Part 15

“Dervail, that dream has died with your Dark Comrade; such is my thought. Diarmod is no longer safety for you. His own life he may not be saving. Between you two, all Leinster and Meath can be made desolate.”

“What then? When he is triumphant, more than Leinster may be his. His vows to me were made in Tara, and who more fit than he to rule again in the ancient place of the great kings? No! The dreams did not end with Duffagan—they endure! Beside Diarmod I will ride to find them!”

Ardan turned to Kauth.

“Bring cover for the dead,” he said, “and robe your queen for a dreary journey—and a speedy one.”

Kauth covered the dead face of Kieran and then backed, sullen and defiant, against the wall.

“I have no queen in this place,” she said. “Because of her, Duffagan is beheaded, and his head on a pike below. I saw what I saw done on that holy man who is dead, and I hear what you hear below in the shoutings. I think it is truth they tell down there in their cries—she is a malediction! Death to all is her one thought, so that she walks safe—that is her thought. In thrall to her was held Tiernan and Duffagan—they were a bridge for her feet. But I am no longer in thrall to her! I have seen unholy and unlucky things, and the words of dead Kieran are a curse against Dervail for always. If you, Lord Ardan, are brave to walk beside her now—you are the only man brave enough for it.”

“Madness has fallen on her,” said Dervail. “The death of her man took her little wit.”

“Not all of it,” said Kauth, who had a most evil look with her red eyes and swollen face, and her grin of malice. “This is the one man who never took the gift of you at your offer—and he is the only one of all your lovers to brave your enemies to reach you this day of your days.”

“Go!” screamed Dervail in white fury. “Scullion, whom I lifted and strove to make human! Join your mates below ere I have you thrown to them from the battlements!”

The woman slunk to the far end of the room of shadows, but cowered there, fearful of going down to the screaming mob. Dervail turned away and covered her ears with white, jeweled hands to shut out the clamor.

“Ardan,” she whispered, “it is not all a lie she tells. They _have_ scurried away from me like rats after a singeing! Rhudri of the Faelain has gone, and every woman of them is out of sight.”

“I know the truth of that,” he said, “for the men of the woodland are bearing brush and straw and great timbers. They will smoke you out unless you take the Breffni road with me, and the choice must be now.”

“The choice?” she muttered, and walked wildly from window to window looking down on the horrid, waiting, upturned faces. “The choice? Ardan—soul of me always! Yours was the choice for me, and mine the rebellious heart! Yours was the true vision, for the vision of Duffagan has led me here to this trap! Yours was the hand I should have held to; yours was the white way for me, Ardan, the white way of the sun; and I am at last saying it!”

She flung herself on his shoulder, and her tears of self-pity touched his hand as he took her in gentleness toward the seat by the window.

But the seat was not reached, for the reason that Diarmod and O’Faelain came into the room at that minute, and Diarmod, in a rush of rage, caught the shoulder of Dervail and flung her until she stumbled and fell across the dead body of Kieran.

“The shouts below are the shouts of the prophets,” he said, “O royal harlot, who, in making choice, passes no man by!”

Ardan turned toward the king with lifted hand of protest, and Diarmod whipped out his dirk at that moment and thrust downward a mighty blow.

“You to the white way of your choice!” he said. “You to your white road—the two of you!”

Ardan fell under the weight of the blow, and blood stained his white garment, but a strange thing chanced at his falling, for the dagger was caught and wrested from the king’s hand.

“A deep stroke, Diarmod, and an unlucky one. The youth is under misjudgment; my faith on that!” said O’Faelain, lifting Ardan and tearing open the white undergarment.

He crossed himself at what he saw there—and it was strange enough.

The slender blade of the king did not go deep for the reason that the point was bedded in a golden ring, and the ring on a golden flat chain fastened around the neck of Ardan.

O’Faelain undid the chain and handed it to Diarmod with the dagger pendant.

“God and Mary have no wish that you do murder or vengeance for this woman—and the sign of it is here,” he said.

Ardan struggled to his feet—bloodstained and pale, his hand staunching the wound.

