He looked about him helplessly for a minute, and then he began to sob; the hard, labouring sobs of a man who is no longer young.
The woman looked rather sorry for a moment, but it was evident that she took no particular interest in what he had been saying. Presently, she began to babble again about herself and her own children; her word flowing one after the other like the ripples of a stream and with apparently as little heed as to whether anyone was listening to them or not.
In this way she told her story. She was the wife of a herdsman, but the children were — not her husband's. It seemed that at some time — she did not herself remember when — she had been carried off by some neighbouring chieftain, the son, brother, or nephew of her husband's master — her ideas upon the whole subject were evidently of the vaguest — who had given her a hut of his own to live in and had visited her from time to time, as the humour took him. Apparently, neither she nor her husband had resented the proceeding, perhaps because it would not have mattered whether they did or not. She told it all perfectly simply. She had not wished to go, but had accepted it as natural, the sort of thing that happened to people. What had become of her husband she did not know. The tiny dimpled girl of three was the master's child, so also was the sturdy, bold-eyed boy of six. One thing she did know: her protector, tyrant was dead. He had been killed by some of the Earl of Ormond's men, who had set fire to his house and destroyed everyone in it. Upon hearing this, she had fled panic-stricken from the cabin which he had provided for her and, with her children, had since then been wandering up and down the country, sometimes for a while joining some other little flock of women and children, but oftener going alone. About a week before, she had found herself in this particular corner of the forest since which time they had been all three starving quietly.
Maelcho made no comment upon her story, little of which had indeed penetrated to his mind. They remained where they were all that day and would probably have remained there for several consecutive days, but that the following night there came on a violent thunderstorm, accompanied by deluges of rain. The lightning played wild fantasias all around the lip of the green cup; one moment showing the trees up to their smallest twig, the next leaving everything — hollow and upper level alike — wrapped in complete and crushing darkness. The wolves were kept at home by the storm, but that benefit was poorly compensated for by the fact that under the downpour the hollow flooring of the wigwam became gradually metamorphosed into a small lake. The little girl with her mother lay at the back of the wigwam, where the ground was higher and therefore drier, but the boy, who had been sleeping nearer to the entrance, awoke in a pool and quickly made the fact known by his stifled howls of alarm and fury.
Maelcho, who, as usual, was outside with his back against a beech tree, crept a little nearer and felt in the darkness for the child's head. Having found it, he lifted him up on to a small ledge which rose out of the water. The ledge however was both wet and slippery, and the little boy continued to cry and to struggle.
“Lie still, little one,” sounded in the deep voice outside. “I am here. You are safe. Lie still.”
“I am wet and cold! Boo, boo! Boo, boo! I hate you; I hate everything.” A stifled howl followed this announcement, half swept away by the lash of the rain.
“Wet and cold! Wet and cold!” repeated the voice from the darkness. “The beasts are always wet and cold. When I was little, I was always wet and cold, yet I lived, yet I grew; I grew big … so big; I walked about like a king. I looked down at everything — at everything except the trees, the trees were always taller. I could leap though and fight, and kill; the trees could not fight or kill. I was better than the trees, though they were taller. You will be better some day than the trees, little one.”
The little boy continued to sob, though not loud enough to have attracted attention. Presently, the little girl awoke, and hearing him sob, she too began to cry, in a weak, wailing fashion, very pitiful and distracting to listen to. There was nothing to be done at the moment, but as soon as the morning had begun to dawn, and long before the storm was over, Maelcho left the shelter of his beech tree, mounted one of the sides of the cup, and having selected the largest of the trees which grew near the edge, he climbed up it, till he reached the top and could look out over the rain-beaten forest.
His mind was beginning to work again, in the only fashion in which it ever did work now. He knew that the children must not be left where they were, and that it was his duty to find some other and drier shelter for them. A picture of some sort was hanging before his mind, only he could not get it right; it was all blurred and mixed up with so many other pictures, that all were more or less like it. A vague recollection of some place, not far off, kept recurring dimly, but whether that place was a shed or a hollow tree, or a cave, he could not recall.
