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.
[Illustration: Decorative separator]
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.
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[Illustration: THE DARK ROSE]
[Illustration: Roisin Dubh]
[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.
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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.”