“You have robbed me of a thing precious,” he said. “To a king and a lord of Erinn it can have little worth, but as for me, if it is my time to die, I would wish to go into death with that token.”

Diarmod looked from the gold ring on which there was graven a circled star and words in _ogham_ and as his eyes met Ardan’s eyes, he was more blanched than Ardan, and his voice was husky and strange.

“How is this precious to you—this thing more ancient than you can know?” he asked.

“It was on the breast of my mother at her death, and more than that I do not know. Dall Clairineach bade me use it as a token to any king of Leith Mogh if danger threatened me. For myself I would not use it—but if it has virtue I will use it that Dervail the queen rides safe.”

“She will ride free,” said Diarmod in a dull, strange way. “Look, Rhudri—see my punishment.”

O’Faelain looked, and crossed himself, and lifted the hand of Ardan to his lips.

“O perfect prince—and the first born,” he said, “you are a grace, and no punishment.”

Dervail leaned forward, breathless at the words and at the look of Diarmod: she was forgotten by him and by O’Faelain. Their eyes saw only Ardan.

“You knew your mother?” asked Diarmod.

“I did not know her. Death took her. Dall Clairineach alone knew my blood, and he gave me no word. I am of his clan—so I am thinking.”

“You are of the race of Conaire Mor, and your mother was Dhira of the Dark Hair whom they forced from me and hid away—a veiled woman! None told me there was a son, but her son could be only mine. You are the heir of my youth.”

“Dhira!” said Dervail, her head thrust forward like a golden-headed serpent with its stroke of poison. “_That_, Ardan, was the nun he took from sanctuary—that was the thing of which I told—and the thing you would not give your faith to—and you the living witness!”

Ardan looked at Diarmod in frowning question, and it was the eyes of Diarmod that wavered and fell.

“This is between these walls,” said Ardan, and reached his hand for ring and chain. “Beyond the portal it is never to be spoke. If the token brings me fealty of a guard I will make use of it to lead this queen back in safety to her kingdom.”

“See to it, Rhudri,” said Diarmod. “All that he asks of Leinster is his. You had my love, boy, and today I am knowing that her eyes were ever looking out on me from your own.”

Ardan made no reply. He was staunching the blood with linen torn in strips by O’Faelain.

“Diarmod,” spoke Dervail, “has an old love weakened you to pleading for crumbs? Is it true that Turlough O’Conor and Tiernan of Breffni have cast the shadow of their spears against you and weakened your courage? You hear Ardan say he will guard me out of your kingdom, and you speak no word of protest? Did I then ride south beside you for only a holiday or a fair?”

“You came, a stolen queen as hostage,” said Diarmod, “that is the tale to tell. The hours are past for words of that: you must go with the prince if you would keep life in you; the spears of two armies are already across our border to force your return to Breffni. I will have vengeance for the loss of you but that will be on another day—on this one there is only flight in all haste for you.”

Thus he spoke, but his eyes were on Ardan and she saw it.

“You are not Diarmod the king this day,” she said. “You are only a man in a trance who has the looks of Diarmod. This dead monk had devil’s words of you, and of me. He called me ‘Dyveke the Dove’ and said you were under _geis_ to hold no white birds under snare. He had lies of old magic, and a curse for me in all of them. Are you knowing that baleful rune he mouthed? Know you that he met his death striving to do murder on me?”

“It is known, and it is a sorrow,” said Diarmod, “and his is the first death of the many ere the end comes; thus has his life paid for his prophecy. Ulster will join me to war against Turlough and O’Ruarc; in another year Leinster will have allies and strength, and you will again ride south to rule.”

“Your lips speak,” said Dervail coldly. “You are not the king of the night on Tara.”

Rhudri returned with a frightened maid and the cloak of Dervail.

“I pledge myself to send your goods on a morrow,” he said; “it cannot be now. While the humor of the mob gives sanction to your going, is the time to go.”

The smile of Dervail was bitter and dreary as she looked at the three men. She was no longer the first thought in any mind there. Ardan the prince, and the first-born of Diarmod, was suddenly most wonderful and pleasing in the eyes of the two men. Even the disdain of Ardan gave them pride in him.