Climbing to where a great branch stretched out horizontally, he extended himself along it like a sloth and lay, sweeping his eyes round and round, and backwards and forwards, over as much of the forest as he could see. Presently, they were caught by a very tall fir tree, standing out a little apart against the skyline, to the left of which stood a coppice of birches, shouldering one another almost as closely as oat-stalks do in an oat-field. That coppice carried a memory of some sort for Maelcho, but what was it? He stared at it; then put his head down against the branch and thought intently; then looked at it again. Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and climbing down the tree, he hastened towards the coppice. In another half-hour, he was pushing his way through the middle of it.
Here he found what he had recalled, or rather he found the starting point for it. The coppice seemed at first to be perfectly blind, but presently a couple of minute paths began to appear, stretching to right and loft. Stooping down, Maelcho selected the left-hand one. It led him along a track hardly wider than a rabbit's run, and so closely over-hung, that he had almost to crawl in order to follow it. Other tiny tracks strayed away from it here and there, but the seanchaí kept the main one. He knew now where it was leading him.
For a time, it seemed to be simply bent upon confusing anyone who committed himself to its guidance. It was a true forest tunnel. Now it went up, and now it went down, now it went right, and now it went left, but always it was tortuous and agonising to follow. Suddenly, a sort of mouth appeared in it. Maelcho straightened himself and walked with rapid steps till he came to what he was in search of. He was now outside the coppice of birches. The trees here were all firs, most of them very old and weighted with moss, which in many places hung in great grey wigs right down to the ground. In the centre of these firs rose a small rocky mound, in one of the sides of which a barely perceptible hole appeared. It was stuffed full of leaves and branches, but, upon his pulling these away, it grew rapidly wider, until it expanded into a narrow passage, lined upon both sides with solid uprights of stone. So far back did this passage run, that a man might remain in safety there, though all his enemies were on his track. Owing to the slope of the ground, he could remain in very reasonable comfort, might even venture to light a fire, certain that the smoke would disappear, long before it had time to attract attention.
With a joyous step, Maelcho hastened back to the now saturated wigwam, fetched away the two children and their mother; led them through the forest, under the still heavily falling rain and along the path in the middle of the coppice, until he brought them proudly to their new quarters. He had found some wood-pigeons' eggs the day before, and now he hastened off in search of more, leaving them to settle themselves. As he pushed his way through the dripping branches, his face might have been observed to break every now and then into a sort of momentary smile or gleam.
Chapter XXXVII.
They remained in this new hiding-place of theirs for several months. It was almost perfectly dry. Another great advantage was that from its position surprise was almost impossible. From the top of the mound you could see in every direction through the pine trunks, as through some pillared and windy corridor, right over the lower trees,
to the region at the bottom, across which any assailant must pass in order to get to them.
The disadvantage was that these merits had the effect of soon attracting others to the spot. Maelcho was watched in his goings and comings and was followed, first by a few, afterwards by more, till the spot became a receptacle for all who could crowd into it. There was a good deal of room in the cave, but more came to it than there was room for. That fierce desire for a hiding-place, which was the absorbing passion of the hour, naturally begot an equally fierce jealousy of all who were believed, rightly or wrongly, to have found a better one. The result was, that the young and weak were apt to get hustled away by the stronger, the older, and the fiercer. From this fate the children and their mother were safe as long as Maelcho, or any other sufficiently powerful protector, was there, but only exactly so long. The effort to secure food for them was another continual call upon his energies and drain upon his strength. The forest abounded with wild animals, rabbits especially popping up in all directions out of their burrows, but they were difficult to secure. He was not as expert at snaring or trapping as some of the younger men were, and the only thing therefore to do was to dig them out of their holes, at great expenditure of time and labour.
Towards the end of the summer, a new element came to change what had by that time grown to be the settled habit of their lives. Returning one day to the cave, with a couple of rabbits in his hand, Maelcho found a gaunt, haggard-looking man sitting between his children and their mother. This man, he gradually came to understand, was the woman's husband, whom she had not seen for nearly eight years. Let no one imagine for a moment that this was a sentimental meeting, or that there was any question on either side of reconciliation or forgiveness; such niceties, if they had ever existed, were all swept into limbo by the grim necessities of the hour. It was a new feature however in their lives, and this Maelcho after awhile began to realise. Little by little, a feeling began to steal over him that his part in the children was over. He was no longer indispensable to them, seeing that there was now someone else, who could do for them what he had done. More than this, he began to perceive that his absence from the cave — his own cave, his particular discovery — would be better on the whole for them than his presence. He brooded over this idea for two or three days. Then came an afternoon when he drifted silently away into the forest and was gone. When they came to look for him, which was not until several hours later, they found a large supply of nuts and berries, which he had left as a legacy for the children, but of the seanchaí himself they found no trace at all. The discreet, the impenetrable forest had simply swallowed him up.
