§ 1

The worst of it all, Campbell smiled, was this: that life was so immensely healthy now, immensely peaceful, immensely sane. Here he was in the house of his fathers, built from the angle of a turret of King John's time. Here he was by the purple hills, by the purple Moyle. Five springs had come since he had given up the sea. Five times he had seen the little mountain streams swell with the import of the season, hurrying from the summit of the eagles, carrying water on nature's business. Five times had the primrose come, and the cuckoo. The faint delicate blue of early grass turned to green. The heat haze of summer on the silent glens. The Moyle thick with fish. Then autumn, a deep-bosomed grave woman moving through the reddening woods, the turf-cutters with their spades, the pillars of blue smoke from the cottages in the stilly September sky. And the three great moons of autumn, silver as sixpence. Five times the distant trumpeting of the wild swans and winter came, in great galloping winds, and sweeping sheets of sea-rain. And Moyle tossed like a giant troubled in his sleep. And on the mountain-sides the rowan stood up like a proud enemy, and the ash bent humbly, and the dwarf oak crouched under fury. And the wind whistled in the frozen reeds. And with the snow came out the hunted ones unafraid, the red fox, and the badger of dark ways, and the cantering hare.

Without, the wind might roar like cannon, and the sea rise in great engulfing waves. Within the old house with its corner dating from King John's time—so long ago!—was comfort. Here was the library where Robin More—God rest his soul!—had puzzled over the round towers of Ireland and written his monograph on the Phenician colony of the County Down, and bothered about strange quaint old things, comparing the Celtic cross to the sistrum of Egypt, and wondering whether the round towers of Ireland had aught to do with worship of the sun, and writing of Gaelic occultism to Bulwer Lytton, and dreaming of the friend of his youth, Goethe, in the dusk. And down in the gun-room were the cups of Alan Donn, cups for sailing and cups for golf, and ribbons that horses won. And in the drawing-room was the needlework of his mother, the precise beautiful broidery ... so like herself, minute, mathematical, not significant.... And in the kitchen was the red turf, and the flitches of bacon in the eaves, and the thick servant girls hustling impatiently, and the servant boys in their corduroy trousers bound with rushes at the knee ... their heavy brogues, their honest jests of Rabelais ... and in the fold the silent sheep, and great solemn cows warm in their manger....

Five years, going on six now, since he had left the sea, and invested his fortune in a Belfast shipyard, and taken over the homestead of Clan Campbell to run as it had always been run, wisely, sanely, healthily.... There were the servant boys and girls, with a comfortable roof above them. There were the cotter tenants, satisfied, certain of justice. At the shows his shorthorns took ribbons. For local charities, his duty was done.... But there was something, something lacking....

It wasn't peace. Peace he had in plenty. The spring of the heather, the tang of the sea brought peace. The bats of twilight, and the sallow branches, and the trout leaping in the river at the close of day. And the twilight itself, like some shy girl.... Out of all these came an emanation, a cradle-song, that lulled like the song of little waves.... And as for pleasure, there was pleasure in listening to the birds among the trees, to seeing the stooking of barley, to watching the blue banner of the flax, to walking on frosty roads on great nights of stars.... To riding with the hunt, clumsily, as a sailor does, but getting in at the death, as pleased as the huntsman, or the master himself.... To the whir of the reel as the great blue salmon rushed ... Pleasure, and peace, and yet not satisfaction.

He thought, for a while, that what he missed was the ships, and that, subconsciously, there was some nostalgia for the sea on him. He had gone to Belfast thinking that with live timbers beneath his feet, the—the vacuum within him would be filled, but the thought of a ship somehow, when he was there, failed to exalt him. He loved them always, the long live ships, the canvas white as a gull, the delicacy of spars—all the beautiful economy.... But to command one again, to go about the world, aimlessly but for the bartering of cargo, and to return at the voyage's end, with a sum of money—no! no! not enough!

And so he came back to the peace and pleasure of the glens, the purple heather, and the red berries, the chink of pebbles on the strand. To the hunts on frosty mornings, to the salmon-fishing, to the showing of cattle. To peace: to pleasure....

And he suddenly asked himself what had he done to deserve this peace, these pleasant days? What right had he to them? What had he given to life, what achieved for the world, that he should have sanctuary?

The answer put him in a shiver of panic. Nothing!

He had no right, no title to it. Here he was drawing on to fifty, close on forty-eight; and he had done, achieved, nothing. He had no wife, no child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not—not even—not even a little song.

§ 2

Strange thing—it hadn't occurred to him at first; but it did now when he thought over it in the winter evenings—was this: that Alan Donn Campbell, for all that he was dead these six years and more, existed still, was bigger now than he had ever been in life....

Because Shane had hated to see the fine boat drawn up, he had put Righ nam Bradan, the Salmon King, Alan Donn's great thirty-footer, into commission, and raced her at Ballycastle and Kingstown, losing both times. He had ascribed it to sailing luck, the dying of a breeze, the setting of a tide, a lucky tack of an opposing boat. But at Cowes he should have won. Everything was with him. He came in fifth.

"I can't understand," he told one of Alan's old crew.

"Man," the Antrim sailor told him bluntly, "ye have na' the gift."

"But, Feardoracha, I'm a sailor."

"Aye, Shane Campbell, you're that. For five times seven years you've sailed the seven seas. But for racing ye have na' the gift. Alan Donn had it. And 'twas Alan Donn had the gift for the golf, and the gift for the horses. Just the gift. You must not blame yourself, Shane na fairrge, there's few Alan Donns."

And thinking to himself in the lamp-lit room, Shane found what the old man meant. Beneath the bronzed face, the roaring manner of Alan Donn, there was a secret of alchemy. Rhythm, and concentration like white fire. To the most acute tick of the stars he could get a boat over the line with the gun. Something told him where breezes were. By will-power he forced out the knowledge of a better tack. As to horses, where was his equal at putting one over a jump? At the exact hair's-breadth of time, he had changed from human being to spirit. It was no longer Alan Donn and his horse when he dropped his hands on the neck. There was fusion. A centaur sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with matter.... And Alan Donn was dead six years ... and yet he lived....

He lived because he had been of great use. He was a standard, a great ideal. Children who had seen him would remember him forever, and seek to emulate the fire and strength of him, having him to measure by as the mariner has the star.... In foreign countries they would tell tales of him: There was once a great sportsman in the North of Ireland, Alan Donn Campbell by name....

His father, too, who had been dead so long—mortality had not conquered him. Once in Ballycastle Shane had seen a shawled girl look out to sea with great staring eyes and a wry mouth, and, half whispered, staccato, not quite sung, her fingers twisting her shawl, came a song from her white mouth:

Tiocfaidh an samhradh agas fasfaidh an fear;
Agas tiocfaidh an duilleabhar glas do bharr nan gcraobh.
Tiocfaidh mo chead gradhle banaghadh an lae,
Agas bvailfidh se port ciuin le cumhaidh 'mo dhiaidh.
The summer will come, and the little grass will grow;
And there will come a green thickness to the tops of the trees.
And my hundred loves will arise with the dawning of the day,
And he will strike a soft tune out of loneliness after me.

