Lady Argial, that your heart is with the cottagers here in Kerry.
There’s many an Irish estate give over to cattle and keepers and
mayhaps some gentleman for the fall hunting, and no spirit of life in
it at all, and it kills the land, that does. It kills the spirit of a
land—or—drives it too far afield to find the way back again!”
“Wouldn’t himself be proud to see you here now, drinking tea from his
own cup, and with the book of his writing to your hand?” said Molly,
beaming hospitality—and settling herself on the doorstep with her own
cup of tea after presenting her visitor with a gilded guest cup. “Now
wouldn’t it be a proud day the day he would see you so?”
“I did see him once; it seems very long ago. He was a slender young
lad with a wonderful smile and odd sayings. He sang a song on the
mountain—a song of Ireland—it had charm and mysteries in it. That was
years ago.”
“And the song was _Kathleen na Hulihan_?” ventured Shamas. “He ever
was singing or whistling one of them, and there have been many.”
“No,” said Lady Argial, with the book open at _A Legend of the Dark
Rose_—“no—it was a different song. But my brother has a new song of
Kathleen and he says the boys are singing it in camp. He found it in
an American paper, but the poet’s name I could not learn. I think the
writer of this book would love it, though it is the sad song of an
old man.”
“I am wondering if you would let us have it?” asked Shamas. “Not so
many new songs come up the glen—it would be a favor of grace, if it
would not be asking too much?”
“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!”
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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.”
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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!”
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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.
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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!”
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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.”
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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!_”