determined, as though he were fated to press his suit and be done with
it. However, he took his stand under the flat, and fear was all but
making him move after he had cast one rhapsodical glance through the
fog when he stopped dead still! He thought he saw Guilda move against
the blinds of her bedroom, and all the pleasant pusslike purring in
his soul became embattled passion. Peter decided to climb to the top
floor of the flat, the floor beyond the balcony where Guilda slept.
Fastening the dog collar round his wrist, he screwed his shaky clerk’s
hands to the sticking point and crawled up the trellis work. In two
minutes he was gasping on the balcony and a fine sweat was blinding
his eyes. Then he swung himself on the railing and began pulling his
febrile body up the stone work. He had luckily lost a good deal of
weight lately, but this was offset by loss of strength. He reached
half-way, and felt he could get no further. The fog thickened, and he
waited to gather his last energy. He would see Guilda. That he was
sure of, and he bargained with his gods that if he saw her this once
he was willing never to see her again. This once, this once, and his
strength swayed on the tottering side of weakness. He could not tell
whether it was weakness or strength that beat in his veins. He was not
a psychologist or he would have known that it was neither. However,
he hoped it was new strength, and began to drive his nails into the
mortared chinks. He spent whole moments hanging by his finger-tips.
What agony! His grateful palm closed round a helpful ledge. It was
her window-ledge! And he drew himself up with a last effort. He was
kneeling on the very sill and a warm light was bathing him, but he had
not the necessary last half-ounce of strength left to raise his arm
and tap the old signal. He sat puffing and sighing until Guilda heard
unusual sounds and not catlike, or, she thought if it was, it was a
very sick cat. She came to the window. Peter saw her shadow swim into
the blind like some enormous bird, and, like a vulture’s crooked wings,
her long arms, trailing bands of vesture, moving to the window-bolt and
slowly opening it behind the undrawn blind ... “Peter, I knew it was
you. I have been thinking of you all the evening. I had an idea that if
I thought strongly enough you would come.” Peter extended his smeared
and bleeding hand, on the hilt of which was fastened her dog collar.
She laughed as she helped him into the room. It was the merry laugh of
love achieving love.... The window redescended. In the fog no one had
seen. So Peter Joneson came within sight and touch of attaining the
unattainable. He sank wearily but dreamily into an arm-chair. Dear,
dear Guilda! She was pouring out the nice warm water again in a basin
and bringing it to him. She was kneeling at his feet again with a nice
crisp towel. He suppressed a frightful fit of coughing, which would
not have chimed with the delectation of the moment. She had wiped the
soot off his skin, and softened the clotted blood, and was drying his
fingers, when suddenly the fresh blood began to spurt into the basin.
There was quite a nasty cut there. He must have struck a snag of
glass in the mortar. She uttered an exclamation of grief which pierced
his flesh as the glass did not. At the same moment the inclination to
cough became his imperative and dominant sensation within. He felt
he would burst if he could not shake his lungs into his throat. But
with a stifling exercise of will power he drove it down his gullet,
while Guilda tried to slake the flow of his blood. It did not seem
possible to stop. She pulled the dog collar tighter and tighter round
his wrist, and still the drops flowed. Peter watched her as in a kind
of delicious nightmare, but he felt something heavier than iron was
sinking on his chest. He must try and shake it off. Perhaps it was only
a dream. He was awakened from his dream by a fierce thrill running
through his body. His wide eyes stared at Guilda--stared and stared.
Good God! her hands were laid on his cut. He could feel her staunching
his blood. “Don’t, oh don’t trouble!” he cried on the top of a heaving
crash in his breaking lungs. “Don’t! don’t! don’t!” “But I love and
adore you, Peter. Can’t you feel how I love you?” And Peter, in
frenzied and prostrate terror felt his blood surge fiercely, unsatedly,
passionately--and then the crash came. His body broke asunder, and
he slipped from her with a single gasp. He coughed savagely, and
sank at her feet. He could just clasp them before he passed into
unconsciousness.... She simply stared.
When he awoke he felt endreamed not with the soft drowsiness that
follows sleep, but startled with the horrible ticking beat with which
one comes out of an anæsthetic. He tried to remember if he had been
going to have an operation and could not, but there was a doctor
standing there, and holding his pulse with a grey face and a watch.