A queer stitch came in Shane's heart—a song his father made! And following the stitch came a surge of pride. Those songs of his father! The light minor he had heard, and the others—the surge of An Oig-bhean Ruaddh, the Pretty Red Maiden:

"Se, do bheatha is an tir seo".... A welcome before you into this country, O sea-gull more lovely than the queen, than the woman of the West, whom Naesi, son of Usnach, held in the harbor. I could destroy all Ireland, as far as the Southern sea, but in the end I would be destroyed myself, when my eyes would alight on the white swan with the golden crown....

Or the despairing cry of his poem Ig Cathair nan g Ceo: "In the City of the Fogs"—he meant London—

"A athair nan gras tabhair spas o'n eag domh—O Father of the Graces, give me a little respite from death. Let the ax not yet strike my forehead, the way a goat or a pig or a sheep is slain, until I make my humility and my last repentance."

Shane wished to God he had known his father, that the man had been spared a little until he could have loved him.... He had the only picture of him left.... Great throat and pale, liquor-harried face, burning eyes, and black tossing hair.... The bald-headed bankers might shake their heads and say: He was no good ... he was a rake ... he drank ... his relations with women were not reputable.... And old maids purse their thin-blooded lips.... But when the little money of the bankers was scattered through the world, and even their little chapels had forgotten them, and the stiff bones of old maids were crumbling into an unnecessary dust, his father's songs would be sung in Ireland, in Man, in the Scottish Highlands, in the battered Hebrides. So long as sweet Gaelic was spoken and men's hearts surged with feeling, there would be a song of his father's to translate the effervescence into words of cadenced beauty.... He had an irreverent vision of God smiling and talking comfortably to his father while the bald-headed bankers cooled their fat heels and glared at one another outside the picket-gates of heaven.... The world had gained something with the last Gaelic bard....

And he had found out, too, that his other uncle, Robin More, had a great importance in a certain circle. In Dublin he met an old professor, a Jesuit priest, who seemed intensely excited that a nephew of Robin More Campbell's should be present.

"Do you know, by any chance, what your uncle was working on when he died?"

"I'm afraid I do not, sir."

"You know his manuscripts."

"Just casually, sentimentally."

"You don't know much about your uncle's work, then?"

"Not very much."

"Did you know," the old priest said—and his urbanity disappeared; there was pique in his tones—"that your uncle was the man who definitely decided for us that the Highlanders of Scotland migrated from Ireland to Scotland? Did you know that?"

"No, sir, I did not."

"I don't suppose," the old man was sarcastic, "that seems important to you."

"To confess, Dr. Hegan, it does not. Is it?"

"My child," the old priest smiled—it was so queer to be called "my child" at forty-seven—"all knowledge is important. All details of knowledge. We come we know not whence, and we go we hope we know whither. Our history, our motives, our all, is vague. All we have is faith, a great broad river, but knowledge is the little piers ..."

They had all been significant: Alan Donn, his father, even Uncle Robin, whom he had thought only a bookworm in the fading sunshine. The world was better, more mature, for their having lived....

And he had nothing. Here he was, drawing on to fifty, close on forty-eight. And he had done, achieved nothing. He had no wife, no child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not—not even—not even a little song....

§ 3

And then he said to himself: "I am too sensitive. I have always been too sensitive. The stature of my family has dwarfed me in my own esteem. Haven't I got as much right as others to the quiet of the glens?" And again he said: "I sit here and I think. And my thought grows into a maze. And I wander in it, as a man might wander through some old gardener's fancy, having stumbled on it inadvertently, and now being in it, now knowing the secret of exit." But a maze was nonexistent, did a person regard it so, and if one were to walk on nonchalantly a little turn would come, and he find himself in the wide sunshine and smiling flowers. And he said: "Damn the subtleties! A person is born, lives, dies. And what he does is a matter for himself alone." But some inner antagonist said: "You are wrong."

And he said: "Look at the people around me. What more right have they than I to this quiet Ulster dusk?" And the antagonist smiled: "Well, look."

First were the farmers and the fisherfolk. Well, they didn't count. They were natural to the soil, as grass was. They grew there, as the white bog flower grew. An institution of God, like rain. And then there were the summer visitors, honest folk from the cities. Well, they had a right. They spent their winters and autumns and springs in mills and counting-houses, clearing away the commercial garbage of the world. And when the graciousness of summer came, they emerged, blind as moles, peak-faced. And before them stretched the Moyle, a blue miracle. The crisp heather, the thick rushes, the yellow of the buttercups, the black bog waters. And when clouds came before the sun the mountains drew great purple cloths over them. And in the twilight the cricket chirruped. And at night the plover cried out against the vast silence of the moon. And the hearts of the selling people turned from thoughts of who owed them money and who was harrying them for money. And the tight souls opened, just a little perhaps, but even that—Poor garbage men of the world, who would begrudge them a little beauty?

Then there were the country people, the landlords, the owners of the soil. Red-faced, sportsmen, connoisseurs of cattle, a sort of super-farmer, they were as natural to the soil as the fisherfolk or the tillers. Their stock remained from ancient tides of battle, centuries before. The founders of the families had been Norman barons, Highland chiefs, English squires; but the blood had adapted itself, as a plant adapts itself in a strange country. And now they were Ulster squires. Smiling, shy, independent. They had a great feeling for a horse, and a powerful sense of fair play. They were very honest folk. A station had been set them and they lived in it, honestly, uncomplainingly, quite happily. But a meadow was a piece of land to them and a river a place where trout could be caught, and snow was a good thing, because it kept the ground warm. They were a folk whom Shane respected a great deal, and who respected him—but they weren't his folk.

Above all these of his neighbors towered three figures, and the first of these was the admiral.

He had a name. He had a title, too—Baron Fraser of Onabega. But to everybody he was the admiral, and in speech plain "sir." A purple-faced and terrible old man, with bushy white eyebrows and eagle's eyes. Very tall, four inches over six feet, very erect for all his ninety years, with his presence there thundered the guns of Drake, there came to the mind the slash of old Benbow.... He had been a midshipman with Nelson at Cape Trafalgar.

Silent and fierce, about his head clouds of majesty, all his life had been spent with pursed lips and hooded eyes, keeping watch for England ... And never a great battle where he could prove himself the peer of Benbow and Drake and Nelson ... Never a dawn when the fleet rolled down to battle with polished guns and whipping flags ... And a day came when he was too old ... So here he was in the Antrim glens ...

A great life, his, a great and serviceable life, frustrated of glory ... And well he deserved the quiet of Ulster, where he sat and wrote his long letters to archÆological papers, proving, he thought, that the Irish were a lost tribe of Israel and that the Ark of the Covenant was buried on Tara Hill ... And there were none to laugh at him ... All spirit he was; watchful, dogged, indomitable spirit with a little husk of body ... Soon, as he had directed, his old bearded sailormen would take his flag-covered casket out to sea in the night, and the guns would thunder: A British admiral sails by ...

And there was Simon Fowler in his little cottage, who was dying by inches from some tropical malady ... A small chunky man with white hair and wide blue eyes ... He had been a missionary in Africa, in China, in India—not the missionary of sentimental books, but a prophet whose calm voice, whose intrepid eyes, had gained him a hearing everywhere ... "Put fear away," he had preached in Africa; "let darkness flee. I come to tell of the light of the world ... After me will come the sellers of gin and of guns. But I shall give you a great magic against them ... Little children love one another ..." In China his fire had shamed philosophers: "I know your alms-giving. I know your benevolence. It is selfishness. Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Unless ye become as little children ..." And in the sensuous Indian lands, his voice rose in a great shout: "Subtle Greece is dead," he proclaimed, "and razed are the fanes of Ephesus. And the Unknown God slinks only through the midnight streets ..." "Blessed are the pure in heart ..." He had gone like a flame through the pagan places of the world, and here he was dying in the Antrim glens, with the quiet of Christ about him, the droning of God's little bees, and the lowing of the cattle of Bethlehem ... He was a great man. He had only one contempt: for hired clergymen.