“You to have royal rule when it means naught to you!” she said, looking at him, “and I to be robbed of it when it is breath of life to me!”

“I claim no rule—nor will I,” said Ardan. “My mother died in sanctuary, and thus will I. Enough sons are in Leinster to divide the spoils. Cover well your head in the veil, for rain is falling. Give extra cloak to the maid, and I ask grace for her, and comfort if her courage lasts through the trials of the way.”

“She shall have honor that she heeds your word, and the children of her shall have honor after her, O prince,” said Rhudri O’Faelain.

It was an awkward moment and strange, as Dervail stood, veiled and gray, beside the body of Kieran, waiting to go.

“The curse came when he came,” she said, looking down on him. “It seems a thousand years past—and it was but yesternight.”

Smoke drifted up on the heavy air, and curled blue-white through the windows. Some of the mob, impatient of delays, had fired brush, and the falling rain drowned it, yet it bore its warning!

There was a lull in the shouting as the guard of the king formed without—and then the great gate of the castle opened and a horse was seen with woman’s furnishings, and a roar went up.

“Dervail! Dervail! Dervail, the accursed of Leinster!”

Dervail stooped and picked up the dagger let fall when she ceased the torture of Kieran.

“Dervail, there will be another day for us,” said Diarmod the king.

“Your lips speak, O king!” said Dervail.

She felt sullenly that the dark-eyed nun—long dead—had thrust herself between them at the end—and in a strange way she felt that the monk who had saved his last breath for curses had some way brought all this evil to be when he sunk his knife in Duffagan: that, and his words of mystic things, had changed the world for her.

He had caught her imagination and enthralled her soul by the mystic things he left in shadow, and the shadow and fear remained on her like a heavy cloak of gray.

Suddenly she turned to Ardan.

“Use your new strength—do not let the king show himself beside me. I do not choose he should hear the wild beasts and their hate of me.”

“It is their fear of you, Dervail.”

“To the blind monk the thanks for that; but do not let him come.”

So, in the gray rain, drearily falling, she rode out beside Ardan in the center of twice sixty of the king’s guard. Her name was echoed by them a thousand times with all the terms of evil they could invent or remember, and more than once a bowman sent an arrow hurtling overhead as a warning to haste.

Once she looked back, thinking to see Diarmod on the wall, but she saw only Kauth staring down over the gateway on which the head of Duffagan was spiked.

It was the first day of the deaths of the prophecy, the “thousand years’ tribute of blood,” for Dervail of the Shadow!

Many souls were sent for judgment in the slaughter done by Diarmod—and done against him in his revenges for the shame of losing her again to Breffni.

So great was the rage against her that even the castle of O’Ruarc was no safety. Widows and the children of slaughtered soldiery cried out against the curse of her beauty for which men died, and she became a secret woman in the sanctuary of Cluain-mac-noise from which great wealth went out through her hands for holy walls and holy vessels, and endless prayer.

And ever, for the rest of her life, on the sweet spring nights of Beltain, she knelt on the cold stone of the chapel floor to undo the false magic of Duffagan on the hill of the druids. He had seen truly there, yet his reading of what he saw was not true; and the proof of it was the bridge she had built for evil to cross on.

It was not that she doubted the magic of druidcraft, but it is an ill and unlucky thing to go to the old gods after the saints have rung bells against them. Even the true things are twisted after that.

Her beauty was still on her, and the dreams of Tara were not dead.

But the fear of the words of Kieran remained as the shadow of a gray ghost, sending her to frightened prayer.

The curse of the blind monk was too heavy to be cast aside even by penance, and she walked veiled and dreamed of a day when Diarmod would again be chief of victories and change the gray cloak of dread to the royal robe of seven colors.

When the word came of his solemn banishing out of Erinn by vote of the Irish nobles, she brooded, and reckoned the wealth still hers, and waited message.

When he came again, with his English allies and the curst name “Diarmod of the Foreigners” on him, her step was light with hope, for the soldiers out of England would make him king indeed over all the proud nobles who had banished him away! The dream of Tara was still a sweet, yet fearful dream.

