ours in the buying of children and mothers,
evil in bringing that breed.
Shadow to us for that breeding:
treacheries born from the blood of their daughters.
Weakness of heart in our clans buying slaves out of Alba.
Slaves have been made of that buying;—slaves are our princes!
Sad forever the purchase—Erinn in shadow is witness!
Sing death forever ’gainst compact or truce with that people.
Leave us forever unchristened one hand of our clansmen:
The axe hand of battle for these who have sold us their daughters.
Watch you forever ’gainst smiles, or sweet words, or hand
claspings.
Think on their mothers once sold to our men for our usage,
Swearing of friends’ oath with them! Unchristened the axe arm of
Erinn.
Unchristened the axe arm forever to use in the cleaving
Of tribes who would barter a friend as they sold their own
daughters.
This is the warning to pass through all lives to our people,
This, and the maid of the wolfhound, and she with the dagger.
That is the soul out of Alba—the white maid Enora!
Leave all unchristened the axe arm of Erinn forever!

* * * * *

I finished the old chronicles, wondering why I had been asked to read of the intensity of the ancient hates, though I acknowledge that the form of the original is better than my faulty translation from the Latin. Then I opened his letter of which I send you an exact copy. I can’t let the original go—yet I want you to be entirely acquainted with all the evidence of which I am possessed. Call me up soon as you read it. Here is the letter:

My Good Friend—

Now that I have put my hand to it, you shall have your wish. To
tell you will lighten the heart of me, and now that the end is so
near I can see no harm coming from the truth. No man with the
cleverness of you would take into court a letter such as this
must be, and you will not tell the one man it would hurt—that you
could not do; the worst you will do is to think me mad.

If it is so now, then I was mad at birth. Yet no one thought it.
I was different but no worse than that, and I will tell it you.

My mother was of the blood of the Cumanac, though the name
of the tribe is dead. Sons were not born—only daughters. The
genealogy of our people is clear back to the days of Diarmod of
the Foreigners, who is in hell if there be one! The women of our
house married scholars, and into families of scholars. The record
of that blood was the record of a province, and there was no
generation of it lost.

I am different from my family. They were fair, I am dark as our
ancient Spanish cousins. My mother wept often on my birthdays
but would not say why to me. Later I learned that I was born the
night of the death of my father. There were times when she cried
out that I was born with his brains, and my questions of ancient
things frightened her, for I spoke as a child of things I could
not know as a child. She thought I had “the sight,” and she was
frightened by it, for she was a quiet, God-fearing woman, with
only dread on her for the side of life she could not see.

Because of that dread I grew silent about many things. I wanted
to ask why, when I closed my eyes to sleep, I so often rose above
my body and drifted there, held only by the thin invisible cord,
waiting for the slumber of the body to release me until I could
go free—where?

I wanted to ask why certain people, though dressed in sober
friese, yet had rainbow rays of light visible—while others had
clear white—and others the color of gloom.

I wanted to ask of the faint, sweet music of harps, heard in
nights of clear cold and white snow under the moon—often I was
out at dawn to find track of the musicians whose playing was
unearthly sweet.

But I was only a boy, and I had learned to watch and learn if
others were in the same wonder, but it was of no use. There were
no tracks in the snow, and no one seemed to me to have ears or
eyes for my mysteries.

So I grew to live much within myself, and my mother was a lonely
woman. When the father of Raymond wed with her, it brought more
content to us both. I think she feared the care of me as I grew
older, and Raymond was the sort she could best understand.

It was after the marriage that I first saw the land of our
ancient people. In Galway my mother’s husband had bought an old
estate, and Raymond had great joy in plans for showing me the old
castle—the secret dungeon—the hidden stairway and subterranean
gallery whose exit they had not yet discovered.

That was the time I had the first glimmer of light as to where I
had flown while my body slept!

For I turned to the hidden stairway before Raymond could tell me,
and I took them to the ruins of an old monastic cell, and told
them to lift a slab there to find the underground entrance—and it
was there as I said.

My mother wept when they told her. I said I had dreamed it.

In looking over the ancient documents of transfer of the lands,
its history was clear to the days of Edward the Third, when
a beautiful daughter of the Saxon owner had become a court
favorite, and left the wilds of Connaught to carry her graces
to the eastern market. The name of her was Enora. I was reading
Latin by that time and found her name in our own records
by Kearmit. Raymond came by some deeds giving names of her
descendants, and it was a game of interest to trace them down
through the centuries.

Happiness was with me in that place; I had never heard the Gaelic
until I heard it there, and the knowing of it seemed breathed
into me with the air, for I was soon delving in every corner
for songs of the ancient bards and seeking out old singers, and
hearing over and over their tales of the breaking of Ireland’s
harps by England’s laws that her music might be killed forever.