After this, he wandered about for a long time alone, meeting other wayfarers, but not again joining any of them. Five months had now elapsed since he had sat amongst the ruins of Dingle; since he had heard the voice from the housetop and had torn the hut upon the cliff to pieces in his rage and despair. They had been five very busy months in Ireland, though empty enough in that forgotten corner of it, of which alone he knew anything. The Baltinglass rising had broken out in June, and this, coupled with the defeat of the English at Glenmalure in August, had sent a wild wave of elation across the whole country. Lord Grey, who had come over as Deputy, had committed serious blunders. Again it was Sir Nicholas Malby, and Sir Nicholas Malby almost single-handed, who had stemmed the tide of revolt and, by the mere wind and whiff of his terrible name, had turned back the waverers into the path of nominal obedience. Riding post to Dublin the very hour after the Glenmalure defeat, he had contrived to narrow down what had at one moment promised to be a general disaster to the very smallest proportions of which it admitted. The wave of triumph in the more outlying regions was however for the time irresistible. Seven hundred Spaniards and Italians had landed a few weeks before at Smerwick and established themselves in Sir James's old fort. Their arrival had been hailed as the foretaste of the long promised and now really coming invasion. Admiral Winter's fleet had sailed for England a few days before their arrival, so that there was no one in the south to oppose them. When a few weeks later it was further reported that Ormond — the detested Ormond — had marched down to Smerwick fort and turned back again without daring to attack it, the tide of jubilation reached the highest point which it had reached since the rising began.
Even in the heart of that forest region in which Maelcho wandered, the tale of these great doings was being passed from lip to lip and being swept to and fro in fitful gusts of exultation. His own realisation of what it all meant was of the dimmest. Public events, apart from their personal bearing, had never had much significance for him. Now, they had none at all. He heard what was said; he remembered it for a few minutes; then he passed on, and in a little while it had vanished away, as though he had never heard a word. His whole life had grown to have exactly that sort of broken and tangled inconsequence, which is the very woof and fabric of dreamland. Scenes spun past him, hideous dramas were enacted before him, but not one of them seemed to have any real grip or actuality for him. Physically he was very much weaker than he had been six months before, and quite a dozen years older. On the other hand, he was no longer the two-legged wolf, the dangerous and homicidal madman that he had been then. Those months, during which he had again had something to care for, had again found little voices to prattle to him and little fingers to tug at his fast whitening glibbe, had dulled the fierce ache which had brought him to that state. The thirst to destroy, for the mere sake of destroying, had passed away. His brain had settled into a quiescent and more completely childish condition. He wandered day after day, much as some forsaken child might wander, that is sorry for itself, but does not quite know why. As for the old Maelcho — as for the old reckless joys of the seanchaí, the old bardic intoxication, the old pride of life, the vanity of the famous fighter and hero — all these were gone as completely as though they had never existed. He was simply now a perfectly harmless, but more or less crazed being, like many of the peasants, whose misery-crazed faces met him as he wandered through the forest. To save his skin a little while longer from the hunters; to pick up the morsel that would enable him to live through the day then passing; to find, when night came, some hole into which he could crawl and sleep; this was all that he was conscious of. Beyond this narrow, elementary radius he had nothing left to wish for, nothing left to hope, and therefore nothing left to fear.
Chapter XXXVIII.
It was the 24th of December in the year of grace 1581, and the scene was the middle of the wood of Kilquegg, part of the same great forest region in which the town of Kilmallock stood, and which had two years before beheld the famous discomfiture of Sir William Drury.