But when the death of Diarmod was come to him in horror, and the head of Tiernan O’Ruarc was sent to England, while his body was hung by the feet on the north wall of Dublin, then again did wild rage of the Irish burn high against the name of Dervail of the Shadow.

It was sung in songs linking her ever with the hated invaders. Even through convent walls that hatred came—hatred against her and against the arch-traitor who had brought the English enemy to help win the throne of Erinn, because of her beauty and her daring dream.

In secret and in darkness, she was guarded to Mellifont and a new name given her for safety, and among the nuns she was never known to have worn the royal colors of a queen. And the dream of Tara was a gray horror—yet it had been told by Duffagan that kings who battled for her would sink in death, while she alone survived—and it was so.

But a monk whispered her name in the sunny walk of the garden one day in spring, and she looked again into the dark eyes of Ardan, who should be King of Leinster.

He held out to her a pearl and a ring she knew.

“These were to go back to you, and I made promise,” he said. “I was with him at the last, when no one else was with him.”

“Did his blessing come with them?” she asked. “It is said he died as Kieran died—cursing Dervail.”

“They should not have told you that.”

“Nay, none are telling me; it is on the air wherever the invading enemy are known and hated—Diarmod and Dervail, Dervail and Diarmod of the Foreigners! In my dreams I am hearing the curses on the two names!”

“Duffagan made such prophecy of your name and its echoes in the druid circle.”

“He did. Give the pearl to some altar and wear you the ring of your father. They are tokens of fear to me—fear of what I dared in my days of daring.”

“There are other sons to wear the ring. Mine is now the monk’s robe. I am a builder and a carver of stone. If the churches rise against the invading English, I will be a soldier to help undo the curse of Diarmod.”

“And the curse of Dervail,” she said, and wept.

He made no answer.

“Ardan,” she said, “Kieran the monk said, a thousand years’ bondage on Erinn for me, a thousand years of the yoke—the yoke on the bent neck of Erinn! You have had the true vision all our lives; you were the only true thing, Ardan. Can you read the days to come, and tell me the end of that curse? For the yoke is on Erinn, Ardan.”

“I dare not read, or make prophecy, Dervail.”

“A white road to you! The bell of vesper sounds, and it is Beltain—and a time of fear to me! Ardan, I have long had a thought unspoken. A tomb will be mine some restful night. I would that your hand had the carving of that bed. Your hand, comrade, will carve the tomb? It will be the end of the flight of the bird, Ardan.”

“I will do that: I saw the form of it when we rode out through the smoke and the furious pack there at the castle in Kildare.”

“And it will be—?”

“The circled cross—and a gray falcon there with broken, trailing wings, Dervail.”

[Music: _Fourteenth Century._]

RANDUFF OF CUMANAC

Such is the record of Kearmit; —Kearmit the holy of Cumanac, Truthful the word he has written Truthful the warning. This is the warning to pass through all lives to our people: Leave all unchristened the axe arm of Erinn forever!

From Archibald T. De Nise, Attorney-at-Law. To Major Matthew Forbes.

_My dear Major_:—A week ago when we ended our after-dinner talk (in the small hours of the morning), I little thought that I should so soon have evidence on your side of the argument concerning the shadowy other life in our midst. I can’t say that the new evidence has convinced me, but it certainly has me rattled.

I am sending you brief excerpts from a curious old Irish volume I am eager to have you see, and also, a verbatim copy of the letter which came with it. I recall that your family was of the last hereditary historians of Ireland in the seventeenth century, and with your bookish tendencies, added to your predisposition to delve into the uncanny, it gives me a hope that your inheritance of knowledge may help me to a glimmer of light in this case.

I am sure that in reading the letter I enclose, you will not fail to recollect the statement of your friend Dartan, whose portrait of “Girl with the Hound,” was in the spring exhibition. He told us that the addition of the hound to that picture was at his suggestion, and that it required considerable time and trouble to find the right type of hound for the desired composition. By this you will note that the hound did not enter that family through any special desire of any member of that family.