The tales were sad enough, but I was only a lad and no sadness
stayed on me, for I was in more happiness than ever before.
In my early childhood I had been long ill, and debarred from
ranging in freedom the field or the mountains, but in old
half-Spanish-looking Galway I walked into new life—and new
strength. The nights and days were filled with the harmonies of
mere living. I was as one who has hungered long for full warm
heartbeats and who grows drunken with the rhythmic music of that
pulsing—all the world and the harmonies of it were as chorus to
me.

I enjoyed life with every breath of me—not as my mother and
Raymond did, in quiet and serene, but with the lilt of a singing
gladness that was but a reflection of every flower—an echo of
every bird-song and the joyous, thunderous rhythm of the tide
with its menace of mysteries.

The Gaelic came to me as though in sudden remembrance, and I
lived in the very spirit of the ancient legends of the Land
Wonderful where turrets of sunken cities are seen in a clear day
at the ebb, and the magic island of the “Land of the Ever Young”
rises above the waters to the west every seven years.

Ireland is the tragic “different” land from every other. The
wish is with me that I could tell to you the influences in that
land—the inherited influences by which an unread peasant can
recite the loves and battles of Queen Maeve, and the flight of
Grania and her Diarmod, as if the passions of them had been in
our own day rather than twenty centuries back in the shadows.
Every well and river, every hill and battle-plain, has its legend
of god or goddess, of the Danaans or the later wondrous Fionn
and the Comrades. Nothing is old there, because the spirit of it
is young. It is why the music of it has had soul enough to reach
through the world—Teuton and Briton and Gaul borrowed and renamed
the music of Ireland and the legends of Ireland, even while
Britain smashed Ireland’s harps lest the bards keep alive forever
her kinship with the Spirits of Beauty.

Only fragments of the music are left to her—death and exile were
the penalties for giving shelter to a bard, or giving ear to
his harping. An old man of Laherdane told me a human life had
been paid twice over for every note of every ancient Irish song
preserved to us in this day. All that is left are a few airs to
which the moderns strive to fit words, or a few verses to which
they strive to fit music, yet the beauty of the fragments are
worth all the strivings.

By this you will see that, as a lad, I was overswept by the great
wave of ancientness of the land—and the charm of it. You have
seen Raymond, and you will know without any telling that he lived
beside me for years, yet never saw the Ireland I was enthralled
by. We had the different eyes and the different heart for its
reading.

I thought often enough how strange it was that while he was near
double the years of me, yet it was the new things of today
he was alive to: the trading of nations, and the financing of
American mines, and such like, with never a thought of even the
policies of kingdoms further in the past than his own generation;
while I lay hidden from my English tutor on the cliffs above the
bay, and tried to picture the gray-blue mist by which the magical
Danaans made a wall between themselves and the foreign invaders
while their hidden palaces under the green hills were being made
ready for their using.

I knew the magical and majestic Danaans of the land had dwindled
in earth-power with the centuries, until in our day they are
spoken of as fairies, or earth-spirits, but that lessened none of
their interest to me. They had, for some mystic reason, drawn the
veil of the invisible over their life. But the life did endure,
and was often close akin to certain living mortals.

For hours I would lie thus in the grasses, listening to the
whisper of winds and waves, singing with them at times, listening
for echoes, until the soft flight of velvet-winged bats from the
cliff caves sent me home in the dark to tell my mother and my
tutor the many echoes of ancient years I had heard out there with
only sea and sky, bird and wind voices for my telling.

I did not mean to speak falsely when I averred, despite lectures
from my tutor and scoldings from my mother, that the birds did
speak, and that the wind did bring whispering voices which none
but I could hear. I heard them, felt their presence, and at times
the veil between this and that other life was so thin that I
could see the glad sunlight on faces that came—I knew not whence!
Slowly, as I grew older, they faded—as do the many other dreams
that come to children.

But the echo of the whispers remained; through all of life they
have seemed to prepare me for what was to come. And if my
sentence from the court is death, I feel that the same voices
will greet me again, and will say: “Rest you now; the time has
been long to you since you wandered away. Your work in that life
is over. Rest you with us.”

So I grew up, my mind full of fancies; and they were odd and
foolish, and frightening to my mother.

“Sorrow of me,” she would say, scoldingly. “You are like a
changeling of different blood. You do naught but dream in
idleness, and see unchristian things that are the outgrowth of
lazy brains.”

It would be of no use in the world to tell her that at times I
dreamed true—like the secret stairway, and the lost underground
hall to which I had found the lichen-covered door. To say
aught to her of these things in argument only sent her to her
prayers—or to her priest, who deemed me but a hopeless liar, and
an unrepentant one.

Only Raymond did not scold. “Never you mind, mother, he is but
a boy,” I have often heard him say; “and why should he do aught
but dream and sing old songs if his happiness is in that? He has
income enough to be at no one’s expense but his own.”