There were three folk of heroic stature around him: the admiral, and Simon Fowler, and the woman of Tusa hErin.

§4

A very small townland is Tusa hErin, the smallest in Ireland, it is said. And a very strange name on it: Tusa hErin, the beginning of Ireland. Why it is so called, none know. Possibly because some Highlanders named it this on landing there. Probably because it was a division between the Scottish and Irish clans. So it was called when the Bruce fled to Ireland. So it is called to this day.

Twenty acres or so are in it—a wind and sea lashed little estate, a great gray house and a garden of yew-trees. For ten years it had been untenanted, until a Miss O'Malley had bought it, and opened the great oak doors, and let the sea-air blow through the windows of it, and clipped the garden of the yews. The country people knew little of her, except that she had a great reserve. To the glensmen she was Bean Tusig Erin, the woman of Tusa hErin.

"What kind of a person is she?" Shane asked.

"A strange woman is in it, your Honor; a strange and dark woman."

"An old lady?"

"If she was one of us, she would be an old woman, your Honor, what with the bitter work and the hard ways. But being what she is, she is a young woman, your Honor. I heard tell she said she was thirty-four."

"Is she good-looking?"

"Well, now, your Honor, that would surely be a hard thing to say. A great dark face she has on her, and her head high, the like of a grand horse. Barring her eyes, you might call her a fine woman."

"What's wrong with her eyes?"

"Hard eyes she has, your Honor, hating eyes. She's always looking at you to see if it is an enemy is in it. A queer woman, your Honor; the like of her was never known."

"But how?"

"The talk that's at her, your Honor. The great hatred she bes having of England, and the talk of old Irish times."

"And she a lady?"

"You'd think it was a queen was in it, with the high head of her, and the proud step of a racing horse. You would, your Honor, you would so."

He asked the admiral about her.

"Do you know this Miss O'Malley, sir, of Tusa hErin?"

"I had the honor to meet her twice, Campbell. A very great woman. A great loss, Campbell, a great loss."

"Who is she, sir?"

"Good God! Do you mean to tell me you don't know who Grace O'Malley is?"

"No, sir, I don't."

"One of the greatest Shaksperian actresses, possibly, the English stage ever knew—and you never heard of her. Good God! How abominably ignorant you merchant marine men are!"

"Abominably so, sir ... But please tell me, sir, why does she hate England so much?"

"Oh, these geniuses, Campbell! They must hate something, or love something to excess ... Depths of feeling, I suppose ... Campbell, do you know anything about Ogham writing?"

"Only that it's straight lines on the corners of stones, sir!"

"Well, now, I think I've discovered something important, most terribly important ... You may have heard of the Babylonian cuneiform script ..." and the old gentleman was off full gallop on his hobby ...

From Simon Fowler he extracted a little more information.

"Fowler, do you know Miss O'Malley of Tusa hErin?"

"I do, poor lady."

"Why poor lady?"

"Wouldn't you call any one poor lady who had just been widowed, then lost her two children? Poor lady, I wish I could say something to comfort her."

"You! Fowler! You couldn't say anything?"

"The wisdom of God, Shane, is sometimes very hard to see. Our physical eyes can only see a little horizon, and yet the whole world is behind it. Miss O'Malley is not a case for any of the ministers of God ... but for Himself ..."

"You exaggerate, Fowler. Surely you are wrong ... They say she is young and proud and beautiful."

"I don't know. I never noticed ... She may be young and proud and beautiful ... I only thought of the dark harassed thing—inside all the youth and pride and beauty ..."

§5

He met her for the first time at a neighboring fair ...

Eleven on a hot June morning, and the little town was crowded, like some old-time immigrant ship. Women in plaid shawls and frilled caps, men in somber black as befitted a monthly occasion. Squawking of ducks and hens, trudging of donkeys, creaking of carts, unbelievably stubborn bullocks and heifers being whacked by ash-plants, colts frisking. Girls with baskets of eggs and butter; great carts of hay and straw. Apple-women with bonnets of cabbage-leaves against the sun. Herring-men bawling like auctioneers. Squealing of young pigs. An old clothes dealer hoarse with effort. A ballad singer split the air with an English translation of Bean an Fhir Ruaidh, "The Red-haired Man's Wife."

Ye Muses Nine,
Combine, and lend me your aid,
Until I raise
the praise of a beautiful maid—

The crash of a drover driving home a bargain:

"Hold out your hand now, by God! till I be after making you an offer. Seven pound ten, now. Hell to my soul if I give you another ha' penny. Wait now. I 'll make it seven pound fifteen."

"Is it insulting the fine decent beast you are?"

"Eight pounds five and ten shillings back for a luck-penny?"

"Is it crazy you've gone all of a sudden, dealing man. If the gentle creature was in Dublin town, sure they'd be hanging blue ribbons around her neck until she wilted with the weight of them."

"It's hanging their hats on the bones of her they'd be, and them sticking out the like of branches from a bush."

"Yerra Jasus! Do you hear the man, and her round as a bottle from the fine filling feeding. You could walk your shin-bones off to the knee, and you'd not find a cow as has had the treatment of this cow. Let you be on our way now."

"Look, honest man. Put out your hand, and wait till I spit on my fist—"

Through the doors of Michael Doyle's public house a young farmer walked uncertainly. He gently swung a woman's woolen stocking in his right hand, and in the foot of the stocking was a large round stone:

"I am young Packy McGee of Ballymoyle," he announced, "the son of old Packy McGee of Ballymoyle, a great man in his day, but never the equal of young Packy McGee. I have gone through Scotland and Ireland, Wales, the harvest fields of England, and I have never yet found the equal for murder and riot of young Packy McGee. I am young Packy McGee. I am young Packy McGee of Ballymore, and I don't care who knows it. Is there any decent man in this fair that considers himself the equal of young Packy McGee?" And he walked through the fair, chanting his litany and gently swinging the woman's woolen stocking with the large round stone in the foot of it ...

The penny poet changed from the high grace notes of "The Red-Haired Man's Wife" to the surge of a come-all-ye. There was the undercurrent of a pipe drone to his voice:

Fare-you-well, Enniskillen, fare-you-well for a while,
All round the borders of Erin's green isle
And when the war 's over return I shall soon,
And your arms will be o-o-open for your Enniskillen Dragoon.

In the intervals between verses a black-bearded man with blue spectacles announced solemnly that he was Professor Handley direct from English and German universities, empowered by the Rosicrucian order to distribute a remarkable panacea at the nominal sum of sixpence a bottle ...

