strong hand on the hilt of his broad sword. But the foot that he lifted
he set down again; and he looked at his kinsman, the _liathan_ priest,
and did not move towards him. 'You are in the right to wear a gown,' he
said slowly, 'because you have the tongue and the evil temper of an ugly
girl. You speak foolish things in your heat, and they disgrace you. I
have the best mind that any man in my family ever had. I have more
thoughts in my mind than there are words in your Latin book. I would
speak whatever I chose to this gentleman, and I would understand his
speech when I troubled myself to do so. But I will not do that,--for
some time at least; I will have my wife come, and she will sit here, and
she will tell me his words, and I will be taking my ease.'
Murtogh _Mordha_ called his son to his side, and gave him a message to
deliver.
The priest, smiling in his cold way, leant over and spoke for the space
of a minute in a tongue strange to Dunlogher into the Spaniard's ear.
Then he stood erect, and gazed at Murtogh with an ill-omened look, and
so turned and strode after the lad out of the door.
III
A young woman of the rarest beauty, tall and slender, and with the
carriage of a great lady, came into the chamber and moved across to the
high, carved chair which Murtogh made ready for her, and seated herself
upon it as upon a throne. She had a pale fair skin, and her hair, coiled
heavily in plaits upon her shoulders, was of the hue of a red harvest
sun. There were jewels in this hair and upon her throat and hands, and
her long robes were of rich shining stuffs. A chain of wooden beads,
with a cross of gold at the end, hung from her girdle, and she gathered
this in her fingers as she sat.
The boy, Donogh _baoth_, came with her, and crouched in humility on the
floor at her side. His thick form and dark hair, and his over-large
head, spoke a likeness now to his father which was not to be noted
before. When, as if under the spell of her attraction, he nestled nearer
the lady's chair, and touched her garment with his hand, she drew it
away.
Murtogh _Mordha_, before he took his seat again, and leant back to half
lie upon the skins thrown over it, told her the Spaniard's name, and
explained to her his errand. The Spaniard, bowing himself low, sank upon
one knee, and reverently kissed her hand, as Murty had seen his father
kiss the ring of the Bishop of Ross. He was proud to observe this,
because his wife was holier and more saintly still than any bishop.
The lady smiled upon the Spaniard, and all that she said to him, and he
to her, was in his tongue. 'I cannot speak it well,' she said. Her voice
had the sweetness of a perfume in the air. 'I lived at Seville, in the
old convent there, for only two years. I have no joy of remembrance now,
save in the peace and charm of those years there; but I fear my memory
of the dear speech is dimmed. But I will listen with all my ears,--and
oh, so gladly!'
She fastened her regard upon his eyes,--the great, rolling, midnight
eyes,--and held it there, that she might the better follow his speech.
'Beautiful lady,' the Spaniard said, 'I learn only now the power our
language, spoken by such lips, may have to enthrall the hearing. Condone
my error, I pray you, but I caught from Father Donatus that you were
this strong chieftain's wife, and I see that you are his daughter; and
even that is strange, to look upon him and _you_!
'I am his wife, but only in name, naught else,' she answered. The wave
of comprehension sweeping over the surface of the Spaniard's eyes made
instant confidence between them. 'I am in captivity here. He is a
pirate, a Goth, a murderous barbarian. He and his savages here--but of
this more a little hence. I beg you now to speak something of your
mission,--your errand here. He is as helpless to follow our words as one
of those hounds; but no dog is keener to suspicion.'
The Spaniard, with eager swiftness of speech, piled one upon another the
curtailed topics of his business. The lady, moving her fingers along the
beads, gleaned the narrow pith of it, and dressed it forth in new
phrases for the lord of Dunlogher.
'_The King of Spain will send this month_,' she said in the Irish, '_a
mighty army to drive the heretic English to the last man from this
Island of Saints. They have wounded God too long! The last drop of
Heavens patience is dried up by their crimes. Their Queen was not born
in lawful wedlock, and the Blessed Sacraments are daily profaned by her
and her accursed people. Those who sustain and honour God now will be
sustained and honoured by Him through glorious Eternity._'
'These things are well known to me,' said Murtogh. 'I would not need the
King of Spain to tell them to me. How will he speak concerning myself?'