In our house were many old books of the tribes of the Cumanac,
and quaint old pictures of our people. My mother never looked
at them. She only had care of them because her mother had known
them as treasures. Kings had been of our family in the past, and
mystical druid rulers in the dim shadow ages. The old legends
and traditions over which I pored as I grew older told me of the
beauty of our women, the bravery of our men, and the high esteem
in which they were held even by their enemies of the east and
north. They lived in the feudal grandeur of those days—kings in
their own territory.

Then the curse came!

All those tales of a life so different to that around me made a
lasting impression on my imagination. I seemed to live in the
lives of those who were gone centuries before I was born. And
when alone in some old room of the castle with my books about me,
or alone in the hills in the night with my memories of dreams
about me, I had strange temptings at times. If my self-confidence
had equaled my convictions, I would have turned scribe and
supplied many missing chapters in the old histories. Strangely
enough, it was not history at all that I wanted to write, but it
was the lost songs of Ancient Ireland, and they held themselves
high in the air—the words never came near—only fugitive melodies
and the thrilling harp!

I think now I should have written the history as it came clear in
my mind, and at times in scribbling idleness to my pen’s point.
The flashes of the ancient life were as a schooling for my mind
and my hand. I think the songs would have followed if I had done
good work.... It is my grief that I have lost the chance for this
life. They come not again to a closed door.

When I was seventeen my mother died. That left Raymond and me all alone, for his father had already gone the Way. He was like a father to me always in his care and the quietness of his love. One day he came to me with some papers he had found in an old desk. My mother, and her mother before her, had taken no heed to them; but they concerned a property in Scotland to which he said I was the heir through an ancient branch of our family.

“What will we do?” I asked him. Scotch cousins did not seem near to me. That people had helped break the harps.

“I must go myself and see about it,” he said; “it is not a large property and may have gone to the Crown through being unclaimed. But by going I may at least find in it some old books such as you fancy, or some old pictures for you to dream over.”

That is what he said: “some old books or old pictures for you to dream over.”

Aye! The dreams he made true for me by that going!

In that way he went from me to be back in a month, but letter after letter came, pleading business details to be arranged. My claim was made good, but it required much attention to settle the matters connected with it. So time went on until many weeks had passed. Then at last came a letter which explained all, and it said:

“Fergal, my brother—

“I have news to tell you—news I hope you will be glad to hear.
Tomorrow I am to be married. It all seems very sudden to send
you word thus, but she has been left alone in the world by
death—herself the last of the ancient family of the Galway
castle, who, I have heard you say, were your forefathers’ enemies
ages ago. Her name is Ednah; she is the last of their line, and
you the last of yours. I give her to you as a sister, and thus we
will bury the old hates of Erin and Albion.”

I read this letter as in a dream. I had never thought of the marrying of Raymond. I re-read it, trying to remember all the tales of our old feud with her people. Why did that one of Randuff and White Enora come first and keep uppermost in my mind? Parts of the others were forgotten It alone remained undimmed in my memory. I tried to put it aside and think only of Raymond. I thought I succeeded, at least in the daytime.

I was out on the cliffs when they arrived, and did not see them at once. I came in vexed with myself for forgetting the hour he was to come. I found them in a room where our family portraits were hung. I could see them through the door—he so large and massive, she so slight and fair. His arm was about her shoulders.

I hesitated; I was only a lad, and our family had been one with family affections, but little of outward sign given of them—no kisses, no embraces, even from my mother; and the sight of that half-embrace was a strange one to me. It made me feel more keenly my own aloneness. Because of the shyness on me I waited until they should move. They had stopped before my picture.

“Who is that?” she asked, and her voice was music.

“It is my brother Fergal,” said Raymond. “He should be here now—the idle, dreaming fellow. He has forgotten. Come, we will go and look for him.”

“Wait,” she said. “I want to look at his picture. How different from all the rest it is. Somewhere, sometime ... I have seen a face like that, or a picture, but where—where?”

“I have no doubt there are many such happy, careless faces among boys,” said Raymond.

“But is it quite careless?” she asked. “When one looks at it long it grows sad, then stern—and the eyes—ah, those eyes! If he looks at me in that way I shall fear him, Raymond.”

Raymond put his hand over her eyes, and laughed and kissed her on the mouth. I went chill in the heart at that kiss.

“What a foolish child you are,” he said. “You and Fergal are alike in your imaginings.”

Then they turned and saw me. Raymond looked so happy and so different that I was glad. But I do not know if I can find words to tell how she looked.

She was fair and babyish, with little ways and movements like a white kitten. Her hair was the yellow of the cornsilk, and her eyes as blue as the violet which grows always in the shade. She reached out her hands to me in a pretty childish way.