In that boisterous ungarnished hall, under the windy rafters of the sky, almost within hearing of the very bugles of their enemies, cold, wet, roofless, with a price upon their heads, and scarce a single morsel to put into their mouths, the Earl of Desmond and his Countess were keeping their last Christmas together.
The momentary gleam of the preceding year had by this time died away, and nothing remained but the recollection of one more blasted hope; nothing but despair and a position about as appalling as the imagination can well conceive. Foul to its friends, and most fair to its foes, had become the fortunes of the great house of Desmond. Of its boasted seven hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, not one solitary half acre remained to its lord. Of the many strongholds, castles, manors, and the rest, not a shanty was left, not a dog-kennel. Smerwick fort had become a word of terror, not to Ireland alone, but to all Europe. Of the Earl's immediate friends and followers, his younger brother was already dead; the elder, Sir John, was still at large, but his fate was at that very moment hovering over his head. Nicholas Saunders, the famous Legate of the Pope, had recently died of want and disease somewhere on the borders of Cork. Two or three dozen gaunt fighting men, of whom Maelcho was just then one, and a helpless flock of starved dependants, was all that the state of the Lord Palatine could muster. They were all starving together.
Worse than s
tarvation, worse even than the driving snow and Arctic cold, which was making that winter memorable in the annals of Ireland, was the sense of irrevocable doom. The lord of all that forest realm seemed to have been forsaken by his own natural subjects, the very spirits of the region having apparently gone over in a body to the side of the enemy. Reports of evil omens were abundant. Fires were observed to burn blue. Torches, when stuck in the ground, went unaccountably out. Wailings, as of creatures in the agonies of death, were heard amid the branches. It was with a dim notion that some change for the better might be wrought by His means, that Maelcho had been brought, almost by force, into this camp of misery. Alas! the famous seanchaí proved as helpless as any of the other allies of the Desmond. He was no longer the seer, the wizard, the nature doctor; he was no longer even the storyteller, who could hold the wildest audiences rapt and silent, hour after hour, by the mere magic of his tongue. He was only a poor trouble-crazed man, now, like any other. His wand was broken, his spirit gone, his very tongue had ceased to be his own old tongue. When left to himself, he would sit all day long, absolutely silent, his hands around his knees, his eyes following first one and then another figure, puzzled like a child by the crowd, the noise, the unfamiliarity of these once familiar surroundings.
Only one man, in fact, could be said to have risen to the necessities of the hour, but then that man was no less than the rebel Earl himself. His whole nature seemed in those two years to have undergone a revolution. The chief, whose eternal vacillation and miserable pusillanimity had been the shame of his friends and the derision of his foes, had become a sort of Attila. A fever of activity seemed to burn day and night in his bones. The latent energy of his race had risen to the top and was showing itself in ways, some of which might be called heroic, others again which were simply ferocious. Only a few days before this, four recreant Geraldines had been brought into camp and then and there hewn into pieces, every clansman present taking his share in the deed. Such acts of vengeance were rare, for as a rule the fidelity of the clan to their chief, despite all temptations to the contrary, had been marvellous and incomparable. Of late too, under the still unbroken magic of his name, and especially under the stimulus of his new and unlooked-for energy, that handful of half-clad men who surrounded him had become a power, which was taxing all the forces of the crown and all the energy of its ablest lieutenants. As in all guerilla warfare, the mode of fighting was essentially predatory. It was only at night that they could take the field, but when they did do so, woe betide the favourers of the English; woe betide all Butlers, or friends of Butlers, upon whom these gaunt emaciated embodiments of starvation descended. Like wolves they came, and like wolves they departed, leaving ruin and death behind them. Their very existence demanded invisibility. They came, they went, they slew, and they were gone again, before the startled soldiers, or the scared villagers, had rallied from their first surprise. The mystery of their proceedings enhanced their actual doings and raised a cloud of phantom terrors about their name. Legends grew up. The Desmond — a lame man, as all Ireland knew, unable for years either to walk or to ride — was reported, truly or untruly, to be himself the leader of these nocturnal expeditions. True or false, that vision of the crippled Earl, carried high upon the shoulders of his followers, or sweeping, torch in hand, through the snow-filled valleys, became stamped indelibly upon the imagination of every man, woman, and child of that generation.
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