Part 20

“How could you ask too much? You who taught a bird its song here in the Kerry hills,” she said, and the flush of pleasure mounted to the white thatch of his hair. She finished the tea and sat looking over the far green.

“I do not sing, but I can repeat three of the verses:

_O Kathleen na Hulihan, It’s old I am and gray, The autumn leaves they drift around The ending of my day. The red leaves—the dead leaves— They drift about my way, Kathleen na Hulihan, today!_

_O Kathleen na Hulihan, I wandered far from you. I took a woman to my wife And kind she was and true, But your gray eyes looked out on me Within her eyes of blue; And, Kathleen na Hulihan, My soul went after you!_

_O Kathleen na Hulihan, Your face is like a star! Your face has led me to your feet, Through wastes and waters far! Your face has made a day for me Where only twilights are! O Kathleen na Hulihan, my star!_”

There was silence for a little when she ended and Shamas looked at her with a glint of tears in his eyes.

“My star!” he said, nodding gently, “a star indeed—and a poet of another land knowing it and singing it! This is a day to live for—a day of great comfort, and you bringing it to me! Now, Molly, woman, you’ll have no more moments of fear for Hugh, and the tales he has retold, when that telling has brought the lady of Argial here to a shepherd’s cot, and her bringing a new Kathleen to us—a star indeed—a star indeed!”

“It is myself is proud as any of Hugh,” said the cautious Molly. “But the boys are wild over him, and many a poet of Ireland has died in exile for less than he has dared say—and you know that well, Shamas, and this is a time of fear at the best, and you are knowing that, too!”

Lady Argial was reading the kindly, yet careful, inscription in the book from under the hearth.

“And this is his own writing to you—others will envy you his love written there. Tell me if there is anything in which he needs help.”

“Nothing we can know—not wealth surely, for the father has left him enough and to spare. Every penny the book brings goes to a fund for Ireland—and more besides!”

“I did not know that—there was no one to tell me,” she said, rising. “It was a fancy I had that he was maybe poor and alone. But perhaps he is not alone either?”

“He is alone except for Dark Rosaleen, or Kathleen na Hulihan,” said Shamas, “and I think he will be having no other sweetheart.”

Their visitor stood in the doorway and looked back into the dusky room of the one window, and then to the almost frail little old man whose spirit was not at all frail.

She clasped hands with him, and with Molly Donn, and mounted the black horse from the stone wall at the stile.

“I do not mean that Argial shall be merely a hunting lodge ever again,” she said. “Come to me as a friend if ever there is favor or justice you have to ask.”

On the hill above she halted to look back and wave her hand.

“Like a queen on a throne she looks there!” said Molly all a-flutter, “and like a queen, too, she sat, simple as the likes of us—on a seat here under our own eaves! Shamas, dear, did you ever hope to see the day?”

But Shamas did not answer. His eyes were on the dark horse and its rider outlined against the shining glory of gold-and-primrose clouds behind which the sun was passing in partial eclipse.

She looked like a statue there, for horse and rider were flat, dark outlines against the sky—themselves in passing shadow and the radiance beyond.

But it was not the picture by which the old man was held—it was a sudden forward movement of hers as if peering down the sea road at something not discernible by the two watchers of the cottage. The horse moved and half turned, restless and eager to be gone, but she halted him there—waiting.

Then the cart of Michal came over the brow of the hill, and a tall man beside Michal lifted his cap in recognition, and the woman, leaning forward, waved her hand.

“Glory be!” muttered Molly. “And who would be the stranger there with Michal?”

But old Shamas knew!

“It’s himself,” he said, and his voice trembled. “I can go the Way in content now that my eyes are on him again—it’s himself come back to us!”

The stranger leaped from the cart and strode over the upland green where the woman waited. His cap was in his hand, and the shock of bronze-gold curls were gone; one lock over his forehead was the only reminder of the golden crown she had remembered.

“O Fairy Prince of a holiday!” she said, and smiled in quick appraisement.