“We are to be brother and sister,” she said. “I hope we shall all be very happy together.”

I barely touched the hands of her—such pretty hands—but that touch tingled through all my blood. I stammered and blushed with embarrassment. I had known so few women, and none well, and I had never seen any as beautiful as my brother’s wife. She was dainty and delicate as the snow maiden that fades when brought down to the level where humanity lives.

Perhaps that was why I feared to touch her, even. If I did by chance, my hand would tremble and my face flush. She laughed over it to Raymond.

“He will never be my brother,” she said. “He is as shy of me as if I were still a stranger.”

One day Raymond spoke to me of it:

“Why are you so foolish,” he asked. “Ednah wonders why you have dislike of her. You are almost of an age—born in the same year—and should be better friends. Yet you range the mountains alone more than ever. Even the books are forgotten by you.”

In answer I asked to go away to school, or to travel. I had never before cared for anything but our old house and the forest near, or the musty books in the time-worn cases. Now the air had grown close; all the quiet of the forest, all the hum in the grasses, could not bring to me their old, drowsy rest; and the wind no more carried echoes of whispering voices!

“Perhaps it is best that you should go,” said Raymond. “Travel may cure you of this strangeness and shyness. I shall give up this place for a while and cross seas. Ednah has horror of these old walls, and will stay in no room of them alone. When you join us again you will find us in some sunnier place.”

So I made my farewells and went wandering. For three years I never saw Ireland. All that time I was going, going—never at rest. And though through every hour of it I longed to go back, and feared to, I could not explain whence the fear came.

Then Raymond wrote to me in Spain to join them here. I was almost twenty-two. There were property matters to be arranged, and my presence was required. I am not sure if I was glad or not. I did not sleep at all, and I sailed on the first ship.

Once on the sea the fear fell away. Almost the music of dreams came back to me. The three years of wandering had driven out the dreams and remembrance had not been happiness.

But the ship to the west brought me into starry nights of sweetness and wonderful dreams when all the world was of hope, for the fear was gone on the waves.

Raymond did not expect me so soon, and I found their new home all alone. Only Ednah was there. She ran down the steps to meet me. Back of her was a tall hound.

“Fergal, Fergal!” she said, and the blue eyes of her were bright as if with tears.

I am not knowing if I spoke to her—I think I did not. But I took her hand. She offered her cheek as if for a brother’s caress, but I did not touch it. I only looked at her, and we walked up the steps together, and the hound followed.

“I am glad it is today you came,” she said. “I am all alone. Ah, we have wanted you so often! The world felt so empty—empty as all my life used to be! Now all will be different—you are here.”

She showed me a portrait lately finished of her with the hound at her knee. The artist had asked that one be secured for the painting, and Raymond had tried to find one to look most like an Irish wolfhound for the harsh note of contrast with her own whiteness. She told this frankly as a child, and laughed because the dog would not follow Raymond when she was near. Then she showed me all their wonderful new home, and the Italian garden above the river, and a wonderful pergola where yellow roses and crimson roses burned like flame.

We sat in that dream place through the sunset. I listened and said little. Her glad voice was as cool, sweet rain that falls on sun-scorched sands. I was beside her until the dusk, drinking in tones of music, but never once did I look in her eyes.

And Raymond came when the night fell.

I scarce know how to tell of the days to follow. The fear and shyness came back to me. But I was older and could hide it more than when she first came to my sight, and Raymond had pleasure to think I was feeling more friendly toward the lovely wife. But I avoided being alone with her, and with the tall hound ever her shadow.

Even when she rode horseback above the cliffs of the river the hound was at the heels of her horse, and was known widely by the new friends of Raymond. The portrait was shown in a great gallery, and was called “Beauty and the Beast.” But you have seen that, and know the pride of Raymond that she was his. He housed and dressed and adored her as queen of the world.

But it was herself gave long, strange looks to me, and looks of question they were, too. Everyone sought her except myself, and she was noting that, even though the eyes of Raymond were blind by his love for us both.

One day I came in with scarlet blossoms for which she had asked.

She was coming down the great stairs and smiled at me.

“How lovely,” she said; “we have dinner-guests tonight, but I shall wear no jewels. I want only those scarlet blossoms in my hair; bring them in here to the musicroom.”

I followed her, and stood there holding the flowers; but she did not take them. She only looked at me and laughed a little.

“One would think me an old witch-wife of your Irish hills, you shun me so, brother Fergal,” she said, “and I think I shall make you do penance here. You must fasten the blossoms in my hair with your own hands. You should learn to be gallant, Fergal, else when you meet your ladylove you will never know how to woo her.”

I held the flowers in silence and tried to fasten them. My fingers were shaking. The perfume of her hair made me drunk as wine.