The lady was not afraid to smile into the eyes of the Spaniard. 'You are
to speak after a moment or two,' she told him, with a calm voice; 'but
hear me this little first. My heart is broken here. I do not know how I
have had the courage to live. These jewels I wear, the fabrics of my
raiment, the wines on the board yonder, are all the booty of
blood-stained waves down at the foot of this terrible cliff. He and his
savages burn false lights, and lure ships to the rocks, and rob and
murder their people. It was thus unhappily I came here, and in fear of
my life, while I was still half dead from the water, I suffered the
marriage words to be read over me,--but now you must speak.'
'I would show you tears rather than words, dear lady,' the Spaniard
said; 'and blows on your behalf more preferably than either. Father
Donatus whispered the tithe of this to me. The whole truth burns like
fire in my heart. As my fathers gave their life blood to drive the
infidel from Grenada,--so I lay my own poor life at your dear feet. If
aught but harm to you could come from it, I would slay him now where he
lolls there on the skins. He is looking at you now, waiting for you to
speak.'
'_The King of Spain has heard much of you_,' she began in the Irish,
without turning her head. '_He is filled with admiration for your
strength and valour. He desires deeply to know what you will be doing.
When you will take arms, and join him with your great might in the
battles, then there cannot be any doubt of his victory._'
'That it is easy to see,' replied Murtogh. 'But the King of Spain's
battles are not my battles. There would be some reason to be given, to
call me out for his wars. The English will be doing me no hurt. They
cannot come here to me, by water or by land; and if they did I would not
let any of them depart alive. For what cause should I go to them? Let
the King of Spain tell me what it would be in his mind to do in my
behalf, when I did this thing for him.'
The lady spoke to the Spaniard. 'The last of my people are killed. They
would not have seemed different to you perhaps,--to you who were bred in
the gentle graces of Spain,--but they were not the ferocious barbarians
these O'Mahonys are. My father was learned in Latin and English, and it
was his dream that I should wed in Spain.'
'Oh, rapturous vision!' said Don Tello, with new flames kindling in his
eyes. 'And if it shall be proved prophetic as well, beautiful lady!
Something of this, too, the priest whispered; but the precious words
return to me as your dear lips breathed them forth,--"wife only in
name." I long to hear them once again.'
The lady repeated them, with tender deliberation, and a languorous gleam
in her blue eyes began to answer his burning gaze. 'I have held the
fierce beast at arm's length,' she said, 'because he is also a fool. I
would give a year of my life to be able to laugh in his face, and slap
these beads across it. I have told him--the blessed thought came to me
even while we knelt at the altar together--that I am bound by a vow. His
big empty head is open to all the fancies that fly. He believes that an
enchanted woman drives up her horses from the bottom of the lake, down
at the foot of the small tower here, every night for food; and he
spreads corn for them which the thieves about him fatten on. He believes
in witches rising from the sea, and leprechauns, and changelings, like
any ignorant herdsman out in the bog, but he is a frightened Churchman,
too. He believes that I am a saint!'
'As I swear by the grave of my mother, you are!' panted Don Tello. 'But
speak now to him.'
'_The King of Spain will do very great things in your behalf_,' she
recited, in Murtogh's tongue. '_He will make you of the rank of a
commander in his armies, and he will ennoble you._'
'I am noble now,' Murtogh made comment, 'as noble as the King of Spain
himself. I am not a MacCarthy or an O'Driscoll, that I would be craving
titles to my name.'
'_Then he will send large rich ships here_,' she began again, with
weariness in her tone, '_to bring you costly presents. And the Pope, he
will grant you ten years' indulgence,--or it may be twenty._'
'Ask him,' broke in Murtogh, sitting up with a brightened face, his hand
outstretched to secure silence for the thought that stirred within
him,--'ask if the Holy Father would be granting just the one spiritual
favour I would beg. Will this gentleman bind the King of Spain to that?'
'And may I wholly trust,' she asked the Spaniard, with half-closed eyes,
through which shone the invitation of her mood, 'may I trust in your
knightly proffer of help? Do not answer till I have finished. You are
the first who has come to me--here in this awful dungeon--and I have
opened my heart to you as perhaps I should not. But you have the blood
of youth in your veins, like me; you are gallant and of high lineage;
you are from the land where chivalry is the law of gentle life,--is it
true that you will be my champion?'
The Spaniard rose with solemn dignity, though his great eyes flashed
devouringly upon her, and his breast heaved under its cuirass. He half
lifted his sword from the sheath, and kissed the cross of its hilt. 'Oh,
my beloved, I swear!' he said, in sombre earnestness.