Oh, thank heavens! It was the watch, and not his heart that was making
that awful tick, tick, tick! Faning was standing there, which was
curious, looking at him with a look still more curious. And why was he
in a strange bedroom? Then he caught sight of Guilda. She was carrying
a basin across the room full of blood.... Then he remembered. She had
washed his hands, and his eye followed her gratefully across the room.
But he was growing weaker. Never had he felt so weak before. He was
too exhausted to make sign or sound. He could hear the doctor talking;
“I am sorry you did not send for me earlier, Mr. Faning, during the
night, for he has been bleeding without cessation, and he must have
been very anæmic before....” Peter’s eyes strayed to the bijou clock on
the dressing-table. It was eight o’clock! Then he must have been two
hours unconscious. He must have fainted. Then he noticed that it was
daylight. Then he lay back, and gave up the ghost. Simply died!
The doctor, as a matter of fact, had been expecting him to die since
six o’clock. He had cut the main artery in his wrist and had died owing
to blood failure during the night. The doctor sat a little puzzled.
He had seen cases of bleeding to death before, and the rarer cases
of bleeders who are liable to shed blood at a touch. But this was an
accident, and he mentioned to Mr. Faning that it would involve an
inquest. Faning blanched, for he wisely hated scandal more than sin,
and the idea of a dead body being found in his wife’s bedroom was a
confusing prospect. Coroners were so unsympathetic in these days. He
suggested it to the doctor, and the doctor agreed that an inquest
would be awkward. What was particularly difficult for him was to
explain where the man’s blood had gone to. There was only a pint or
two in the basin and on the towels, and yet his veins were practically
emptied. It would be a puzzling inquest, and had better be avoided.
Guilda crept to the doorway and watched her husband and doctor deciding
action. No servant was allowed to pry into her room that day, and it
was given out that Guilda herself was unwell. She dropped into bed at
Faning’s orders, and lay there half frightened, but weirdly sad and
content. She slept until the evening without thinking of the corpse her
husband had locked into the bathroom. At tea-time the doctor returned,
and, when no one stood in the street, they pitched the body over the
balcony into the garden where it fell with a sodden crash. Then they
waited and waited, but no policeman came, no newsboy gave the alarm.
Their plan was imminent and certain of success. The body would be found
cold that night or in the morning by the milkman, and every policeman
on the beat would testify to the peculiar character of the gentleman
and his way of entering his friends’ houses. It suddenly occurred to
the doctor that something would be missing. “The blood?” he said:
“there is no blood in the garden.” Fortunately no servant had cleaned
the basin, and the clotted fluid was diluted with hot water and carried
carefully outside into the garden, and splashed about the crumpled
figure under the trellis-work. Softly it sank into the gritty earth of
two dogs’ graves.
THE WEIRD GILLY
Once upon a time--and a long time gone, before the wind and the rain
had come to live in Ireland--O’Donnell held festival with the fine
gentlemen of Donegal.
They sat in the house at Ballyshannon which he had graven of yew and
thatched with gulls’ plumes, and they feasted upon new of all meats,
and old of all liquors. As they drank high and deep, their plaited hair
fell over the wine cups their fathers had taken out of the graves of
the Danes. In face of O’Donnell himself sat the Joyless Jug. It was
called so because it had been used to fetch water by the patron saint
of all the O’Donnell’s. It never ran dry on O’Donnell’s table, and this
by the marvelling was esteemed a miracle.
As the company peered through the lime-white arches of the hall into
O’Donnell’s apple garden, they saw a strange gilly pricking the sour
fruit with a javelin. O’Donnell sent a Saxon slave to bring him in. The
stranger gave astonishment to them all. He wore patched hose over his
swinging shanks, and a mantle that would have wrapped a mare and foal
was gathered to his girdle. A naked sword trundled at his heel-tip, and
he carried three charred javelins of holly. The puddle water splashed
out of his deerskin brogues while his ear-tips peeped through his
mantle hood.
“God save you and ripen your apples,” quoth he, and, as he smacked his
lips, the wine leaped in their cups.
“And who and wherefrom and whither exactly art thou?” asked O’Donnell.
“My habits take me to Islay in Scotland one day, to the Island of Man
another, and to Rathlin the next, for a ranting rambling rover I am.”