Forests of cows' horns and drovers' sticks, clamor of frightened cattle, emphatic slapping of palms. Clouds of dust where the horse fair was carried on. Stands of fruit and cakes. Stalls of religious ornaments, prayer-books, and rosary beads ... A shooting gallery ... A three-card trickster, white and pimpled of face ... A trick-of-the-loop man, with soap-box and greasy string ... A man who sold a gold watch, a sovereign, and some silver for the sum of fifteen shillings ... An old man with the Irish bagpipes, bellows strapped to arm, playing "The Birds Among the Trees," "The Swallow-tail Coat," "The Green Fields of America" ... small boys regarding him curiously ... later young farmers and girls would be dancing sets to his piping ... At the end of the street a ballad-monger declaiming, not singing—his head thrown back, his voice issuing in a measured chant ... "The Lament for the Earl of Lucan":

Patrick Sarsfield, Ireland's wonder!
Fought in the field like bolts of thunder!
One of Ireland's best commanders!
Now is food for the crows of Flanders!
Och! Ochone!

A knot of older people had gathered around him, white-headed farmers, bent turf-cutters of the glens, a girl-child with eyes like saucers. A priest stopped to listen ... The crude English of the ballad faded out, until there was nothing but disheveled agony ... rhythm ... a wail ... Somewhere a leaping current of feeling ... There was a woman on the edge of the crowd, a lady ... She came nearer, as though hypnotized ...

The country bard stopped suddenly, exalted, and swung dramatically into Gaelic ... Dropping the alien tongue he seemed to have dropped fetters.... His voice rose to a pÆan ... he took on stature ... he looked straight in the eye of the sun ... And for Shane the clamor of the drovers ceased ... And there was the plucked note of harpers ... And fires of ancient oak ... and wolf-dogs sleeping on skins of elk ... And there was a wasted place in the twilight, and grass through a split hearthstone ... And a warrior-poet, beaten, thinking bitter under the stars ...

Do threasgar an saoghal agas do thainic an gaoth mar smal—;
Alastrom, CÆsar, 's an mead do bhi da bpairt;
Ta an Teamhair na fear agas feach an Traoi mar ta!
'S na Sasanaigh fein, do b' fheidir go bhfaigh dis bas!

A voice spoke excitedly, imperiously to Shane:

"What is he saying? Do you know Gaelic?"

"I'm afraid I've forgotten my Gaelic, but I know this song."

"Then what is it? Please tell me. I must know."

"He says:

"The world conquers them all. The wind whirls like dust.
Alexander, CÆsar, and the companies whom they led.
Tara is grass, and see how Troy is now!
And the English themselves, even they may die."

"How great!" she said. "How very great!" She turned to Shane, and as he saw the dark imperious face, he knew intuitively he was speaking to the Woman of Tusa hErin. She seemed puzzled for an instant. Something in Shane's clothes, his carriage ...

"You don't look as if you understood Gaelic? How is it you can translate this poem?"

"I knew it as a boy. My father was a Gaelic poet."

"Then you are Shane Campbell."

"And you are the woman of Tusa hErin!"

"You know Tusa hErin?"

"I know every blade of grass in the glens."

"If you are ever near Tusa hErin, come and see me."

"I should like to."

"Will you really?"

"Yes."

She left him as abruptly as she spoke to him, going over to the ballad-monger. She left him a little dazed ... He was aware of vitality ... He was like a man on a wintry day who experiences a sudden shaft of warm sun, or somebody in quiet darkness whose eye is caught by the rising of the moon.

§ 6

As in a story from some old unsubtle book, in passing the gates of Tusa hErin, he had gone into another world, a grave and courteous world, not antique—that was not the word, but just older ... A change of tempo ... A change of atmosphere ... The Bois Dormant, the Sleeping Wood of the French fairy-tale?... Not that, for the Sleeping Wood should be a gray wood, a wood of twilight, with the birds a-drowse in their nests ... And here were clipped rich yew-trees, and turf firm as a putting-green's, and rows of dignified flowers, like pretty gracious ladies; and a little lake where a swan moved, as to music; and the sunshine was rich as wine here ... all golden and green ... But the atmosphere? He thought of the cave of Gearod Oge, the Wizard Earl in the Rath of Mullaghmast, and the story of it ... A farmer man had noticed a light from the old fort, and creeping in he had seen men in armor sleeping with their horses beside them ... And he examined the armor and the saddlery, and cautiously half drew a sword from its sheath ... And the soldier's head rose and: "Bhfuil an trath ann?" his voice cried ... "Has the time come?" "It is not, your Honor," the farmer said in terror, and shoved the sword back and fled ... An old man said for a surety that had the farmer drawn the blade from the scabbard, the Wizard Earl would have awakened, and Ireland been free ... There was great beauty and great Irishness to that story, but there was terror to it, and there was no terror on this sweet place ...

He said: It is a trick of my head, an illusion that this is different. Some shading that comes from the yews, some phenomenon of cliff and water ... But even that did not circumscribe the rich grave look of grounds and house. A song from "The Tempest" came to him:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange ...

That was it, something rich and strange, like some old cloister into which one might turn from an inquiet and hubbubby street ... A knock at an oaken wicket; a peering shy brother, and one was on green lawns and the shadows of a gabled monastery. Cowled, meditative friars, and the quiet of Christ like spread wings ... But there was a reason for the cloister's glamour: cool thoughts and the rhythm of quiet praying, and the ringing of the little bell of mass, and the cadenced sacramental. All these were sympathetic magic ... But whence came the glamour of Tusa hErin?

§ 7

And she said: "I am glad you came. I knew somehow you would."

"I am glad, too. I knew Tusa hErin as a boy. It was then a weird old place. The yew-trees were unclipped, the turf riotous, the little lake ungraveled ... It had an eeriness. But now—it is very different."

"Any place is different for being loved, tended."

"I suppose so. One loves but one gets careless toward ... I know Antrim has always had an immense attraction for me ..."

"Antrim—alone?"

"Yes, of course, Antrim."

"Not all Ireland, then?"

"I never thought of Ireland as all Ireland."

"O Shane Campbell, you've sailed so much and seen so much—China, they tell me, and South America, and the Levant. And in the North, Archangel. I'll warrant you don't know Ireland."

"I never saw much, though, in any place outside Antrim."

"You never saw much in the little towns of the Pale, or gray Dublin, with the Parliament where Grattan spoke now a money-changer's business house, and the bulk of Trinity of Goldsmith and Burke—or the great wide streets where four-in-hands used to go. And Three-Rock Mountain. And Bray. And the beauty of the Boyne Valley. And the little safe harbors of the South. And the mountains of Kerry. And all the kingdom of Connacht. And the great winds of Donegal."

"But it's so eery, deserted, a dead country. All like Tusa hErin was before you took it."

"If one could take it all, and do to it as I've done to Tusa hErin. By the way," she asked suddenly, "is Tusa hErin haunted?"

"No, I never heard. Did you see anything?"

"I think I heard something a few times. A piper piping when the storms rose. A queer little tune—like that thing about McCrimmon."

"Cha till, cha till, cha till McCrimmon."

"Are there words to it?"

"Le cogadh mo sidhe cha till McCrimmon."
Never, never, never, will return McCrimmon.
With war or peace never will come McCrimmon.
For money or spoil never will return McCrimmon.
He will come no more till the Day of the Gathering.

"A lamenting tune like that, I heard."

"The drone was just the grinding of the waves, the air the wind among the yews."

"That's possible. But isn't a phantom piper possible, too, in a land of ghosts?"