“O Dark Rose of a dream!” he answered, and bowed before her. “This is a more wonderful coming back than I could have hoped—it has taken ten years to earn it!”

He apparently did not note her half-extended hand, but stood as a courtier might before a queen, yet with a sort of gay comradeship in his smile, and the caress in his voice. The horse reached forward with pointed ears of inquiry, and then snuggled its nose against his shoulder. He lifted his hand and stroked the black satiny skin.

“It is a fine welcome to Kerry he is giving me,” he said, with laughing touch of brogue. “Ah! It’s great just to be breathing the air again!”

“A welcome to Kerry is what we all give you, Hugh Siod,” she said. “You forgot to pipe to the herds here until I came again, but you kept well your boy-promise to make songs for Ireland!”

“For the Dark Rose,” he corrected her, and smiled. “I think I promised to make them on the fairies’ rath, but we human things drift in strange currents sometimes, and my songs were made in another place.”

“They go to my heart,” she said, “and not mine alone. My brother idolizes you; I must tell you of Jerry and his comrades. Your songs have been an inspiration.”

He stood while she told him of the wounded brother, and the hopes for Ireland founded on the Irish troops, drilled to fight, if need be, their ancient enemy for equal rights, yet putting aside, temporarily, their own great cause, and marching to battle beside that enemy when devastation threatened a larger world.

The glint of laughter went out of his eyes as they talked there—and they talked long.

She grew pale and still as he told her of things beyond the seas, of foreign alliance by which all Ireland could be made a battlefield, of the political groups who stayed at home to undo the work of the Irish regiments in which her pride was so great.

“For that I have come—and come in secret,” he confessed. “Because of what I have written in my passion for Irish freedom, strange things have been told to me. All my heart is with them—but this is not the time! I have crossed the ocean to tell them that, and to bring word from men more important than I. I go to Cork and then to Dublin to do what I may.”

“And then?”

“I have been helping recruit in Canada, but others can carry on that work now. If I escape alive from my Irish friends when I tell them the truths I bring—well—if there is room for me in an Irish regiment, that is where I will be. There is yet work to do.”

Her hand crept up to her throat as she listened to him.

“Once you made me weep when you crooned a lullaby,” she said, “and now, for all my gladness and pride in your work, you are giving me a great fear! You make me understand things that were dark. I fear—I fear my brother may know of that group you came to reason with, I fear it greatly! And—you maybe know the position and inclinations of Lord Argial—”

“I know,” he said quietly, “yours will not be the only family divided in Ireland—there will be tragedies as dark as any I have sung, and the day is past when they can be hidden as of old.”

“You know the censor has suppressed your _Legends of Desmond_?”

“I ought to,” and his smile twinkled out again. “But sailors sing the songs of them aboard ship, and teach them to sweethearts ashore, and I heard a shepherd whistling one of them as we crossed over the plain below—so—one way and another they will bear their message, if it is worth the bearing!”

“It is—it is!” she said earnestly. “You have wakened many of us to greater pride in our heritage. I am only one of them. Did you know—have you ever chanced on the trace of a link between your family and our own? My brother found it in some old record of genealogy of Munster. I—he takes great pride in it. I—am able to claim myself as your kinswoman—though far removed.”

“Not so far!” he corrected. “You may remember that I recognized you as kindred even when awed by you, and O’Donnell’s Dark Rose was called by him ‘The Flower of Munster.’”

She looked at him as he spoke lightly of the things of which he had written as a religion.

“I have found many of my Irish cousins in the ten years,” she said, “but not one of them is like you. I rode up to Templard today, but all is different; there is no hawthorn blooming and no white lamb, and no shepherd of songs!”

“I never went there again,” he said very quietly. “It is a place to dream about. When I have done something of use to Ireland—of real use—I will go up again to the old temple. It has always been sanctuary to me. I would wish that the hawthorn might be in bloom when I go again—and that I might see you there!”