“Your hands are nervous doing work so new to them,” she said, and laughed. “You foolish boy, what can I do more than to fit up this room for you only, with its Irish harp and its Irish music and a pot of Shamrock in each window. It is enough to make any other man love me—but not Fergal!” she said, and sighed, and then laughed.

I could not answer her words of light mocking, and the great hound, stretched at her feet, arose and the bristles on his neck stood upright as my hands touched her hair. He was ever on guard for her, and it was a jest that she had to put chain on him for the lessons with a dancing-master. He would allow no stranger to touch her, and me he was ever watching in jealousy.

Raymond’s wife noted it, and laughed.

“He has the jealousy of a man in love,” she said, “but you know nothing of that jealousy, for it is only books and old music you have in your mind. You are almost a year older than I, and have traveled around the world, yet are afraid of women. And to think I once dreamed of fearing you—or your picture—that is amusing to me now! I have never once seen your eyes look in a rage as I thought they might. But it is seldom you favor me even with a glance. I doubt if you could tell the color of my eyes.”

So she chattered on, smiling up at me, mocking at my silence and at my shaking hand.

“I have fear that this will not be done to your pleasure,” I said at last.

She laughed again. “Fergal,” she said, “is it all women you are fearing, or only me?”

As she spoke her head was turned to look up at me. I still held the flowers in her hair. My wrist was near her cheek. In turning, her lips touched it. Perhaps it was accident. I do not know.

The golden hair of her was over my hands, her red mouth on my wrist, and the wonderful child-eyes of her looking into my own. She raised one hand and clasped my arm. I threw it from me with a force that staggered her back to the wall, and the tall hound pressed close to her and growled deep threat to me. The flowers in my hand I dashed to the floor, and I left her there like that. As I went down the steps I heard my name called by her, but I never looked back.

That night I spent in the forest.

When morning came again I told Raymond that my wandering years were not over. The Foreign Legion of France might need another sabre. I was willing to offer one to her—or to Ireland, if need arose in the south. And it was not a time for youth to be easy in comfort in any house.

Raymond laughed, and said I could send money enough to buy them a seasoned soldier instead of myself, and told me he would take it ill if I sailed before Ednah’s birthday, for it was in his mind to give an entertainment that I might meet their many new friends. His wife joined us in silence and clasped his arm and stood with eyes downcast. She looked very white and very childish. We had not spoken.

“You young people have been dull here,” her husband said. “Suppose we have a ball for your birthnight; something to repay the great hospitality of the people. What do you say, my child? I must not have you lonely.”

She spoke her pleasure, and, the choice of entertainment being left to her, it was a masquerade she made choice of. “It is more gaiety,” she said.

“A masque it shall be, then,” said Raymond. “And you, Fergal, must have no thought of leaving us until after that.”

“Are you going again?” she asked, and her blue eyes had pleading in them.

I could make her no answer.

“So he threatens,” said Raymond. “You must help me to persuade him to be sensible and stay where he is. Perhaps we can find him a sweetheart at the ball. You must get a fine dress, Fergal, and we shall have it the night Ednah is twenty-two.”

I was arranging some books in a case while they talked. I did not want to look in her eyes and see the appeal there. One of the volumes slipped from my hand to the floor. It was our old book of legends, and it lay open at the tale of Randuff and White Enora.

“Here is my dress,” I said, and tried to laugh. “What was good enough for our ancestors centuries ago is good enough for me now. I shall wear the dress of Randuff of Cumanac. Here is a description of it in the legend.”

Ednah stared at me. “Randuff of Cumanac,” she half whispered, “do you mean that ‘Randuff’ of the Lady Enora’s song?”

“Yes, if that is what you are calling him,” I said, “but the song I never heard.”

“How do you know of him?” asked Raymond.

“I heard the rhyme of the killing often when I was a child,” she said. “My grandmother never tired repeating the old tales of our ancestors. It gave me fear of the wild Irish. How bitter those old traditions made the people! The Lady Enora was sung as a very brave maid. Grandmother always spoke of the Cumanac as our enemy. Had she lived she would not have allowed me to be under the same roof with a descendant of theirs—never!”

“How ridiculous in this age to remember the old feudal hates,” said Raymond. “I do not think the mother of Fergal knew even the legend. She read only books of piety, and was too sensible to take heed of hates so unchristian.”

“It may seem silly to you,” said his wife, “but my grandmother was thought a wise woman.”

“What will be your dress?” asked Raymond, stroking her hair in a caress.

“I think I shall not tell either of you that,” she said. “It will be much more amusing to puzzle you. I shall receive my guests in evening dress and then mask in whatever I decide upon. You must not coax me to tell. On my birthnight you must let me have my own way.”

My friend, this story may seem strangely long to you, but when I write of it, every word, every look, is coming back to me.

No persuasions could induce Raymond to mask the night of the ball. “I am too old,” he protested. “At forty-five, people lose zest for masques.”