She translated the action and utterance to Murtogh. '_Whatever of a
spiritual nature you would crave of his Holiness he would grant._'
'But it would be a cruel time of waiting, to send all the long way to
Rome and back,' he objected, 'and this matter lies like lead upon my
soul.'
She looked up into the Spaniard's eyes, and let her own lashes tremble,
and fed the ravening conflagration of his gaze with a little sigh. 'It
would be very sweet to believe,' she murmured, 'too sweet for sense, I
fear me. Nay, Don Tello, I need not such a world of
persuasion--only--only--lift your right hand, with thumb and two fingers
out, and swear again. And say, "Bera, I swear!"'
'It is your name?' he asked, and as she closed her eyes in assent, and
slowly opened them to behold his oath, he lifted the fingers and waved
them toward her, and passionately whispered, 'Bera, queen of my Heaven,
star of my soul, I swear!'
'_That is the sign of the Pope himself_,' she explained, with
indifference, to Murtogh. '_Whatever wish you offered up you have it
already granted. It is Don Tello who bears the holy authority from the
Pope._'
The lord of Dunlogher hurled himself to his feet with a boisterous
energy before which the lady, wondering, drew herself away. He
stretched his bared arms towards her, then flung them upward as in
invocation to the skies. The beatitude of some vast triumph illumined
his glance.
'Oh, then, indeed, I am Murty _Mordha_!' he cried. 'It is I who am
prouder than all the Kings on earth! It is I who have won my love! Oh,
glory to the Heavens that send me this joy! Glory and the praise of the
saints! Glory! Glory!'
The rhapsody was without meaning to the Spaniard. He stared in
astonishment at the big chieftain with the shining countenance who
shouted with such vehemence up at the oaken roof. Turning a glance of
inquiry at the lady, he saw that she had grown white-faced, and was
cowering backward in her chair.
'Our Lady save us!' she gasped at him in Spanish. 'He has asked the Pope
to absolve me from my vow.'
Don Tello, no wiser, put his hand to his sword. 'Tell me quickly, what
it is? What am I to do?' he demanded of her.
Murtogh, with a smile from the heart moistening his eyes and
transfiguring all his face, strode to the Spaniard, and grasped his
reluctant hand between his own broad palms, and gripped it with the
fervour of a giant.
'I would have you tell him,' he called out to the Lady Bera. 'Tell him
that he has no other friend in any land who will do for him what Murty
_Mordha_ will be doing. I will ride with him into the battle, and take
all his blows on my own back. I will call him my son and my brother.
Whatever he will wish, I will give it to him. And all his enemies I will
slay and put down for him to walk upon. Oh, Bera, the jewel restored to
me, the beautiful gem I saved from the waters, tell him these things for
me! Why will your lips be so silent? Would they be waiting for my kisses
to waken them? And Donogh, son of mine, come hither and take my other
son's hand. I will hear you swear to keep my loyalty to him the same as
myself. And, Owny Hea,--hither, man! You cannot see my benefactor, the
man I will be giving my life for, but you have heard his voice. You will
not forget it.'
The absence of all other sound of a sudden caught Murtogh's ear, and
checked his flow of joyous words. He looked with bewilderment at the
figure of his wife in the chair, motionless with clenched hands on her
knees, and eyes fixed in a dazed stare upon vacancy. He turned again,
and noted that Owny Hea had come up to the Spaniard, and was standing
before him so close that their faces were near touching.
The old blind man had the smile of an infant on his withered face. He
lifted his left hand to the Spaniard's breast and passed it curiously
over the corselet and its throat-plate and arm-holes, muttering in Irish
to himself, 'I will not forget. I will not at all forget.'
A zigzag flash of light darted briefly somewhere across Murtogh's
vision. Looking with more intentness he saw that both the blind man's
hands were at the arm-pit of the Spaniard, and pulled upon something not
visible. Don Tello's big eyes seemed bursting from their black-fringed
sockets. His face was distorted, and he curled the fingers of his hand
like stiffened talons, and clawed once into the air with them. Then Owny
Hea pushed him, and he pitched sprawling against Murtogh's legs, and
rolled inert to the floor. His hot blood washed over Murtogh's sandalled
feet.
A woman's shriek of horror burst into the air, and the hounds moaned and
glided forward. Murtogh did not know why he stood so still. He could not
rightly think upon what was happening, or put his mind to it. The bones
in his arms were chilled, and would not move for him. He gazed with
round eyes at Owny, and at the red dripping knife which the bard
stretched out to him. He felt the rough tongue of a dog on his ankle.