§ 8

"A land of ghosts"; the phrase remained with him. And the lighted lamp and the burning peat fire seemed to invoke like some necromantic ritual. How often, and he a young boy, had the names trumpeted through his being. Brian Boru at Clontarf, and the routed red Danes. And with the routing of the Danes, Ireland had come to peaceful days, and gentle white-clothed saints arose and monasteries with tolling bells, and great Celtic crosses.... And gone were the Druids, their cursing stones, their Ogham script.... Gone old Celtic divinities, Angus of the Boyne, and Manannan, son of Lir, god of the sea ... and the peace of Galilee came over the joyous hunting land.... The little people of the hills, with their pygmy horses, their pygmy pipes, cowered, went into exile, under the thunder of Rome.... And the land was meek that it might inherit the kingdom of heaven.... And the English came.... The Earls of Ulster fled into Spain.... And only here and there was a memory of old-time heroes, of Cuchulain of the Red Branch; of Maeve, queen of Connacht, in her fighting chariot, her great red cloak; of Dermot, who abducted Grania from the king of Ireland's camp, and knew nine ways of throwing the spear.... The O'Neils remembered Shane, who brought Queen Elizabeth to her knees with love and terror.... And Owen Roe, the Red.... And the younger Hugh O'Neil, with his hardbitten Ulstermen at Benburb.... They had to bring the greatest general of Europe, Cromwell, the lord protector, to subdue the Ulster clans.... Sullen peace, and the Stuarts came back, and again Ireland was lulled with their suave manners, the scent of the white rose.... The crash of the Boyne Water, and King James running for his life.... And Limerick's siege, and the Treaty, and Patrick Sarsfield and the Wild Geese setting wing for France.... France knew them, Germany, Sweden, even Russia.... Ramillies and the Spaniard knew Lord Clare's Dragoons.... And Fontenoy and the thunder of the Irish Brigade.... And Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, dead at the end of the day.... Even to-day Europe knew them: O'Donnel, Duke of Tetuan and grandee of Spain; and Patrice McMahon, Duke of Magenta, who had been made president of the Republic of France—they were of the strain of Lucan's wild Geese....

And again a sullen peace, and Ulster rang to the trumpet of American freedom, and the United Irishmen arose in Belfast.... And Napper Tandy at Napoleon's court, and Hoche with his ships in Bantry Bay.... Wolfe Tone's mangled throat, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald murdered by his captors....

What had made these men, sane men—Ulstermen mostly—risk life and face death so gallantly? What brought out the men of '48 and the men of '67? What was making little Bigger fight so savagely in Parliament, blocking the legislation of the empire? What had got under their skins, into their blood? Surely not for a gray half-deserted city? Surely not for little bays and purple mountains? Surely not for an illiterate peasantry, half crazed by the fear of hell?

He tried to see Ireland as a personality, as one sees England, like the great Britannia on a copper penny, helmeted, full-breasted, great-hipped, with sword and shield, a bourgeois concept of majesty, a ponderous, self-conscious personality:

When Britain first, at Heaven's command
Arose from out the azure main,—

Just like that!

And Scotland he could see as a young woman, in kilt and plaid and Glengarry cap, a shrewd young woman though, with a very decisive personality, clinching a bargain as the best of dealers might, a little forward. He could think of her as the young girl whose hand Charles the Young Pretender kissed, and who had said to him directly: "I'd liefer hae a buss for my mou'." "I'd rather have a kiss on my mouth." Scotland knew what she wanted and got it, a pert, a solid, a likable girl.

But Ireland, Ireland of the gray mists, the gray towns. How to see her? The country ballad came to him. The "Shan Van Vocht," the poor old woman, gray, shawled, pitiable, whom her children were seeking to reinstate in her home with many fields:

And where will they have their camp?
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
And where will they have their camp?
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
In the Curragh of Klidare,
The boys will all be there.
With their pikes in good repair,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.
To the Curragh of Kildare
The boys they will repair,
And Lord Edward will be there,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.

No! Not enough. One might work, sacrifice money, for the Shan Van Vocht—but life, no! He thought again. Poor Mangan's poem flashed into his mind and heart....

O my Dark Rosaleen,
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green
They march along the deep.
There's wine from the royal pope
Upon the ocean green.
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
My dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
Shall give you health, and help, and hope,
My dark Rosaleen!

Ah, that was it! Not pity, but gallant, fiery love. Modern ideals and ancient chivalry.... A young dark woman with a quivering mouth, with eyes bright in tears.... There was an old favorite print that portrayed her, a slim wistful figure resting a pale hand on a mute harp, a great elk-hound at her feet on guard, and back of her the rising sun shone on the antique round tower.... A pretty picture, but was it enough? He tried to envisage her close, concentrated.... There the dog, there the harp, there the slim form.... But the face.... It seemed to elude him. And suddenly it flashed at him with abrupt dark beauty ... the face of the woman of Tusa hErin....

§ 9

The long Ulster twilight had set in, the twilight of bats, gray-blue, utterly peaceful ... the little chiming of the sea.... Even the wind was still.... All things drowsed, like a dog before the fire, relaxed but not asleep.... Beneath her feet the turf was firm ... beneath that the hush-een-husho of the purple Moyle.... Soon there would be a moon and her servants would saddle Shane's horse for him and he would ride home in the Antrim moonlight, eighteen miles of grim road with the friendly moon above him, and the singing Moyle on his left hand, and on his right the purple glens.... And the shadows ... the delicate tracery of the ash-tree, and the tall rowans, and the massive blue shadows of the cliffs ... a golden and silver land.... A very sweet silence had fallen between them, as if music had ceased and become restful color.... They watched the quiet swan....

"I am a little afraid to leave Tusa hErin," she said suddenly and softly, as though thinking aloud.... "I am like a nun who has been in a convent.... She is lost in the open world.... Will I ever again find a place like Tusa hErin?"

"Granya, are you selling Tusa hErin?"

"I have sold it, Shane."

"I am sorry," was all he could say. A little silence, and he could feel her smiling through the dusk.

"You never ask any questions, Shane?"

"It never occurs to me to ask them, Granya. If any one wants to tell me a thing, I know they will, and if they don't why should I intrude?"

"I should like to tell you why I sold Tusa hErin. But I cannot. It is my own secret."

He nodded in the dusk: "I understand."

She turned to him slowly. Her sweet dark head was like some fragrant shrub.... Her low soft voice had so much life to it....

"I wonder if you know what a friend you are, Shane? If you understand how peaceful it is to have you here? You are such a sweet fact, Shane, like the moon."

"I am a friend, Granya...."

"You are, yes.... And you know so little about me, Shane. And I know all about you.... I know the adventures of your youth.... And of the hard girl of Louth, and the poor harassed woman of Marseilles.... And of the little Syrian wife whom you didn't know you loved until you lost her ... and the gray voyages to the cruel country.... At times I see you like a little boy hunting the leprechawn.... And then I see your face, your eyes, and understand how you commanded men in ships.... You are like some beautiful play, Shane.... I wonder what is the ending?"

"It is already ended, Granya."

"No, Shane. I know, the end hasn't come.... I know you, Shane," she asked abruptly; "what do you know about me?"

"Nothing much, Granya, except that you are you. I heard you were a great actress ... and that you had two babies ... who died...."

"Not a great actress, Shane, a very good one, perhaps. I might have been great one day ... and again, I mighn't. I shall never know.... And I had two babies.... They were very nice little people, Shane. I was very fond of them.... But a physical life is a little thing, I have come to believe, and there is another life, a life of thought and emotion. And that one is so long.... It seems ages since I was an actress and had two pretty babies. It seems in another life.... Shane, I don't think I was alive until my babies died...."

"I don't understand, Granya."