It is easy to decide that an impressionable mind, under the influence of powerful inherited tradition of brutal ages, could work itself into a state of self-hypnosis wherein the dream became the fact. I tell myself that such is the reasonable solution of the mystery.

I work it out beautifully along those lines as I would a theoretical game of chess—and then that red-eyed hound of the picture walks across the board, and makes chaos of my chess men!

You know how much the unusual personality of the boy has interested me from the beginning. The excitement over him has been tremendous—the absolute lack of motive—her beauty, and his youth (he is not yet twenty-three)—all this would be enough to make the affair celebrated even without the very important financial position held by his brother.

I have begged the boy to help me clear up the mystery of it all, and he evidently thinks he has really given me that help in the letter I enclose, but to my mind it furnishes two mysteries instead of one.

When you have read it I want you to call me up, no matter what hour of the day or night it is, and then come and talk it over—if ever a friend needed a lifeline in the strange sea of the uncanny, I am that friend. I worked personally all night on the copy I send you—it could not be given to a copyist.

There are many who are confident that he is not the guilty one, but that his finding her there, in that condition, shocked him out of sanity. He gave himself up at once and accused himself without any excitement whatever. He has steadily refused to tell his motive for the act, and has made not the slightest attempt to vindicate himself at any time—not even soliciting the help of an attorney.

When I offered him the services of my office he only said: “It is a kindness of you to give help at this time, and there is money in plenty to pay you, Mr. De Nise, but the work is not worth the doing, and it is I am telling you it.”

More than that he has not said, and his speech has the unusual quality of fineness in it, at the same time that he uses curious phrasing suggestive of a brogue, though it is not a brogue. Perhaps it is that Irish music in his voice makes him fascinating. I have heard nothing quite like it. I hope you remember that in our former talk I spoke to you of it, and you said that prior to Elizabethan days, much learning and most of the music of England had been borrowed from the Irish scholars who took the brogue with them across the Irish Sea and made it fashionable. I assure you this lad’s manner would become fashionable if it could be easily imitated. It belongs to a world older than our day. That is the baffling impression given when he speaks. It is not the words alone—it is a certain lilt in intonation as if he had been trained in rhythmic chants. Strangely enough his half-brother, who is old enough to be his father, and has had much the same educational advantages, has not a particle of this manner. He is a plain, practical, very well-to-do Anglo-Irishman, interested in certain American mines, and is a local bank director.

You will think me obsessed by this matter of a personality individual and strange—but I am only impressing on you the fact that I spoke to you a week ago of that baffling fascination in him. I want you to remember it, otherwise we should both fancy that my present impressions are merely borrowed from the book and letter I send you.

Yesterday, in desperation over having the case called for next week and not a single word or suggestion of help from him, I repeated what I have said to him so often:

“Fergal, since you have promptly accused yourself and implicated no one but yourself, why—why in the name of all that’s holy, do you not tell to me, your lawyer, and your friend, at least the cause of the crime you have confessed? Why will you not give me something substantial to work on? As it is, I have nothing but absurd theories—shadows to pit against a prosecution.”

He looked at me with the quiet, unyouthful gray eyes, which look black under jet lashes. Then he stretched his arms drowsily as if I had fairly beaten him into speech.

“Aye, Mr. De Nise,” he said, and shook his head with its purple-black wave of hair, like nothing so much as a crow’s wing, except that a crow has no curls to its feathers. “Mr. De Nise, the wonder is on me, sir, as to what you would be saying if you heard in truth of the shadow I have fought in this—and the shadow I feared long—and the shadow by which I was overcome. I am not the one saying to you that shadows are little things to fight.”

“You try me and see what I would say,” I suggested. “Tell me every word and every thought you have on this matter; that is the right thing to do for me as well as for you.” I was only too keen to encourage him, for it was the first time he had shown even a sign of sympathy toward my solicitations.

“And you would not be thinking it moonshine from some Irish rath of the fairies? And you will not be having your laugh with the councilors and the judges over the crazed Irish head of me, after I have gone the Way?” he asked.