The dark corners of the chamber seemed to be moving from him a long
distance away. There was a spell upon him, and he could not tremble.
The voice of Owny Hea came to him, and though it was soundless, like the
speech of Dreamland, he heard all its words; 'Murtogh son of Teige, I
have slain your guest for the reason that I have the Spanish, and I knew
the meaning of his words to this woman, and he could not live any
longer. The _liathan_ priest, when he would be going, told this stranger
that she you called your wife was your enemy, and made a mockery of you,
and would give ear gladly to any means of dishonouring you. And the
_liathan_ priest spoke truly. While the woman repeated lies to you of
the King of Spain and the Pope, she whispered foul scandal of you, and
wicked love-words to that dog's-meat at your feet. It is I, Owen son of
Aodh, who tell you these things. And now you know what you have to do!'
Murtogh turned slowly to the lady. She lay, without motion, in her
chair, her head limp upon her shoulder, and the whiteness of sea foam on
her cheek. Thoughts came again into his brain.
'I have the wisest mind of all in my family,' he said; 'I know what it
is I will be doing.'
He drew the short sword from his girdle, and put his nail along its
edge.
'Donogh _baoth_,' he said to his son, 'go below and seek out Conogher
_tuathal_ and Shane _buidhe_, and bid them seize the _liathan_ priest
between them, and bring him to me here where I am. And you will take
some sleep for yourself then, for it is a late hour.'
The lad looked at the pale lady with the closed eyes, and at the sword
in his father's hand. He set his teeth together, and lifted his head.
'I am of years enough to see it all,' he said. 'I have no sleep on my
eyes.'
Murtogh bent over the corpse at his feet, and caressed the boy's head
with his hand. 'I will not call you _baoth_ (simple) any more,' he said,
fondly. 'You are my true son, and here is my ring for your finger, and
you may return with them when they fetch me my _liathan_ cousin.'
IV
Next morning young Donogh gave his word to the men of Dunlogher, and
they obeyed him, for in the one night he had thrown aside his sluggish
boyhood, and they saw his father's ring on his finger, and heard a good
authority in his voice. They came out from the Western gate at his
command, three-score and more, and stood from the brink of the cliff
inward, with their weapons in their hands, and made a path between them.
But the women and children Donogh bade remain within the bawn, and he
shut the inner gate upon them. It was as if the smell of blood came to
them there, for the old women put up a lamentation of death, and the
others cried aloud, till the noise spread to the men on the cliff. These
looked one to another and held their silence.
They did not clash their spears together when, after a long waiting,
Murtogh came from the gate, and walked toward them. A fine rain was in
the air, and the skies and sea were grey, and the troubled man would
have no spirit for such greeting.
He bore upon his broad back a great shapeless bundle thrice his own
bulk. The weight of it bent his body, and swayed his footsteps as he
came. The cover of it was of skins of wild beasts, sewn rudely with
thongs, and through the gaps in this cover some of the men saw stained
foreign cloths and the plume of a hat, and some a shoe with a priest's
buckle, and some the marble hand of a fair woman. But no word was
spoken, and Murtogh, coming to the edge, heaved his huge shoulders
upward, and the bundle leaped out of sight.
Then Murtogh turned and looked all his fighting-men in their faces, and
smiled in gentleness upon them, and they saw that in that same night,
while the 'little people' had changed Donogh into a man, they had made
Murtogh a child again.
'She came up from the water,' he said to them, in a voice no man knew.
'It was I who brought her out of the water, and fought for her with the
demons under the rocks, and beat all of them off. But one of them I did
not make the sign of the Cross before, and that one is the King of
Spain; and so he has wrought me this mischief, and made all my labour as
nothing; and she is in the water again, and I must be going to fetch her
out rightly this time.'
Murtogh sprang like a deer into the air, with a mighty bound which bore
him far over the edge of the cliff. Some there were, in the throng that
sprang forward, agile enough to be looking down the abyss before his
descent was finished. These, to their amazement, beheld a miracle. For
the great fall did not kill Murtogh _Mordha_, but the waters boiled and
rose to meet him, and held him up on their tossing currents as he swam
forward, and marked with a pallid breadth of foam his path out to sea,
farther and farther out, till the mists hid him from human view.
The wailing song of Owny Hea rose through the wet air above the keening
of the women in the bawn. But louder still was the voice of the lad who
wore his father's ring, and drew now from beneath his mantle his
father's sword.
