It was in the full height of summer, and by the bland sea, and while
gathering a bouquet of wild flowers for a girl clad in white, and
sitting on a mound hard by, that Eugene O'Donnell had for the first
time the courage to tell himself he was in love. A minute before and
he had stood in great fear of this said love--it had seemed silly,
childish, unworthy of a full-grown man in the perfect possession of
all his faculties. And now, all at once, even while his back was
towards her, and he was not under the glamour of her eye, the magic of
her touch, the mysterious fascinations of her motions, when,
apparently, nothing was going on in the bare daylight but the tranquil
ripple of the waves on the shore below, this fear left him, and all at
once he confessed to himself his love, and began to glory in it.
Once the flood-gate was broken down his nature knew no pause, saw no
obstacle, appreciated no difficulty. Turning round hastily, with the
flowers in his hand and a laugh upon his lips, such a laugh as he had
never laughed before, for now the whole nature of the man was stirred,
he cried: "What a fool I have been, Ellen." It was the first time he
had called her by her name, and yet it seemed old and familiar to him.
"What a fool I have been," he said, "to bother about these flowers."
She blushed, and looked up timidly, and looked down bashfully, and
smiled, and moved as though to rise, and then sat still. She was not
familiar with her name upon his lips. "Eugene," to her mind, seemed
familiar, for from one reason or another, perhaps the love of brevity,
she so called him when she thought of him. But to hear him call her
Ellen was as though her secret had been penetrated, and the fact that
she called him Eugene laid bare.
"What a fool I have been to gather these idle flowers," he repeated.
"They are but the symbols of what I could say so much better in words.
May I speak?"
She grew red, and then deadly pale, and seemed about to faint. Her
lips opened, but no sound came.
"Whether you give me leave or not," he said, "I must. Ellen," he went
on, "I think there is at this moment but one thing I believe
impossible, and it is that I could ever go away from you. I never was
in love before, and I don't exactly know the regular thing to say, but
I'll tell you how I feel. If you were to get up off that mound now and
walk away, supposing back to Glengowra or to the world's end, I'd
follow you. And I'd never cease to follow you, even beyond the world's
end, until you turned back and put your hand in mine. That's better
than these flowers," he said, tossing the bouquet from him. "It's
straighter, anyway, Ellen. Will you give me your hand, dear?"
He called her "dear," and after a little while her hand was raised
slightly from where it lay, and he took it, and she let it bide with
him.
So the stupid flowers lay--nowhere; and two pure hearts, sweet with
God's goodliest graces, were opened to the understanding of one
another.
Then came moonlight nights to make the rich completion of the full
day. He sang to her among the rocks, with the cool fresh sea washing
beneath their unwearied feet. She sat clasped to him, and glad to be
so clasped; and he sat strong beside her, and conscious of his
strength. There was no worshipping on his part, no bowing down before
a golden image. He took her to his heart in the beauty of her
wholesome girlhood, as one takes a melody or a flower, without
question and without any exaggeration of dearness beyond the
exaggeration compelled by all beautiful things.
These moonlit nights amid the rocks were the dearest things which had
been, up to that, with him. There was no impediment in the course of
his true love; his father was affluent; he had explained the whole
matter at home; he had brought his sweetheart home, and there had
she been approved of. Her mother saw no reason why the handsome,
good-natured, good-humoured, well-off young man should not marry her
beautiful daughter; and the daughter, on her part, saw all the reasons
between heaven and earth, and several others which had no existence in
heaven or earth or the region between, why she should marry him.
It was their custom in these moonlight nights to stroll down to that
cove where their first meeting had taken place, and where the glamour
of her beauty had first fallen upon him. Here, of nights, were
privacy, the moon and the sea, and the perfections lent to the moon
and the sea by the cliffs and the rocks and the sounds of the sea
(that are subtler than any voice); and now and then the sounds of the
land, which take away the aerial perspective of the sea and bring to
the soothed eye visions of homesteads and fallows, of sleeping woods
and gentle useful beasts, of pious folk at rest by night and pious
folk at rest for ever; and, over all, the limitless quiet of night.
Here on several occasions they sat for hours, from the late sunset,
through the late dusk, into the dark. And once or twice, when he bade
her good-bye at her mother's gate, he stole back again to the cove
which had been the theatre of the magic drama in which he was acting.
He now lived in the village, and often sat at the cove until the blue
dawn blotted out the bluer night, and the seagulls awoke, and the
sails of the fishing-boats out in the bay were trimmed for home.
All this time, though he knew it not, a shadow dogged him, an evil
shadow, a morally misshapen shadow, a pitiless dark shadow, that hid
here and there where it could, behind wall, or tree, or rock, and ever
glared unwholesomely.
The shadow of a swarthy man, of a man that showed his teeth in the
moonlight and fumbled something in his pocket; a sinister stealthy
shadow, that boded good to no one, lurked, and dodged, and followed in
the footsteps of the lovers like the evil genius of their career.
When all had been settled between the lovers, Ellen had written to
Mrs. Vernon and obtained release from her duties in that household. A
month had now gone by since that meeting on the shingle, and it was
arranged that in another month the wedding was to take place. The
course of true love was running as smooth as the planets in their
orbits. The happiest man and woman in Ireland were Eugene O'Donnell
and Ellen Creagh. As the days went by that cove grew dearer to his
heart; and even now, when the moon was making moonlight for lovers
somewhere else, he, Eugene O'Donnell, could not keep away from it, nor
could he sleep.
One night he left her at her mother's gate and walked slowly down the
road to the cove. It was dark for a summer night. Yet still there was
light enough to see a large object, say the figure of a man, fifty
yards off. He knew the ground as a farmer knows his farm. Following
the declivity of the road he soon arrived at the broken ground. Here
was a high rock on the right, high enough to conceal a man; and here,
behind this rock, was hidden a man with gleaming teeth, and in his
right hand a gleaming blade.
As O'Donnell drew near the rock the man sprang forth, seized the other
by the throat with the left hand, and, whirling up his right,
whispered: "You shall never marry her."
"Lavirotte! Lavirotte! My God, Lavirotte, are you mad?"
"Yes, and you are dead."
The hand holding the knife descended swiftly.