"I mean this, Shane, that things were so casual to me. They came and they went, and I was what I was, and that was all.... When you were a boy, Shane, you had what I never had—wonder. I was the child of actors, Shane, brought up to a mechanical tradition, knowing the business thoroughly—a part was words and directions, and a salary.... That things were mimic meant nothing ... do you see? That there was a life that was unreal, and another life that was real, and then a further life, too subtle, too profound for the value of words ... one sees glimpses ... one feels ... and when you try to fix it, it eludes you. Do you understand? Like your mirage, a little.... That is only a symbol.... Am I talking nonsense, Shane? Anyway, I took things, well, just casually....

"See the moon rising, Shane?" she paused. She turned again.

"I got married, just got married; he was a good man, Shane. But I didn't love him. I loved nobody. I got married because he was a suitable and every one got married. And just the same way I accepted marriage.... And when he died, I was very sorry, but impersonally sorry ... as if something nice in the world had been gone ... a swan shot....

"And my little people, Shane, they were very nice little people.... I was fond of them, but as I might be fond of some terrier dogs.... I was good to them.... Often I sit here and wonder: Was I good enough? And, Shane, God is my witness and this garden, and the moon above, there is nothing I could give them I held back....

"You know how they died, Shane?... I was playing and my house went on fire, and the servants fled.... When I came back from the theater a policeman said: 'We got everything all right, Miss O'Malley. Your dogs, your piano.' ... 'Where did you put the babies?' I asked.... They said: 'What babies?'

"Shane, I knew after a little while that I cried too easily ... a little sweet rain of affection ... April ... I didn't forget them.... I wouldn't let myself.... And then I thought: God! if I had loved my husband my heart would have been like a cracked cup when he died.... And when my babies died, I could not have lived.... And all I shed of tears was a little shower of April.... O Shane, one isn't like that when one is hurt.... Do you remember David, Shane, when he went up to the chamber over the gate ... and as he went thus he said, 'O my son Absalom, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!' ... And he was only a man, Shane....

"Am I bothering you, Shane? No? I am just thinking aloud, with you there.... I never thought I could, with any human being....

"And then I knew, Shane.... Part of me was not alive.... That was terrible to know, like finding out a horrible deformity, or knowing you are insane.... And I began to watch people.... I could say: There is a woman who knows she is loved, Shane.... There is a radiance in her face, an indescribable something.... You remember the Bible word 'Shechinah,' the glory of the Lord!... And there were women with children ... that had lost themselves in the joy of giving ... would always have that joy of giving.... And it made me feel strange, shameful ... as though I had no breasts....

"I must have been a little insane then, Shane. I would go along the streets, looking at people, and saying: 'That person looks as if they would understand,' and thinking of stopping them with: 'Please, a moment, there is something wrong with me!' But I knew they wouldn't understand ... wouldn't believe it real.... Even if they were kind, all they would say was: 'It's all imagination ... as if imagination were not the most terrible thing in the world.... All that is wrong with the poor mad people is imagination.... Shane, I was like some poor cripple holding out his deformity to the passers-by, asking for help.... All he would want was money, but I wanted ... oh, I don't know what I wanted....

"And, then, Shane, I would go into a church, and pray, and wait, kneeling there, for something to happen.... It never happened.... Then I would laugh. People used to turn and look at me.... I began to hate them. I grew proud. I hated them more and more....

"I said I'd get back to work, and forget it all.... I was made as I was made.... Accept it.... I thought I could.... I was to play Lady Macbeth in Nottingham.

"You know how she enters, Shane. She comes in reading a letter. She is alone on the stage, in Macbeth's castle of Inverness: '"They met me in the day of success,"' she reads—Macbeth is writing of the witches in the desert place: '"and I have learned by the perfectest report, they have more in them than mortal knowledge."' I came on as I always came on.... And the moment I left the wings, Shane, saw the audience, a strange thing happened.... Illusion died, not died ... but was dead.... And there I was supposed to be reading a letter that had never been written by people who had never possibly an existence, before an audience who had paid a little money to be amused.... I couldn't read it. I just couldn't....

"Behind me in the wings they were prompting, whispering fiercely.... But I couldn't.... I stood there.... Then I said: I'll go off the stage. But I couldn't do that even.... My feet were shackled to the ground.... I seemed to have been charmed.... My hand fell to my side.... And then a panic came. My knees hit one another. My teeth chattered ... awful, awful....

"There was such a silence. The audience stirred, whispered.... Then some one laughed.... Never laugh, Shane, suddenly, with me.... I crumpled up. They rang the curtain down ... I stole away to Ireland.... Whenever I am not hating—enough, the thought of that laugh comes to me...." She shivered on her seat.

"That was only nervousness, Granya. Somebody got nervous and laughed."

"No, Shane, no."

"They talk of people laughing in the face of death. It's just a nervous action, Granya."

"I tell you, no, Shane." She grew vehement. "It's a cruel country, England. And Shane, they hate us Irish. As long as we are pleasant, witty, as long as we are buffoons ... but let us be human beings, Shane, and they hate us."

"Don't be silly, Granya!"

"I'm not silly, Shane. I know. They hate us because we have something they have not. The starved Irish peasant is higher than the English peer. He has a song in his heart, a gay song or a sad song, and his eyes see wonders...."

"But, Granya, we are only a little people, and they all but rule the world.... You are wrong. They don't hate us."

"Do you remember Haman, Shane; Haman who had everything:

"'And Haman told them of ... all the things wherein the king had promoted'; and he said: 'Yet all this availeth me nothing so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate.'"

"Shane, do you remember how Haman died?"

"Granya!"

She rose. Her hands stretched out to the Irish hills. Her voice took on the throbbing of drums:

"Oh! the Erne shall run red
With redundance of blood,
The earth shall rock beneath our tread,
And flame wrap hill and wood,
And gun-peal and slogan-cry
Make many a glen serene,
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!"

"Poor Granya!" he said. He caught and kissed her hand.

She let her other fall on his shoulder for an instant.

"Good night, Shane!" she said abruptly. She moved swiftly toward the house through the yew-trees. In her pale dress against the moonlit turf, between the dark trees, she was like some old, heart-wringing ghost....

§ 10

He brought back from Tusa hErin that night a sense of dread. What in God's name had Granya done? To what committed herself? There were rumors abroad that the men of '67 were not dead yet.... In America, in the hills of Kerry, in Galway, there was plotting ... not glorious, but sinister plotting.... God! had they enmeshed her?

He had three times heard her sing the old Ulster ballad of General Munro:

Up came Munro's sister, she was well dressed in green,
And his sword by her side that was once bright and keen.
And she said to the brave men who with her did go,
"Come, we'll have revenge for my brother Munro!"

He had looked on that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to it all.... She was often in Dublin these days.... Did they? Had they?...

If it had been the Jacobite times, or '98 or even '48, he would not have minded. The Irish might call these Irish rebellions, but in reality they were world affairs. James and the Prince of Orange were the clash of the ideal of courtliness and tradition worn to a thin blade and of the stubborn progress of pulsing thought. And '98 was the echo of the surge for liberty—the frenzy of France and the stubborn Yankee steel.... And '48 was another breathing of the world.... Even '67 he would not have minded. Sixty-seven was a gallant romantic rally, a dream of pikes amid green banners, and men drilling by moonlit rivers....