My dress they called a success, but Ednah said:

“There is one thing needed for that costume: you have no dagger.”

“It was forgotten by the costumer,” I told her, “and I had none that would answer.”

“Wait,” she said, “I have one—an heirloom. How old it is I do not know. We had several in an old chest. Grandmother knew the history of each, but I never could remember them. I kept a very ancient Spanish one for a paper knife: I am sure it will do.”

She left us, running along the hall, the great hound leaping beside her in play, her white ball dress fluttering like wings; to see her thus none would have thought such a childish butterfly could be the hostess of the evening.

Raymond looked after her in pride and great content.

“Like a child she is,” he said. “Just as thoughtless and innocent; twenty-two today, and does not look seventeen. Ah, Fergal, there is only one life for a man: you must also get a wife. You will be more content to stay home from wars then.”

I had no answer for him, and he laughed at me as he watched her come back with the dagger. It swung by a silver chain and there were jeweled clasps to the chain. The handle formed a cross, and the sheath was oddly carved and inlaid; the blade ... but you have seen it!

I tried to clasp it, but the fastenings were difficult to manage.

“Clasp it for him, Ednah,” said Raymond. “I must have this hound chained for you, else no mask will serve you or no stranger be let dance with you.” So he spoke and laughed and left us alone.

The chain of the girdle was in her hand and her eyes on mine. “Shall I?” she asked.

“If you please,” I answered, “since your husband bids.”

“I am more kind to you than you are deserving,” she said, and sighed. “You have not even said you were sorry for hurting me that day.”

“If ever I have hurt you, I am sorry,” I said as coldly as I could, but I feared while I spoke that she would know the tremble in my throat. I might have been brutal that day, but to tell her so I did not dare; I was afraid. And looking down at the bent golden head of her, I told myself that never another day should see me under the roof with my brother’s wife.

“You are hurting me now,” she whispered. “Fergal, you are hurting me always when you speak to me with that ice in your voice.”

“Never will you hear it after tonight,” I answered. “I am going tomorrow.”

She stared at me, and put out her hand as if about to speak, then dropped it and walked away.

The ball was a very gay one. I surprised Raymond by showing no shyness whatever among the ladies who thronged the rooms. He said the mask gave me boldness. He was trying to discover his wife, and had failed.

“Several times I thought I had found her,” he said, “but I am always mistaken. She has been very cunning. If you find her first, Fergal, bring her to me.”

I danced and jested with many, but in none did I discover her.

At last, wearying of all the gay pretenses, I went out into the night. The Italian garden above the cliffs was deserted by others for the dance, and the pergola of the yellow roses was my own. It was there I had sat that first evening of her witcheries. And there I sat again with my head in my hands—wishing for the dawn that would take me away without offense to the man I felt deep love for.

The moon was at full and the grounds almost as day except under the thick vines. Music came faintly to my ears through the open windows, and dew lay over the grass like dust from the stars. A bed of petunias near me exhaled that fragrance which the moon, but never the sun, has power to draw out.

The peace of it all oppressed me. The perfume of the flowers was sweet, but I hid my face in my hands. I knew that the time was past when the scent of flowers or music of winds or my own dreams would bring content to me. Better, I thought, if I were dead and forgotten as the Randuff whose dress I wore.

How long I was sitting there I do not know. At last I felt that I was not alone, and looked up. By my side was a girl in a dress such as I had never seen save in antique pictures. It was of something with lights in it like the waves of the ocean when the moon shines. Her face I could not see for the misty lace over it.

The glamour of the scene was about me. I forgot the crowds dancing within; I forgot all save the presence of this girl, or was it a dream-girl like the visions of my childhood?

“Who are you?” I asked, and there was awe and wonder on me.

“Do you not know?” came the answer in a whisper. “Have you forgotten, Randuff of Cumanac?”

“Randuff?” I repeated, scarcely knowing what I said. My brain seemed whirling and the music of the dance drifted away. Through it I heard the muffled, far-off bay of a hound!

The girl touched me with her hand, and I held it fast. Her presence was an intoxication of joy to me. I have no words for the telling of the witcheries I felt myself yielding to. Was I Fergal or was I Randuff? I could not tell.

“Of course, Randuff,” she whispered with her lips on my throat, “and I am your Enora who has found you again. This night only is ours out of all the years of life. Were you wishing for me?”

“I was,” I said, and I spoke truth. It seemed to me that all of life had been nothing but waiting for that one night, and her near me.

“And you are not afraid now?” she whispered.

And I said: “There is no fear on me of anything but to lose you again, as we have lost each other until now.”

“We have only this night out of all the others,” she repeated. “Give me your kisses, Randuff.”

