Part 18

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.

“It is not then!” he denied awkwardly. “I have tried to find words for songs, and I did sing them to the sheep—as you maybe know,” he added cautiously, “but how could a shepherd know all the man-thoughts of ‘Rosaleen’? No, young, dark rose-lady, it was only one man made that—and the heart of him dying in him with the sickness for home. He had only thirty years of life, had Hugh O’Donnell, and Shamas was telling us that the poets of Ireland die in youth for the reason that the People of the Hidden Raths want verses and music under the green hills, and they call the young away while their dreams are on them.”

“You are a very queer boy,” she said, “and I won’t believe there was a song of any rose until I hear it.”

He looked at her doubtfully.

“You may be having the Gaelic?” he ventured, but she shook her dark-ringleted head. In his heart he thought she was but trying him, and probably knew all the tongues of all the lands of the earth.

“Then I’ll be giving you the Englishing Mangan made of it; but the words will not sing themselves to the Irish air O’Donnell made; but that is right enough, too, when you think of it. Second-best music is good enough for the English who smashed the Irish harps, and this is a verse of it. There are many verses to ‘The Dark Rose.’”

And with the lamb snuggling under his arm and the slanting rain making a gray veil of all the outer world, Hugh threw back his head, unconscious of lack of training as a meadow lark, and sang—

_I could scale the blue air, I could plow the high hills; Oh! I could kneel all night in prayer To heal your many ills! And one beamy smile from you Would float like light between My toils and me, my own, my true, My Dark Rosaleen! My Own Rosaleen! Would give me life and soul anew, A second life, a soul anew, My Dark Rosaleen!_

The girl leaned forward, watching him, as startled at the unboyish song as he had been at sight of her.

“That is a song I never heard,” she said, “and it is a lovely one; but what does he mean by ‘a second life’?”

“I never heard anyone asking that,” said the lad, wrinkling his brows. “I will be the one to ask Shamas of it, for I heard him say there was no line of that song without a meaning to it.”

“Who is Shamas?”

“Sometimes he is a tinker, and he has made more than one circle of Ireland in his time. He was the one to be teaching us ‘The Dark Rose,’ and telling us of the poets of the ancient old days when a poet was highest man in a kingdom, and no gifts too great for him—I’m thinking that was even before Padrig was coming over with the bells. I’m wishing you had the Gaelic. Shamas has poems by the hundred, from the songs of Dierdre, and Liadan (whose home was right here in Kerry itself)—down to the March of Brian, and the Coulin, which he is singing at me often enough—and him laughing! But it is in Gaelic all the words of them are, and no English words fit the music at all. I’m thinking you should have the Gaelic, Dark Rose.”

“I wonder if I should? My nurse knew Gaelic, but they laughed at her songs until she grew silent, and then they told me she died. I was little then.”

She sat thinking a moment, humming softly in a gentle croon and moving her head to keep time to the melody while the eyes of Hugh grew bright.

“You do know it, you do!” he said joyously, but she shook her head.

“No—the words will not come, though once I did know that sleepy-time song of Kathleen, but all I can remember is—

_Sho heen sho lo, O lulla lo!_”

“But you have the memory of the ancient music, and it is old beyond count! Also there are English words put to that one, and I hearing a girl back from America singing it—and this is the English of it:

_I’ve found my laughing babe a nest On Slumber Tree. I’ll rock you there to rosy rest, Asthore Machree! Oh lulla lo, sing all the leaves On Slumber Tree! Till ev’rything that hurts or grieves Afar must flee._”

The girl sat looking at him, and the tears were bright in her eyes.

“That is it—that is the song of poor old Kathleen. To think I would hear it in this cave on a Kerry hill.”

“And why not? This is not a cave, but a druid’s temple where they tell that the new fire was given out to the people at Samhain, and the druids had the making of that fire on an altar here and the giving of it. But children and mothers and their _suantre_ songs were before that time surely, and many a one could have been crooned in this place, for great gatherings were here. Even the old people are liking to hear the music of the slumbersongs. They say it brings back the voices of mothers—here.”

