The young man from Houghton County, strolling along behind these
three men, all so busily occupied with one another, had, of a sudden,
conceived the notion of dropping silently out of the party.
He had put the idea into execution and was secure from observation on
the farther side of the ditch, before the question of what he should do
next shaped itself in his mind. Indeed, it was not until he had made his
way to the little old-fashioned pier and come to an enforced halt among
the empty barrels, drying nets and general marine odds and ends which
littered the landing-stage, that he knew what purpose had brought him
hither.
But he perceived it now with great clearness. What other purpose, in
truth, did existence itself contain for him?
“I want to be rowed over at once to that vessel there,” he called out to
John Pat, who made one of a group of Muirisc men, in white jackets and
soft black hats, standing beneath him on the steps. As he descended and
took his seat in one of the waiting dingeys, he noted other clusters of
villagers along the shore, all concentrating an eager interest upon the
yawl-rigged craft which lay at anchor in the harbor. They pointed to
it incessant as they talked, and others could be seen running forward
across the green to join them. He had never supposed Muirisc capable of
such a display of animation.
“The people seem tickled to death to get The O’Mahony back again,” he
remarked to John Pat, as they shot out under the first long sweep of the
oars.
“They are, sir,” was the stolid response.
“Did your brother come back with him--that one-armed man who went after
him--Malachy, I think they called him?”
“He did, sur,” said Pat, simply.
“Well”--Bernard bent forward impatiently--“tell me about it! Where did
he find him? What do people say?”
“They do be saying manny things,” responded the oarsman, rounding his
shoulders to the work.
Bernard abandoned the inquiry, with a grunt of discouragement, and
contented himself perforce by watching the way in which the strange
craft waxed steadily in size as they sped toward her. In a minute or two
more, he was alongside and clambering up a rope-ladder, which dangled
its ends in the gently heaving water.
Save for a couple of obviously foreign sailors lolling in the sunshine
upon a sail in the bows, there was no one on deck. As he looked about,
however, in speculation, the apparition of a broad, black hat, with
long, curled plumes, rose above the companionway. He welcomed it with an
exclamation of delight, and ran forward with outstretched hands.
The wearer of the hat, as she stepped upon the deck and confronted this
demonstration, confessed to surprise by stopping short and lifting her
black brows in inquiry. Bernard sheepishly let his hands fall to his
side before the cool glance with which she regarded him.
“Is it viewing the vessel you are?” she asked. “Her jigger lug-sail is
unusual, I’m told.”
The young man’s blue eyes glistened in reproachful appeal.
“What do I know about lugger jig-sails, or care, either,” he asked. “I
hurried here the moment I heard, to--to see _you!_”
“’T is flattered I am, I’m sure,” said Kate, dryly, looking away from
him to the brown cliffs beyond.
“Come, be fair!” Bernard pleaded. “Tell me what the matter is. I thought
I had every reason to suppose you’d be glad to see me. It’s plain enough
that you are not; but you--you _might_ tell me why. Or no,” he went on,
with a sudden change of tone, “I won’t ask you. It’s your own affair,
after all. Only you’ll excuse the way I rushed up to you. I’d had
my head full of your affairs for days past, and then your
disappearance--they thought you were drowned, you know--and I--I--”
The young man broke off with weak inconclusiveness, and turned as if to
descend the ladder again. But John Pat had rowed away with the boat, and
he looked blankly down upon the clear water instead.
Kate’s voice sounded with a mellower tone behind him.
“I wouldn’t have ye go in anger,” she said.
Bernard wheeled around in a flash.
“Anger!” he cried, with a radiant smile chasing all the shadows from his
face. “Why, how on earth _could_ I be angry with _you?_ No; but I was
going away most mightily down in the mouth, though--that is,” he added,
with a rueful kind of grin, “if my boat hadn’t gone off without me. But,
honestly, now, when I drove in here this morning from Skibbereen,
I felt like a victorious general coming home from the wars. I’d done
everything I wanted to do. I had the convent business blocked, and I had
O’Daly on the hip; and I said to myself, as we drove along: ‘She’ll
be glad to see me.’ I kept saying that all the while, straight from
Skibbereen to Muirisc. Well, then--you can guess for yourself--it was
like tumbling backward into seven hundred feet of ice-water!”
Kate’s face had gradually lost its implacable rigidity, and softened now
for an instant into almost a smile.
“So much else has happened since that drive of yours,” she said gently.
“And what were ye doing at Skibbereen?”
“Well, you’ll open _your_ eyes!” predicted Bernard, all animation once
again; and then he related the details of his journey to Skibbereen and
Cashel, of his interviews with the prelates and of the manner in which
he had, so to speak, wound up the career of the convent of the Hostage’s
Tears. “It hadn’t had any real, rightdown legitimate title to existence,
you know,” he concluded, “these last five hundred years. All it needed
was somebody to call attention to this fact, you see, and, bang, the
whole thing collapsed like a circus-tent in a cyclone!”