And then I knew what a woman’s kiss meant to a man, though it was not as a woman I was thinking of her, but as a spirit of the far past come back for that one night. My arms were about her—her face to mine; broken, tender words were whispered in my ears. What I replied I do not know. I felt her kiss on my mouth; I heard her breathless whispers.

And back of it all I heard the wild baying of a hound!

“One night of life together, my Randuff,” she sighed. “Is it not worth more than a long lifetime apart?”

I could not speak—I could not! She lifted her hand to bring my face again to hers. Some jewel in her bracelet caught in the lace mask, and the veil of lace fell from about her head.

The moon shone full in her eyes through the rose vines of the pergola, and the soul of me was frozen there, for the girl who had witched me by the touch of her fingers—whose lips I had kissed, whose love I had taken—was the wife of my brother!

I tried to rise; I could not. I tried to speak, but my tongue seemed paralyzed. She must have felt something of what I wanted to say, for terror was on her, and she clung to me, whispering:

“Don’t, Fergal; don’t look at me like that! I could not have you go away so. Now, though you go, I will know your love is mine. Nothing can change that. Your love is mine!”

I knew she was speaking the truth. Our lives were each other’s, though the bond of it was sin. I heard her whispers in a strange, double sense, for in clearness, as though there was no other sound under the heavens, I was hearing the bay of a hound, and him on a trail!

She came closer to me. Her lips were touching mine which were locked, giving no response to her caresses. I was as a man struck dumb with the horror. My brother—who had been like a kind father to me, always!

When I could hear her again, she was whispering:

“Why must you go—ever? Do not be leaving me. Raymond need never know—”

Then it was that I killed her, as the hound, in great leaps, entered the pergola, dragging his chain in the moonlight. One blow of the dagger, and she lay on my arm, white and innocent-looking as a sleeping child. The hound leaped for me, but the same dagger caught him in the throat. Another stroke left him twitching and quivering at my feet.

I stood between them, watching them long, to be sure no breath of life was there to come back.

Then I lifted her in my arms and bore her to the house. On straight through the rooms I went, where the masked dancers scattered with shrieks from my path. At last I saw Raymond, and carried her to him.

“I have found your wife,” I said, and laid her in his arms.

And for that, the judges, who cannot know, will be giving me death.

FERGAL.

[Music: (_The DARK ROSE_)

_Sixteenth Century._]

THE DARK ROSE

* * * * *

* * * * *

_And gun-peal, and slogan cry
Wake many a glen serene,
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My Own Rosaleen!
The Judgment Hour must first be nigh,
Ere you can fade, ere you can die,
My Dark Rosaleen!_

The lad Hugh scarce knew he was breathing the words, singing through his mind. Old Shamas Ronayne had been telling over the tale of Red Hugh O’Donnell, dead in Spain three hundred years ago, yet alive and youthful over all the land where his song of the dark rose was sung.

_My Dark Rosaleen!
My Own Rosaleen!_

“And he also had the name of Hugh on him. It’s myself is wishful I could see a man like that in our own day—Shamas swears they don’t make them any more.”

He followed the sheep up through gorse and fern in the Kerry hills, and cut himself a rude flute of alder, and strove to catch the notes of the song on it, and tried again softly whistling with a blade of grass held over his lips, and gave both up for the murmured words:

_O my Dark Rosaleen!
Do not sigh, do not weep;
The ships are on the ocean green;
They march along the deep!_

The drifting glory of the clouds, silver and luminous and softly gray, made wondrous forms and pictures against the blue of the sky, and the deeper, darker blue of the far sea. He drowsed there over the mystery of _Rosaleen_—had she been a maid beloved and estranged? Or, was she, indeed, a dear secret name for the shadowed land for which O’Donnell had fought and from which he was self-exiled?

The _suantre_ of the sleepy winds lulled the lad into slumber before he decided the centuries-old mystery, but it remained with him in a misty dream, and in the dream he saw that the dark rose—the hidden rose—was a Leanan Sidhe, a fair mistress of the Secret People whose magic palaces were hidden under ancient raths of green, and where legendary heroes waited the mystic music of the awakening on Erinn’s day of destiny.

There was, in this confused dreaming, more than a little of the tellings or the singings of old Shamas by the peat fire in the long twilights. A glen on the Kerry coast, where the sea-rovers of thirty centuries agone left records on the white strands, is a wonder-place for dreams. Queen Banva of the rath on Slieve Mish gave her name to the island in that place and was consort of King of the Forest in far-dim days when the forests were mighty and the great brown deer ran in countless herds and were gentled and gave milk only to the music of the voices of maidens—and the soothing and crooning and gentling harmonies of that music remain today, and is called the “music of Fairie,” and men wonder at the sweetness of it, and the living spirit of it.

The giant deer are gone, and the forests of wonder are gone—and the speech of that day was long forbidden—only the spirit of the music has lived in the hearts of the children of Banva.