He touched his breast, and had a smile, gentle and deprecating lest she should think it childish indeed that old folks should care for lullabies, but she was gazing at him curiously.

“You strange boy!” she said, and laid her slim hand on her own breast. “I never knew anyone like you; you made me hurt—here—when you said that! You make me want to cry—yet there is not a word in the song for crying! I think I have a hundred cousins, but none of them knows the things you know; yet, one time we were Irish, too.”

He smiled at her mysteriously.

“To be sure you are, else how could you be the Dark Rose and come to this fairy rath of the hawthorn tree? It is ‘fairie’ they are naming in these days the great mystic people of old in Ireland, and great and good they were and are, in spite of saints, bells, and banning. (May they hear me say it!) Shamas says Irish blood must ever waken to send back its answer to Irish music—and that is what it was doing when you said it hurt you: it is my thought that it was only calling you awake.”

“You strange shepherd and wonderful boy,” she said, and her voice was so full of sweetness and kinship that he leaned forward and looked, slightly smiling, yet very earnest, into her eyes.

“Tell me—Dark Rose—have you been wandering away and only now found your way back? Or have you gone far out on some tide of forgetting, or of slumber, maybe—and the lullaby and the heart-song of the Dark Rose is calling you awake?”

“Are you a wizard in shape of a boy that you know even my thoughts?” she asked. “For I was thinking that song of Kathleen must have been sleeping in my mind a long time—a very long time, and all of the words gone. Yet the music did wait to be called awake, and it was you called.”

“I think it was Maeve and Banva calling, and both of them queens calling to you! But you are awake again—and you are surely the Dark Rose living again!”

“I wish my cousins could hear you call me that,” she said, and laughed; “they would think it a new sort of compliment. When they want to praise, they say a girl is fair and not dark, and they never heard the song.”

“It may be that the sleep is on them, too, and it may be you will call them awake. I am thinking there will be many to answer a call when you cry it.”

A rainbow shimmered through the mist, and a curious radiance heralded the breaking of sunrays between the clouds. The storm ended quickly as it began, and Hugh rose to his feet with the lamb content on his arm. The raindrops still shone on his gold-brown curls, and the time had been short in the strange shelter, yet he did not feel as if it had been: all the generations since O’Donnell made the song seemed to have been bridged over by the dark, bright beauty of that strange girl in the gray shadow.

She also arose, but did not emerge; her eyes were on him, slender and at ease in his homely garb of homespun, weather-stained and worn. The sun touched his hair into a shimmer of radiance and the white of the lamb was made whiter by the arrows of the sun now far down the west. She could not but note a certain patrician cast to his features, and the slender shapeliness of the hand holding the lamb, and she saw him as a picture in whatever light he moved, first Shelley, and now—

“Shepherd Hugh of the glen, you would have given me a fine fright, rushing in here after me, had you been anyone else than yourself,” she said, “yet I know not a thing of you for all our talk. I am sure you are a poet, and if there were Irish princes left in Ireland, I would know you were one of them, but after all I only know your name is Hugh, and that you have a friend, Shamas, a tinker.”

“And I am only knowing that you are the Dark Rose, and that the fairies brought you here on eve of Beltain that I might see you once and be content: my great thanks and my love to them—may they hear me say it!”

“Content?” she murmured—“not even asking who I might be?”

“Not even asking,” he said, smiling back to her. “I care not a rush the name others may be putting on you. Queen of fairies, or maid of the cinders, they may be calling you, but the Dark Rose are you to me!”

“There may be a day when I come again to Kerry,” she said. “Would I find you if I asked for Hugh of a glen?”

“I am foster brother to Michal Donn, and his shieling is back of beyond on the other side there. I am of the Siod.”

“Siod?” and she stared at him; “Sidhe, I read that in tales of fairies—it is their name! I do not need to be Irish to know that. I thought you were not mortal!”