She had the same wish, and he knew it without words. The childish promise of tryst when his songs called her back to Kerry was not forgotten by either of them. Ten years of life in the world had dragged their long days between a lad and a maid whose hands had not even touched, yet nothing in that life had been more real than their dreams of each other.

“I must go,” she said. “It is wonderful that you returned here today—the day I came just to look at the place where you had once lived! I wonder if I will ever see you again, Hugh Siod.”

“I think you will,” he said; “wherever they send me I will find my way back some time. You wear the green—dear color of hope, which is all that is left to Ireland! Hope then with me that the hawthorn may be in bloom when I do come—hawthorn time is the glad time, and the winter left behind.”

“I will—I will!” she said.

They looked at each other steadily and turned away. He halted once to watch her riding swiftly up toward the far summit, and then he followed Michal to the cottage.

“Would you look at that now?” demanded Molly watching afar, “not even a handshake did she give him—and she all fine words here in praise of his writings! Sure, the quality folk is a puzzle any way you take them, and it would hurt her none at all to be human to him as she was to us!”

The stars were out when the lady of Argial rode along the great oak avenue from the forest, and had joy in the night odors of swelling buds, and the promise of earth that winter was indeed gone.

A leaping light against the windows told that a cheery fire had been made, more for the brightness of it than the need of warmth. And she thought of the long talk there she would have with Jerry over the strange hour at Siod’s old Kerry home.

But when she reached the hall, angry voices came to her ears, and she faced a strange scene from the library door.

Jerry, on his crutch, stood, a picture of helpless fury, and watched Hector Laud of Argial tear leaf by leaf a book apart, and toss them on the blaze.

“I will have no smuggled seditious books under my roof,” he declared, “and no plotting traitors!”

“You are the sort of man to make traitors!” said Jerry hotly. “You are the sort of man against whom people rise in ever-widening circles until it is called Revolution! Can you put lock and key on thoughts by burning a thinker’s books? I will not stop another night under your damned roof if I have to hobble on crutches over the mountain!”

“Jerry!” She was beside him, with her arms about him—and staring hard at Laud, who calmly continued his task instead of flinging the volume at once to the flames.

“Rose, Rose! It is the songs of Siod! My songs! It is brutal,” muttered Jerry, and before either realized what she was doing she darted forward and tore the remnants of the volume from the grasp of her husband.

“They are Ireland itself, the very spirit of Ireland! And no fire ever made by you—or made by your blood—can burn that spirit out, Hector Laud!” she said.

The men were no more astonished than herself at her act. Laud stared at her, sneering, incredulous.

“Irish bombast!” he remarked. “So my wife is also a reader of this forbidden drivel of old legends! It is as well I came unexpectedly to note what was holding you so long in the wilds of Kerry. Is my castle one of the several used in these days for traitorous sedition?”

“Our blood breeds no traitors,” she replied evenly, “neither do we permit insult. Jerry is right. You can have your roof for your own usage. A thatched cottage will give us more of self-respect.”

“Don’t be absurd!” suggested Laud. “You know perfectly well I won’t allow you to go, and will not have a scandal. That thing in your hand is smuggled literature of a pernicious sort. If I choose I could put your brother under arrest for having it here. Burning it is the simple way out.”

“Legally, I suppose he is right. Rose,” said Jerry at last. “I don’t want to make trouble for you. Let it be burned rather than that.”

The boy had sunk in his chair—rather pale and shaky from his brief fury. She put her arm about him with a wonderful smile in her eyes.

“There are different ways of burning,” she said. “Sacrifices are offered in that way.”

She knelt on the hearth and held out the book in both hands, looking across at Jerry.

“This is my sacrifice for my soldier brother,” she said, “that he may, without blemish, fight ever in the right, for Ireland!”

She laid the leaves on the blaze and knelt watching until there was left only a glowing curl of ash. Hector Laud regarded her somberly. Never before had she so openly defied him. He was in sullen rage, knowing that he had gone too far, and his rage extended to the book, and the writer of it.