But to-day was different.... Revenge was in the air, and revenge was no wild justice, as an old writer had said. Revenge was an evil possession.... An exhausting, sinister mood.... The men who would fight this modern battle, if battle there was to be one, were dark scowling men.... The amenities of battle, the gallantry of flags meant nothing to them. They would shoot from behind ditches in the dark.... In America was talk of dynamite—an idealist using a burglar's trick.... There was no gallantry that way....

And besides, it wasn't an Irish war. It was a matter of agriculture.... A war of peasants against careless landlords, Irish themselves in the main, who had fled to England to avoid the suicidal monotony of Irish country life, and lost their money in the pot-houses and gambling-dens of London, and turned to their tenants for more, forgetting in the glamour of London the poverty of the Irish bogs.... It was contemptible to squeeze the peasants as a money-lender squeezes his victims, but the peasants' redress, the furtive musket and horrible dynamite, that was terrible. God, what a mess!... And had Granya been caught into that evil problem, a kingfisher among cormorants?

And if she had what was he going to do about it?

What could he do? What right had he to meddle with her destiny? Friendly they had become, close sweet friends—the thought of her was like the thought of the hills purple with heather,—but friendship and destiny are a sweet curling wave and a gaunt cliff. They were two different people, independent. Shane Campbell and the Woman of Tusa hErin.

§ 11

She had been distraught all the evening. Merry, feverishly merry at times, and again silent, her eyes far off, her mouth set. She rose suddenly from the piano she was playing, and looked at him. Standing, above the light of the candles, her face and head were like some dark soft flower.

"Shane, you are a very true friend of mine, aren't you?"

"Yes, Granya."

"If I wanted a very great favor, would you consider it?"

"Not consider, but do it."

"Yes, but the risk," she faltered. "I hardly dare—"

"What risk? What are you talking about, Granya?" A thought struck him. "Is it money? Don't be silly and talk about risk! Anything I can give you is yours, and welcome!"

"It's not money, Shane. And thank you! It's—it's this—"

"Yes, Granya."

"It's this, Shane. Would you—would you bring a ship for me from St. Petersburg to Lough Foyle, very quietly?"

"What kind of a ship?"

"A ship, just a ship, a sailing-ship."

"What's in the ship?"

She paused. "Guns, Shane."

"No, Granya. I won't."

"Oh, well," she sat down, "I shouldn't have asked."

"Granya," he walked over and caught her shoulder, "don't be foolish."

"I'm not foolish, Shane. If I am, it's done now." She smiled.... The air crashed out beneath her fingers. Her voice rang:

In came the captain's daughter—the captain of the Yeos—
Saying, "Brave United Irishmen, we'll ne'er again be foes.
One thousand pounds I'll give to you, and go across the sea;
And dress myself in man's attire and fight for liberty!"

"You'll not move one foot from Tusa hErin!"

"O Shane, Tusa hErin's no longer mine, and I've got to go."

"Because the ship and the guns are mine, Shane," she smiled quietly; "my present."

With a terrific smash of the fist he broke in the top of the piano. The wires jangled in pandemonium. The candles fell to the floor.

"Hell's fire and God's damnation!" He swore at her. "You fool!"

She rose, her breasts heaving. Her eyes flashed.

"You've no right to speak to me like that, Shane Campbell."

"Oh, yes, I have. Every damned right! Do you think I'd let any woman go cruising around the North Seas, with a crew of foreigners, and a shipmaster she doesn't know.... I'll bring the bi—the boat in...."

§ 12

They left the city of strange ugly women, with great spirit in their faces, and great bearing to the body of them, and of slim cat-like men, who had great power in their eyes.... A very beautiful city of churches and hammered brass ... a place of high rarefied thinking and savage animal passion.... They left it on a July morning with the sun high.... And they sailed east, sou'east down the Gulf of Finland, until Dago Island was on their port quarter....

And they rolled down the Baltic Sea, sailing sou'-sou'west, until they passed Gotland, and they edged west again, leaving Bornholm to port.... And they sailed past MalmÖ into the Sound, heading north for the Cattegat.... They turned the Skaw and swung her into the Skage-Rack.... And the wind held....

And once out of there, they pointed her nose nor'west by nor' as though Iceland were only a buoy in a yacht-race.... And the wind held.... The summer nights of the North were on them, the unearthly beauty of the light.... There was no world.... They were sailing on the Milky Way.... Only the gurgle of the water at the bows, the whush of the wake beneath the counter, held them as by a thin umbilical cord to the world of men.... The whap-whap-whap of the cordage.... The ting-ting-ting of the helmsman's bell.... The cry for'a'd: "The lights are burning bright, sir!" ...

§ 13

The gaunt Shetlands were on their starboard beam now, the dun Orkneys off the port bow. Sumburgh Head dropped away, and they headed due west.... The waves were laughing, the sun rose in a great explosion abaft of them.... The world was a very small place.... The universe so large.... At dawn the gulls chattered and whined, and screamed until they felt immense loneliness.... One seemed to be intruding in a world of white feathers and cold inimical eyes, and complaints in a language one could not understand.... So lonely ... so undefiled ... the home of the great whale.... Here was the world as God first made it ... clean and beautiful and absolute.... Up here steam engines seemed ridiculous toys.... In winter the sleek seal and the great white bear.... And the great crying of the gulls.... One thought of Adelina Patti's great singing and wondered did it matter a lot.

And they swung sou'west by sou' to leave the Hebrides to port. They were on the last leg of the voyage, and the wind still held....

"O Shane, it's wonderful...." She had come on deck in her man's clothing.... She was so tall, so slim, her legs so long, it seemed some pleasant feminine fancy of hers, not a material adaptation of the life on board ship. "The wind will hold until we get there."

"I don't like it," Shane grumbled.

"Why, Shane? Why don't you like it?"

"We're too lucky."

"It isn't luck, Shane. It's the will of God."

"Hmm!"

"Granya!"

"Yes, Shane."

"I've just been thinking. Why couldn't you conspirators have chosen a better time of the year than August for landing your arms? There's only about two hours of night."

"Because, Shane, the arms must be ready for autumn, when the harvest is in. That's the best time for a revolution. And the arms must be distributed. And the men must drill a little. Now is our only time."

"Hmm."

"O Shane, I wish you would be a little enthusiastic."

"Enthusiastic? At forty-nine!"

"Are you forty-nine, Shane? You don't seem thirty-nine. None could tell but for the little gray in your hair.... And Shane...."

"Yes!"

"I like your hair rumpled a little with the sea-air ... much better than when it is sleek in Antrim.... Shane, you don't know how well you look on board ship."

"Ooh, be damned to that.... Mr. Janseen, get them to lay aft, and see if you can't get a little more out of that mizzen.... A little more pocket in the luff." ...

§ 14

They passed the Butt of Lewis, sailing due sou'west.... To port they left the Seven Hunters, changing the course to sou'west by sou'.... The Hebrides passed them like islands in a dream, purple, gleaming strangely in the sunlight, now a black shower whipping over them, now sunshine pouring in great floods.... Lewis went by, and then Harris.... North Uist where the winds blow so hard they have an old word: Is traugh fear na droiche air mhachair Uistibh: 'Tis a pity of the slut's husband on the plains of Uist.... You'll be needing buttons on your coat there.... They passed Rona of the Seals, and Benbecula.... They passed South Uist and Eriskay.... They passed the Ponboy Isles.... The islands of the Cat they called them in Gaelic.... Faintly they saw the mists of Hecla ... heard the curlews.... They saw fishing-boats with great brown sails....