“Your name? and you are welcome,” said O’Donnell.
“The Gilly of the Gael.”
“It is enough; sit where you would drink, and drink where you sit.”
“Indeed,” said the Gilly, “I will sit, or I will sit not, as it pleases
me. I would hear music to play the ache out of my legs and the water
out of my shoes.”
O’Donnell called his harpers to play smooth and soothing strains out
of their live harps. They were the pride and power of O’Donnell’s
entertaining.
When the gilly had listened a while through his hood, he spoke to the
harps: “I have never heard minstrelsy the like--not since I heard the
musicians of Beelzebub tinkling iron with their sledgehammers on the
nethermost ground-tier of Hell!”
He seized a harp himself, and shook the last melody out of it. Then
he played to the gentry of Donegal and such music that all the women
travailing in the town and the gallants gashed in battle lying within,
were soothed to sleep and stupor.
“I perceive thou art an harmonious rogue,” said O’Donnell, and he
forgave him the insult he had delivered upon the harps.
“One day I am sweet, one day I am bitter,” quoth the Gilly, “one
morning under sun, one evening under moon, and here one day, and not
here the next.”
O’Donnell saw a source of endless entertainment for the men of Ulster,
and he told off twenty gallow-glasses, as they valued their straw and
ale, to guard the gates, and he hid twenty horsemen in the apple grove.
But the Gilly was gilly to no Lord.
“Watch for me, ride for me,” cried he, “or I am clean away.” The
gallow-glasses sprang to seize him leaving. But he passed them, and he
ran through the horsemen, spearing their apples as he went. Then the
riders rode each other down in tumult, and the gallow-glasses fell upon
each other’s knives.
But the Gilly was gone--and he left a herb for their healing, a little
bundle of starwort, with O’Donnell’s watcher on the hills.
* * * * *
At that time it chanced that the son of Desmond had gathered the men of
South Munster to proclaim himself Desmond against his father. Hove the
weird gilly within hearing;
“God save you, and keep sprigs to your trees!” he cried entering.
“And who art thou of all royal rascals and runners?”
“I am Duartane O’Duartane, runner to the King of Ireland,” he told
him, “and I have run Ireland from the shelly shore of Sligo to the mud
mountains of Thomond.”
“Play or be hung,” said Desmond, thinking the squelch of his brogues
was all his music.
The Gilly would not play, but when they ridiculed him he caught the
harp from a blind harper of Desmond so swiftly that the harper thought
the wind had taken it. First he made the harp sound, and then to sing,
and at last to speak. The harp said:
“The music is not more lasting than the harp that begot it, and the
sprig is not stronger than the tree that grew it.”
“Thou art a traitor to thy clan,” cried the young Desmond to the harp,
and his men-at-arms cut the harp-strings with their swords. The Gilly
slipped aside and called out: “One day I am sweet, another I am sour,
one day in North Donegal, one day in South Munster,” and away he
vanished like a twang of his music.
It happed at the time of the Gilly’s raid and riot through Ireland
that M’Keogh of Leinster, the hereditary crown-bearer and coroner to
the MacMurrough, lay sick of a bog-palsy in his leg. The twelve royal
physicians of Leinster were gathered about the one leg, for until he
could walk the new MacMurrough might not come by his crown. To be
crowned by a sick man was against the Brehon law of Ireland.
Swung the Weird Gilly to sight.
“Who art thou, watering my garden with thy brogues?” cried M’Keogh.
“A medical student picking plants,” answered the Gilly, “and if you
promised to put away all niggardliness, I would heal the sorriness of
your shank.”
“So be it,” said M’Keogh, and sent his gold robes to patch beggar’s
rags at his gate.
The Gilly slit a leaf of nightwort with his javelin and dropped it then
and there on M’Keogh’s leg. With that, M’Keogh’s leg rose under him and
started to run out of the house, and M’Keogh with it, and the twelve
royal leeches of Leinster running after. There was no catching him till
he tired toward evening. When they brought him back he offered the
Gilly his one daughter for wife.
“It is well,” said the Gilly, “be she foul or be she fair, she shall be
mine.”
That night a banquet was spread with porridge for plenty and water for
wine. But when the guests were gathered, a servant ran in crying:
“The foreign physician is over the hills and faster than a russet hare
between a day and a night of March.”