And he knew himself justified in his rage when she rose from her knees and smiled on Jerry.

“It is gone, soldier boy!” she said. “The pages are gone out of sight, but the real book is here,” and she touched her breast. “I know it all by heart, as does more than one of the Irish, and I will teach it all over to you again!”

A fortnight later the hell of revolution broke loose in Dublin, and a reign of terror ruled. Wild fear dominated the official group, and strange jail-yard killings sent a shudder around the world. Hector Laud was sharer of that obloquy, and his wife, to whom no one would tell the truth, divined the unspoken. She shut herself in a room apart, and refused to look on his face.

Jerry was brought to her there, shot and speechless, and gave work for her hands. The wound temporarily affected his speech and he had lain apparently dead for over an hour in the barricaded street where the bullets sang their death-song over him. Then some stranger had gone into that inferno after him and got him to safety. Civilians were forbidden within that street, and the stranger had been taken before the military authorities to answer for his humanity. No one could learn what had become of him; no one but the sister of the boy was especially interested, and it was difficult for any friend to seek answers to her questions, knowing that her husband was the one man whose information concerning suspects, arrests, and executions was absolutely accurate. He could tell her if anyone could—but no one could even hint that to her! Every friend of hers was shrouded in gloom because of the bond between them—they called him “Butcher Laud” when out of her hearing.

The second day Jerry could articulate, but his nerves were a jangle, and his eyes pleaded with her.

“Kerry, Kerry!” he whispered over and over. The physician listened and assented.

“Get him out of this if you can. Everyone he sees here is filled with the devil’s own horrors we’ve been going through. By all means get him to the hills where there is peace.”

Jerry whispered for “Siod,” once or twice, but no one knew where to find Siod.

It was the last week in April, gloriously bright, and the warm sun calling out patches of bloom in every southern nook. The green grass was springing, and the coils of fern uncurling in wood and sedgy marge.

She rode west to Kerry in a curious trance-like state with the wounded boy and a nurse. There were moments when she felt the after-effects of some shock she had lived through, though the actual shock, or the nature of it, had been forgotten!

She wakened herself sobbing of some unknown sorrow, and the eyes of Jerry followed her in mute question. He could whisper disjointed words, but was forbidden attempt at conversation. Rest and nursing were his only need. The wound coming so soon after his former convalescence had been too heavy a strain for quick recuperation—yet he would recover and, as the physician said, live to fight again.

The very birds of the air appeared to be bearers of disaster to the hills, for there was no welcome there for the family of Argial; herdsmen and farmers who once met her with the smile of welcome on every road now turned aside in the hidden boreens, or crouched back of hedges as she walked abroad.

Shamas Ronayne alone came to her, a frail old white figure in gray, and driving the white donkey of Michal Donn.

“None other would be coming for question to a Laud of Argial, and I am the one coming,” he said. “What may happen to me is as nothing at all, for my time is near, and none to sorrow.”

“I will sorrow,” said the lady of Argial. “The very land itself sorrows for every man like you who passes. You are of the living records of the unwritten things—the sacred things.”

“It is of the lad,” he said. “He was to come back once, or send word back to us once, when he had given his message in Dublin and joined a regiment. No word has come, and it is nearing a month. He was not of the revolution, for his message to them was a different one entirely. Kerry and Cork he reached in time, but Dublin he could not have. His name is not heard of, though many are asking.”

“Yes, my own brother is asking—and my own heart is asking.”

He looked at her with a new, wondrous look of comprehension, and tears shone in the unfaded blue of his strangely youthful eyes. He touched her green sleeve, as he might have touched the sacrament.

“Ah! ‘Rose of Kerry!’ I should have known, I should have known!” he said. Her eyes, darkest gray, shaded darker by black lashes, met his gaze steadily and in pride. His own eyes closed, and he murmured a prayer at what he saw there.

“It has been always, I think,” she said. “I was as a child walking in sleep—and he called me awake!”