The girl had moved over to the gunwale, and now leaning over the rail,
looked meditatively into the water below.
“And so,” she said, with a pensive note in her voice, “there’s an end
to the historic convent of the O’Mahonys! No other family in Ireland
had one--’t was the last glory of our poor, hunted and plundered and
poverty-striken race; and now even that must depart from us.”
“Well--hang it all!” remonstrated Bernard--“it’s better that way than
to have _you_ locked up all your life. I feel a little blue myself about
closing up the old convent, but there’s something else I feel a thousand
times more strongly about still.”
“Yes--isn’t it wonderful?--the return of The O’Mahony!” said Kate. “Oh,
I hardly know still if I’m waking or not. ’T was all like a blessid
vision, and ’t _was_ supernatural in its way; I’ll never believe
otherwise. There was I on the strand yonder, with the talisman he’d
given me in me arms, praying for his return--and, behold you there was
this boat of his forninst me! Oh! Never tell me the age of miracles is
past?”
“I won’t--I promise you!” said Bernard, with fervor. “I’ve seen one
myself since I’ve been here. It was at the Three Castles. I had my gun
raised to shoot a heron, when an enchanted fairy--”
“Nothing to do but he’d bring me on board,” Kate put in, hastily. “Old
Murphy swam out to him ahead of us, screaming wid delight like one
possessed. And we sat and talked for hours--he telling strange stories
of the war’s he’d been in wid the French, and thin wid Don Carlos,
and thin the Turks, and thin wid some outlandish people in a Turkish
province--until night fell, and he wint ashore. And whin he came back he
brought O’Daly wid him--where in the Lord’s name he found him passes my
understanding, and thin we up sail and beat down till we stood off
Three Castle Head. There we lay all night--O’Mahony gave up his cabin
to me--and this morning back we came again. And now--the Lord be
praised!--there’s an ind to all our throubles!”
“Well,” said Bernard, with deliberation, “I’m glad. I really _am_ glad.
Although, of course, it’s plain enough to see, there’s an end to me,
too.”
A brief time of silence passed, as the two, leaning side by side on the
rail, watched the slow rise and sinking of the dull-green wavelets.
“You’re off to Ameriky, thin?” Kate finally asked, without looking up.
The young man hesitated.
“I don’t know yet,” he said, slowly. “I’ve got a curious hand dealt out
to me. I hardly know how to play it. One thing is sure, though: hearts
are trumps.”
He tried to catch her glance, but she kept her eyes resolutely bent upon
the water.
“You know what I want to say,” he went on, moving his arm upon the rail
till there was the least small fluttering suggestion of contact with
hers. “It must have said itself to you that day upon the mountain-top,
or, for that matter, why, that very first time I saw you I went away
head over heels in love. I tell you, candidly, I haven’t thought or
dreamed for a minute of anything else from that blessed day. It’s all
been fairyland to me ever since. I’ve been so happy! May I stay in
fairyland, Kate?”
She made no answer. Bernard felt her arm tremble against his for an
instant before it was withdrawn. He noted, too, the bright carmine flush
spring to her cheek, overmantle her dark face and then fade away before
an advancing pallor. A tear glittered among her downcast lashes.
“You mustn’t deny me _my_ age of miracles!” he murmuringly pleaded. “It
_was_ a miracle that we should have met as we did; that I should have
found you afterward as I did; that I should have turned up just when
you needed help the most; that the stray discovery of an old mediæval
parchment should have given me the hint what to do. Oh, don’t _you_ feel
it, Kate? Don’t _you_ realize, too, dear, that there was fate in it all?
That we belonged from the beginning to each other?”
Very white-faced and grave, Kate lifted herself erect and looked at him.
It was with an obvious effort that she forced herself to speak, but her
words were firm enough and her glance did not waver.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “_your_ miracle has a trick in it. Even if
’t would have pleased me to believe in it, how can I, whin ’t is
founded on desate.”
Bernard stared at her in round-eyed wonderment.
“How ‘deceit’?” he stammered. “How do you mean? Is it about kidnapping
O’Daly? We only did that--”
“No, ’t is _this_,” said Kate--“we ‘ll be open with each other, and
it’s a grief to me to say it to you, whom I have liked so much, but you
‘re no O’Ma-hony at all.”
The young man with difficulty grasped her meaning.
“Well, if you remember, I never said I knew my father was one of _the_
O’Mahonys, you know. All I said was that he came from somewhere in
County Cork. Surely, there was no deceit in that.”
She shook her head.
“No; what ye said was that your name was O’Mahony.”
“Well, so it is. Good heavens! _That_ isn’t disputed, is it?”
“And you said, moreover,” she continued, gravely, “that your father knew
_our_ O’Mahony as well almost as he knew himsilf.”