“We knew he was a false rascal,” declared the twelve royal doctors of
Leinster.
At this time it chanced that Conor of Connaught was preparing to avenge
a foul insult done upon the dead and the living of his country. A
Connaught crone had lent a basket to a hag of Munster and had received
neither it nor its eric-price in return. Sped the Gilly within speech
of them. He was crossing the ridge of Ireland that runs from Dublin to
Galway.
“Who art thou, running with thy ribs wrapt up in a mantle?” asked Conor.
“I am the Gruesome Gilly and I run through Ireland to see good wars and
fair fighting, and if you would have me now I will join gladly.”
“Will any hiring purchase you?” quoth Conor.
“Nothing unfair to be done to me,” answered the Gilly.
So he marched with the fighting men of Connaught and of Far-Connaught,
till they overstepped the marches of Munster. Heaven gave them
blessing, boon and victory, for they carried away two spotted cows from
the Hag of Munster, and her one-horned bull, as a solace for the basket.
When the men of Munster learnt of the disgrace befallen them, they
marched for half a day and half a night. But the Gilly kept them at bay
with his javelins in one hand, while he drove along the cattle with
the other. He kept running betwixt the prey and the pursuit till he was
past the fords of the Shannon. It was the greatest cattle-spoil of the
time, and gave hymning to harpers and piping to poets for a spring-tide.
When they came to Conor’s house, Conor drained the first flagon of wine
and left the Gilly thirsty. “The drink goes with the deed,” said the
Gilly, and, before the words were with Conor, he had disappeared.
At the same time, O’Kelly the King of the Kellies was bidding men to
banquet. Came the Gilly within call.
“Art thou a Kelly of Munster or a Kelly of Leinster?” was all the
O’Kelly would ask a stranger.
“I am neither, but a good conjurer,” said the Gilly, “and for five
flagons I will prove the goodness of my art.”
“Prove,” said O’Kelly, and five hundred Kellies shouted “Prove!”
“I will wag one ear, while the other is still,” said the Gilly, and all
the Kellies were silent for it seemed not easy to be done.
Then the man of tricks tied one ear with the end of his mantle and
wagged the other. O’Kelly gave him five flagons full.
“I will show thee another,” said the Gilly, and pulling a long thread
out of his mantle, he tossed it in a ball to the clouds. He drew his
mantle over the end of the thread and a hare ran up and away to the
clouds, and then a beagle, and then a dogboy, and, last of all, a
fairy-woman. They listened to the merry hunting cry, until all had
entered the mists. Then the Gilly reeled down the thread, and there was
the hound picking the hare’s bones and the dogboy meshed in the hair of
the fairy-woman. O’Kelly called for another trick.
“I know only one better,” said the Gilly, and vanished.
That day MacMurrough King of Leinster was banqueting in his house.
There were sixteen harpers playing for him to choose which should be
the choice harper of Leinster.
“Whence art thou?” asked MacMurrough.
“One day am I in Islay and another in Man, one day with the heat and
the next with the cold, one day with Conor and another with Kelly,”
answered the Gilly.
“How do my harpers harp with those of Conor and Kelly?” asked the King.
“There is no music I would compare them with,” said the Gilly, “except
the melodious thunder of the Porters in the Pit.”
The King ordered him to be strung forthwith.
When they had gibbeted him on the crow’s perch, they returned and met
him coming out of the King’s house. They ran back and found it was the
King himself they had hung, and the Gilly had left a sliver of batsbane
for his anointing before burial.
That time the Gilly was gone without saying farewell or fare-ill. Away
he vanished with his roguery and ranting, with his wandering and his
wizardry, as all magicians and artists, that shall be since or ever,
must vanish and leave but a little breath of wonderment with the folk
of the world.
OREMUS
JOHN LONG, LTD., PUBLISHERS, LONDON, ENGLAND, 1924
_Wyman & Sons, Ltd., Printers, London, Reading and Fakenham_
Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious errors in punctuation have been silently corrected in this
version, but minor inconsistencies and archaic forms have been retained
as printed.
The French in the Baudelaire prayer has been silently corrected.
The following changes have been made:
On page 102: belives _to_ believes
On page 131: work _to_ word
On page 184: or _to_ of
On page 213: Spindlehorn _to_ Spindelhorn
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.