“Aye! And your voice would now be calling him to answer if any voice could,” said Shamas. “I have been walking the glen paths in the night with a great fear on me, and no shape to that fear. ‘Before the hawthorn is in bloom,’ was what he said at his going away, but the buds have opened surely on Templard, and no word coming! The man they wedded you to is the man who knows all things of them in prison, and them who were killed there. I—we all had thought that you would surely be knowing.”

“Shamas,” she whispered, and then again in growing horror—“Shamas!”

“Aye,” he answered. “There are fearful hearts waiting the words, but none would be asking an Argial, barring myself—and it is you I am asking.”

“And I am no Argial!” she said. “I am only a woman of Ireland, this day. If a crime has been done against him, Argial must answer!”

She sent message by wire so imperative that some reply must come back. After that there was nothing to do but the waiting, and Shamas she would not let go.

They talked long, and their speech was all of him, and she told him of their childlike game of the fairy queen and the Irish prince who found her in the shadows of the druid temple on Templard.

“I mind well the day,” said Shamas, “for on the hearthstone that night he wrote the poem-tale of the Dark Rose of Red Hugh O’Donnell, and it blooming again in Kerry for fragrance to all Ireland—alive and blooming after three centuries of heavy feet trampling it in the mire! He worked all the night at it, and his eyes alight and no weariness on him! Molly was in a fair fright over it, for he said he was writing a dream he had in a fairy rath—and it the eve of Beltain! As this is.”

“This?” she said, and stared at him.

“Aye, what else? In the cities the people are forgetting them old days of the fields and the new bloom, but here we are not forgetting, for it ends the black winter for us and gives us hope of harvests to come.”

“And I forgot!” Her voice was incredulous. “Shamas, my mind has been full of him, yet for the first time in ten years I forgot! Since last Wednesday I have walked as in a trance, and I seem to have lost dates or records of time. Beltain to come:—and I to forget! Why, it was like a tryst-time, a day to wish myself back on Templard, and hear his voice again there—his young voice singing.”

“Wednesday,” mused Shamas. “That was the night I walked sleepless. The restlessness would not take itself away. So—Sunday and all as it is, I could stand it no longer, and took the road to you.”

“Sunday?” she repeated. “I had forgotten that also! The hour has gone by when an answer could reach me by wire on a Sunday! It will be morning now before we can get it, but you must not go back until it comes. You are the only comforting soul near me.”

“I could not sleep under the roof of Argial,” said Shamas.

“Neither will I this night,” she said, “but you can rest, and wait, and what I can do for your comfort I will.”

The twilight crept through the dusky wood, and quiet settled over the sombre mass of gray Argial. A star glimmered here and there in the deepening sky.

She paced her chamber alone—waiting!

A lad passed through a far meadow singing a love-song to some mate of the thatched roofs, and she paused at the window listening until the last sound died away—but it was another voice of which she was thinking.

“And this night!” she murmured. “This sleepless night of the tryst-time! Ah, to be but once on Templard under the stars—and his young voice singing there carefree as before!”

She walked away from the window and the witcheries of the thought. She lit a reading-lamp, and picked up a little book—Meyers’ translation of the fragments of verse of _Liadan and Kurithir_. The ancient love-story of the two poets had its own fascination for her always, but this time her eyes rested on one verse and did not go beyond. It was Liadan’s recognition of the forbidden voice singing its love to her—

“_Belovéd is the dear voice I hear! I dare not welcome it, But this only do I say: Belovéd is the dear voice!_”

She sat quite still, looking at it. Her dark eyes grew darker, wider; every sense seemed suddenly alert in a new way. Her breath was stilled to listen; no sound broke the darkness or echoed in the halls—yet far away beyond—above—she felt the vibrations of wordless harmonies!

They passed, and left her staring at the words:

“_Belovéd is the dear voice I hear I dare not welcome it!_”

She arose, took from a closet a long-hooded cloak of green, and turned out the light.

“But I dare,” she whispered, and slipped out and down to the stables in the moonless night!