So the lad, Hugh, whose head was ever filled with one old legend, or another old song, merged crowned Banva the Fair, and a nameless fairy sweetheart, and the dark mystic rose-maid, immortalized by Mangan, into his dream there on the hillside in Kerry, and had grief that each was sad, for their tears were falling and his words of comfort were useless, and the music of the song came to his help, and he awoke himself with the whisper:

_O my Dark Rosaleen!
Do not sigh—do not weep!_

But it was not tears at all that were falling on his face and his hands: it was a swift, showery rain falling between two great blue and sunny plains of the sky—just one drifting cloud of rain from Slieve Mish, and it above him!

The sheep were over the hill and beyond, and guilt was on him as he ran after, pelted by the rain.

Through the gray mist of it he could see the patch of white they made on a sunny knoll toward which the shadow of the rain-cloud was moving.

But a nearer sound came to his ears through the swift drive of the shower—the bleat of a lamb, astray from a heartless parent. He stood in his tracks hearkening to it, for it sounded from the druid rath above, and it was a queer place for the straying of a lamb up there among the bare stones when there was good grass, and that green, all below it.

But he ran across the old hill road and up the other side of it to where one hawthorn shone white in bloom at the summit.

It was a stiff run in the pelting rain, but the sounds were nearer each step. He crossed one circle of the long crumbled earth wall, then another, and plunged in between the standing stones and, breathless, dropped down on the stone paving with the rescued lamb in his arms.

He was guided to it more by sound than sight, for the shower was now a tempestuous gray wall of falling water, and with his treasure-trove he moved back under the shelter of roof formed by three enormous slabs. Once it might have been an underground temple, but the earth about it had washed away, and it was like nothing but a shadowy tunnel of great stone—and other great stone slabs fallen about.

He wiped the water from his eyes, peering out the way he had come, and then settled the lamb beside him and leaned back to wait the sunshine or the lessening of the downpour.

But he straightened quickly at what he saw in the shadow of the other wall, and the heart in him gave a great leap, for he had met one of his dreams, or a queen of a legend come alive again!

For a girl sat there in a greenish-gray dress, and touches of scarlet in the lining of the cloak over her shoulders. It was the cloak made the picture so complete in the ancientness of the suggestion—he could not know it was an idealized copy of a Connemara hooded cloak.

The two young things sat gazing at each other as if entranced. The face of Hugh was white, yet not with fear. There was awe on him, but there was also joy, for, much as he had dreamed of the queens of beauty in old legends, not one dream held as much of charm as the uncrowned maid whose garb was so near the color of green lichen-covered stone that he feared she would fade back into the shadows of it.

Then she smiled in an adorable way.

“I saw you sleeping in the bracken as we passed up the old road,” she said. “You looked like a picture of Shelley I have.”

Hugh had not ever heard of that name, but there surely were many names in the old legends not known to Shamas, who was his one great historian.

“That is an Irish name, I think, but it is not mine,” said the lad politely. “I am Hugh of the glen below, and I am thinking it is yourself would be Banva or Maeve but for the dark hair of you—and the dark brightness of the eyes of you.”

“Maeve—Maeve?” she repeated and regarded him with twinkling humor. “Is it Queen Mab you mean—of the fairies?”

“It is—but she was a fair-haired woman, and nothing like you at all. I could not make guess at the name on you, yet it has the right to be a bright name, and beauty in it.”

“You would not guess it ever, for it is no queen in a book,” the girl said with a little ripple of laughter. “It is common as the bracken, and more common than the hawthorn in bloom there by the stone pillar, for it is Rose.”

“Rose! the dark rose? Dark Rosaleen?” And the voice of Hugh was a whisper of awe. “I think now you are Maeve indeed, witching me with that name!”

“You are silly from tending sheep too much,” said the mocking beauty. “Why should a fairy witch you? And why should it be with my name? The dark rose! Am I then so dark? You are not polite as I thought you at first—and I wish the storm were over.”

Hugh caught his breath in a real terror at thought of her anger.

“Ah, it is tricking me you are,” he said, “for how would you not be knowing that the dark rose is the dearest flower growing to every one of the real Irish? Since Hugh O’Donnell was making that song away there in Spain, and since Mangan turned the verse of it to ‘Rosaleen,’ that rose is the sacred thing in many a breast. Shamas Ronayne was telling that to all of us boys, and he is wiser than most. I went asleep thinking of you, and singing the song, and—glory be to the name!—was it that was bringing you here to this far-away rath?”

“Thinking of _me_—and singing the song? Hugh of the glen, how could you think of a stranger you never saw or heard of? And what was the song? I said you looked like Shelley, the poet, and maybe it’s a song you made yourself.”

The color flooded his face at that, and she clapped her hands gleefully.

“It is—it is—it is!” she chanted, and smiled at his blushes.