'I am Donogh son of Murtogh _Mordha_!' he shouted, 'and I am Lord in
Dunlogher, and when I am of my full strength I will kill the King of
Spain, and give his castles and all his lands and herds and women to you
for your own!'
The three towers of Dunlogher are broken, and the witch has fled from
its grey lake, and no man knows where the bones of its forgotten sept
are buried. But the evil currents will never tire of writhing, and the
shadows which are no shadows are forever changing, in the Path of Murty
the Proud.
THE ROLL-CALL OF THE REEF
BY Q
THE ROLL-CALL OF THE REEF.
'Yes, sir,' said my host the quarryman, reaching down the relics from
their hook in the wall over the chimney-piece; 'they've hung here all my
time, and most of my father's. The women won't touch 'em; they're afraid
of the story. So here they'll dangle, and gather dust and smoke, till
another tenant comes and tosses 'em out o' doors for rubbish. Whew! 'tis
coarse weather.'
He went to the door, opened it, and stood studying the gale that beat
upon his cottage-front, straight from the Manacle Reef. The rain drove
past him into the kitchen, aslant like threads of gold silk in the shine
of the wreck-wood fire. Meanwhile, by the same firelight, I examined the
relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge.
But the trumpet was evidently an old cavalry trumpet, and the threads of
its parti-coloured sling, though frayed and dusty, still hung together.
Around the side-drum, beneath its cracked brown varnish, I could hardly
trace a royal coat-of-arms and a legend running--_Per Mare Per
Terram_--the motto of the Marines. Its parchment, though coloured and
scented with wood-smoke, was limp and mildewed; and I began to tighten
up the straps--under which the drumsticks had been loosely thrust--with
the idle purpose of trying if some music might be got out of the old
drum yet.
But as I turned it on my knee, I found the drum attached to the
trumpet-sling by a curious barrel-shaped padlock, and paused to examine
this. The body of the lock was composed of half-a-dozen brass rings, set
accurately edge to edge; and, rubbing the brass with my thumb, I saw
that each of the six had a series of letters engraved around it.
I knew the trick of it, I thought. Here was one of those word padlocks,
once so common; only to be opened by getting the rings to spell a
certain word, which the dealer confides to you.
My host shut and barred the door, and came back to the hearth.
''T was just such a wind--east by south--that brought in what you've got
between your hands. Back in the year 'nine, it was; my father has told
me the tale a score o' times. You're twisting round the rings, I see.
But you'll never guess the word. Parson Kendall, he made the word, and
locked down a couple o' ghosts in their graves with it; and when his
time came, he went to his own grave and took the word with him.'
'Whose ghosts, Matthew?'
'You want the story, I see, sir. My father could tell it better than I
can. He was a young man in the year 'nine, unmarried at the time, and
living in this very cottage, just as I be. That's how he came to get
mixed up with the tale.'
He took a chair, lit a short pipe, and went on, with his eyes fixed on
the dancing violet flames:--
'Yes, he'd ha' been about thirty years old in January, of the year
'nine. The storm got up in the night o' the twenty-first o' that month.
My father was dressed and out, long before daylight; he never was one to
'bide in bed, let be that the gale by this time was pretty near lifting
the thatch over his head. Besides which, he'd fenced a small 'taty-patch
that winter, down by Lowland Point, and he wanted to see if it stood the
night's work. He took the path across Gunner's Meadow--where they buried
most of the bodies afterwards. The wind was right in his teeth at the
time, and once on the way (he's told me this often) a great strip of
ore-weed came flying through the darkness and fetched him a slap on the
cheek like a cold hand. But he made shift pretty well till he got to
Lowland, and then had to drop upon hands and knees and crawl, digging
his fingers every now and then into the shingle to hold on, for he
declared to me that the stones, some of them as big as a man's head,
kept rolling and driving past till it seemed the whole foreshore was
moving westward under him. The fence was gone, of course: not a stick
left to show where it stood; so that, when first he came to the place,
he thought he must have missed his bearings. My father, sir, was a very
religious man; and if he reckoned the end of the world was at
hand--there in the great wind and night, among the moving stones--you
may believe he was certain of it when he heard a gun fired, and, with
the same, saw a flame shoot up out of the darkness to windward, making a
sudden fierce light in all the place about. All he could find to think
or say was, "The Second Coming--The Second Coming! The Bridegroom
cometh, and the wicked He will toss like a ball into a large country!"
and being already upon his knees, he just bowed his head and 'bided,
saying this over and over.