“Oh-h!” exclaimed Bernard, and fell thereupon into confused rumination
upon many thoughts which till then had been curiously subordinated in
his mind.
“And, now,” Kate went on, with a sigh, “whin I mintion this to The
O’Mahony himself, he says he never in his life knew any one of your
father’s name. O’Daly was witness to it as well.”
Bernard had his elbows once more on the rail. He pushed his chin hard
against his upturned palms and stared at the skyline, thinking as he had
never been forced to think before.
“Surely there was no need for the--the misstatement,” said Kate, in
mournful recognition of what she took to be his dumb self-reproach. “See
now how useless it was--and a thousand times worse than useless! See how
it prevints me now from respecting you and being properly grateful to
you for what you’ve done on me behalf, and--and--”
She broke off suddenly. To her consternation she had discovered that
the young man, so far from being stricken speechless in contrition, was
grinning gayly at the distant landscape.
Turning with abruptness she walked indignantly aft. Cormac O’Daly
had come up from below, and stood wistfully gazing landward over the
taffrail. She joined him, and stood at his side flushed and wrathful.
Bernard was not wholly able to chase the smile from his face as he rose
and sauntered over toward her. She turned her back as he approached and
tapped the deck nervously with her foot. Nothing dismayed, he addressed
himself to O’Daly, who seemed unable to decide whether also to look the
other way or not.
“Good morning, sir,” he said affably. “You’re quite a stranger, Mr.
O’Daly.”
Kate, at his first word, had walked briskly away up the deck. Cormac’s
little black eyes snapped viciously at the intruder.
“At laste I’m not such a stranger,” he retorted, “but that me thrue name
is known, an’ I’m here be the invitation of the owner.”
“I’m sorry you take things so hard, Mr. O’Daly,” said Bernard. “An easy
disposition would come very handy to you, seeing the troubles you ’ve
got to go through with yet.”
The small man gazed apprehensively at his tormentor.
“I don’t folly ye,” he stammered.
“I’m going to propose that you _shall_ follow me, sir,” replied the
young man in an authoritative tone. “I understand that in conversation
last night between your step-daughter and you and _The_--the owner of
this vessel, the question of my name was brought up, and that it was
decided that I was a fraud. Now, I’m not much given to making a fuss,
but there are some things, especially at certain times, that I can’t
stand--not for one little minute. This is one of ’em. Now I’m going to
suggest that we hail one of those boats there and go ashore at once--you
and Miss Kate and I--and clear this matter up without delay.”
“We’ll remain here till The O’Mahony returns!” said O’Daly, stiffly.
“’T was his request. ’T is no interest of mine to clear the matther
up, as you call it.”
“Well, it was no interest of mine, Mr. O’Daly,” remarked Bernard,
placidly, “to go over the mining contracts you’ve made as trustee
during the past dozen years and figure out all the various items of
the estate’s income; but I’ve done it. It makes a very curious little
balance-sheet. I had intended to fetch it down with me to-day and go
over it with you in your underground retreat.”
“In the devil’s name, who are you?” snarled Cormac, with livid face and
frightened eyes. “That’s just what I proposed we should go right and
settle. If you object, why, I shall go alone. But in that case, it may
happen that I shall have to discuss with the gentleman who has just
arrived the peculiarities of that balance-sheet I spoke of. What do you
think, eh?”
O’Daly did not hesitate.
“Sur, I’ll go wid you,” he said. “The O’Mahony has no head for figures.
’T would be flat injustice to bother him wid ’em, and he only newly
landed.” Bernard walked lightly across the deck, humming a little tune
to himself as he advanced, and baiting a short foot from where Kate
stood.
“O’Daly’s going ashore with me,” he remarked. “He dare not!” she
answered, over her shoulder. “The O’Mahony bade him stop here.”
“Well, this is more or less of a free country, and he’s changed his
mind. He’s going with me. I--I want you to come, too.”
“’Tis loikely!” she said, with a derisive sniff.
“Kate,” he said, drawing nearer to her by a step and speaking in low,
earnest tones, “I hate to plead this sort of thing; but you have nothing
but candid and straightforward friendship from me. I’ve done a trifle
of lying _for_ you, perhaps, but none _to_ you. I’ve worked for you as I
never worked for myself. I’ve run risks for you which nothing else under
the sun would have tempted me into. All that doesn’t matter. Leave that
out of the question. I did it because I love you. And for that selfsame
reason I come now and ask this favor of you. You can send me away
afterward, if you like; but you _can’t_ bear to stop here now, thinking
these things of me, and refusing to come out and learn for yourself
whether they are true or false, for that would be unfair, and it’s not
in your blood--in _our_ blood--to be that.”
The girl neither turned to him nor spoke, but he could see the outline
of her face as she bowed her head and gazed in silence at the murmuring
water; and something in this sight seemed to answer him.
He strode swiftly to the other side of the vessel, and exultantly waved
his handkerchief in signal to the boatmen on the shore.