Honk-honk of wild ganders in the distance, and occasionally the chugh of a diving bird.... The wind blew from the nor'west.... The foam snarled beneath the bows....

"I don't like it.... I don't like it...."

"Shane, it is wonderful.... God is with us."

"Hunh...." He saw the weather leaches flick.... "Don't let her come up," he roared at the helmsman. "Steer her, you Swede bastard.... Where the hell did you ever steer before? On a canal?"

"Shane!"

"What is it, Granya?"

"Your language, Shane!"

"Listen, Granya.... I'm not playing a comedy.... I'm sailing a ship ... that's on an errand I don't like.... If you don't like my language, get below...."

"Sorry, Shane!" She said with a meek courtesy. She stayed....

They passed Skerryvore.... They passed Dhu Heartach, Colonsay, Islay of McCrimmin.... Iristrahull was on the weather beam.... They swung eastward.... Irishowen Head showed off the port bow.... On an August afternoon, they slipped into Lough Foyle....

§ 15

The soft luminosity of a summer night was in it ... and a little moon, which Shane damned.... Before them rose the outline of Donegal.... On each beam they could see faintly the outlines of the bay's arms.... The schooner moved under jibs and mizzen.... From the bow was the splash of the lead....

"By the mark, fine!"

"Luff her a little, a little more ... steady!"

"Four fathoms, no bottom!"

"Keep her off a point!"

"By the deep, four!"

"How's the bottom?"

"Clean and sandy, sir!"

"No bottom at three!"

"Ready for'a'd to let go?"

"All ready, sir!"

"The mark three, no bottom!"

"Lee—o!... Hold her!"

The long swish of oars, the rattle of oar-locks.... A voice rapping out:

"Rest on the oars!" And then: "Schooner ahoy!"

Shane's heart sank. He gave no answer.

"What ship is that?" The voice rang over the little bay ... found a grotesque echo in some cliff....

"Who are you?"

"His Majesty's coast-guards. Stand by. Coming aboard. Lay on your oars, men!"

And then ... a long instant.... "Toss oars!"

"Bring her into the wind!" Shane ordered....

A scramble alongside, and some one was coming over the waist rail.... A firm step on deck.... Some one was smiling....

"My name's Flannagan, Lieutenant Flannagan.... Sorry, Mr. Campbell, we can't let you land ... your cargo or your passenger...."

"I don't understand."

"Well, sir, we know what your cargo is, and my orders are not to let you land. And I was to tell you, sir, that you couldn't land anywhere."

"By God! I knew it would end like this.... Are we under arrest?"

"No, sir.... You are just not to land. I'm sorry, sir, but.... Orders!"

"Then what the blazes am I going to do?"

"Jove, I don't know. Can't you bring the cargo back where you got it?"

"I suppose I'll have to do that. But my passenger.... I can put her ashore."

"I'm sorry, sir. But your passenger can't go ashore, anywhere, any time, in her Majesty's dominions."

"Hmm!"

He heard her quick step on the companionway.

"Shane."

"Shane, are you there?"

"Shane, Shane, what's wrong?" She came into the shrouded light of the binnacle. "Shane, who—who is this?"

"My name's Flannagan, Miss O'Malley—royal navy—I'm sorry; you can't land."

"What does it mean, Shane?"

"You're beaten, Granya."

"Are we prisoners?"

"No, Miss O'Malley, just you can't land. And I'm very distressed to tell you.... You may not land anywhere, any time, in her Majesty's dominions."

"That doesn't shut out Mr. Campbell, does it?"

"I've no orders against him, Miss O'Malley, barring his landing his cargo or you...."

She laid her hand on Shane's arm....

"I'm sorry, Shane.... I'm very sorry, my dear—dear friend.... You were so good.... There are few—would have sacrificed their time and profession, and everything—to help a woman on a wild-goose ideal!—like mine was.... So please forgive me!"

"There's nothing to forgive, Granya...."

"I want to do this ..." she leaned forward and kissed him.... The lieutenant turned away. "And now good-by."

"Why good-by? I'm not going ashore. I'll stick."

"Dear Shane, you would." She caught his hand, pressed, dropped it. Her voice rang out: "But I'm going ashore...." She had swung over the taffrail and dropped into the water with the soft splash of a fish....

"My God ...!" Shane swore with rage. "Wait. I'll get her. Will you stand by with your boat?"

"Right-o!" Flannagan answered cheerily.

Shane kicked off his shoes, slipped out of his coat.... "This damned woman!" he thought as he dropped astern, came out, began to cast for direction like an otter-hound.... He heard her soft rhythmical strokes ahead.... He tore after her ... caught up ... reached her shoulder....

"Come back, Granya!"

"No, Shane."

He had decided, once he reached her, to turn her back by force, but the strange gentle voice restrained him. All this matter of Ireland, all this expedition of opera bouffe, took on again a strange dimension when she spoke.... All the time he had been foolish, he knew, and, worse, looked like a fool, but some strange magic of her voice made it seem natural ... the naÏve brave gestures.... One levitated above common ground.... Even this moon-madness did not seem trivial and a thing for laughter.... A dignity of ancient stories was on it.... The blue Irish hills, soft as down, the little moon, and the tide hurrying out of the lough to the great Atlantic.... A wrench of the will and he gripped her shoulder:

"Shane, please don't!"

"You're coming back, Granya."

"I'm not, Shane, and please don't hold me. I'm getting weak."

"You'll never make it, Granya. And if you did, where would you go on the Donegal hills?"

"I don't know, Shane. But please let me go, I implore you.... Even if I do go down.... Don't you see? There is nothing for me but this, or death.... My life.... O Shane, let me go!"

"Quiet, Granya!" He caught her wrist.

"Please, Shane. Please. I pray of you...." She began to twist.... "O Shane, you hurt."

"Quiet, Granya. Boat—o!"

The lantern of the coast-guards' cutter came nearer.... The measured swish of the oars ... the creak.... She began to struggle fiercely....

"Granya, if you don't keep quiet, I'll have to hit you...."

"O Shane!" she whimpered....

"All right Get her on board. Steady, there. Trim a little. Good!" Flannagan and a great bearded coast-guard had her.... The silence was broken with her little sobs.... He helped her over the waist of the schooner....

"Go below, Granya, and get into some dry clothes.... Mr. Flannagan, I'll take the boat back to St. Petersburg.... If Miss O'Malley doesn't land neither do I. May I send a letter ashore? It's only about business, and the place in the glens...."

"I'll take it and have it sent."

"Another thing; we want to get some provisions and water."

"Of course, sir.... That's all right."

"Do you think one of the country girls could be persuaded to come on board as Miss O'Malley's maid?"

"I think so. We'll ask the local priest."

"Oh, yes, the priest.... Another thing: do you think you could dig out a parson around here somewhere and bring him on board?"

"O Shane, what do you want that for?" She hadn't gone below, but waited in the companionway.

"You don't think you're going wandering around with me, casually, like this?"

"But it's only to St. Petersburg, Shane!"

"And then where do you go? What do you do?"

"I—I—I don't know."

"Better get the parson, Mr. Flannagan."

"Oh, but Shane—" she protested.

"Go below, Granya, and get those wet things off.... And get into women's clothes.... Granya!"

"Yes, Shane.... Very well, Shane...."