For the war had become a purely tribal one, waged in the old fashion and for the old objects. Those larger and more political aspects of it which once loomed so big, had very nearly disappeared since the fall of Smerwick. Spain and France, Italy and Portugal — all the Catholic powers banded together — had practically vanished from the popular eye. Even England and England's mistress had fallen comparatively into the background. It was now, as it had always been, the Geraldines against the Butlers, and the Butlers against the Geraldines. The Geraldines, unfairly over-matched, beaten and desperate, pent into a corner, but still fighting furiously; fighting for their name, for their chief, but above and beyond everything else, for revenge.
Chapter XXXIX.
Christmas was past, and the new year already beginning to be an old one. The starving camp in Kilquegg Wood had again broken up. The Desmond had fled away and was terrorising his enemies from a new standpoint. The months too had fled away. The cruel snow-enveloped winter had given place to an unkindly spring, and the spring in its turn to a comfortless, rain-saturated summer. Lord Ormond was still in command in Munster, but the complaints against him were growing daily more menacing and threatened soon to make his position untenable. Some amongst his subordinates were eager to assure the Council that he was keeping up the war wholly for the sake of the profit he reaped from it. A far more dangerous accusation was that the old ineradicable feud between Butlers and Geraldines was keeping alive the struggle, when, but for this purely local stimulus, it must long ago have died a natural death. Sir Walter Raleigh — one of Ormond's most consistent opponents — never failed to press home this point and was ably supported by Sir Nicholas Malby and by Malby's brilliant subordinate Fenwick, by whom most of the reports were drawn up.
“Subdued by a Butler!” In those four words lies the whole pith, the whole explanation of this latest phase of the struggle. It was this, and this alone, that kept it alive. All through that bitter spring of 1582, it dragged on and through the dark cheerless summer; with unlooked-for bursts of triumph upon one side, with furious reprisals upon the other, with such unexpected ups and downs of fortune as could only have occurred in a country, very easy to overrun, but practically impossible to subdue and hold permanently.
One consolation was that the evil was felt to be after all a remediable one! The whole Desmond Palatinate had long since been escheated to the crown and was being now rapidly cut up into plots varying in size according to the status or the merits of the recipient. Each “undertaker,” as his own lot came into his hands, was bound to get rid of these vegetable enemies of the Queen, “traitor trees”, as speedily and effectually as his means admitted of.
A forest covering hundreds of thousands of acres cannot, with the best will in the world, be disposed of in a minute. Though the woodcutters were kept at work from dawn till dusk, some years had still to elapse before nakedness, rather than leafiness, became the actual note and badge of the land. In the meantime, the forest was big enough, despite the axes, and into it still crowded, not only its own inhabitants, but all who from other and less sheltered regions could contrive to escape to it.
Maelcho was still one of its pensioners. All that summer, he had remained close under the shelter of its branches. By the beginning of September, he found himself once more in the county of Tipperary. The year had apparently repented of its many perfidies and treacheries, for the miserable, unsatisfactory summer was dying sumptuously in an exceptionally splendid autumn. Far and near, the trees were bedizened with every hue that a painter could combine. Not the trees alone, but the very ground itself had become gorgeous, immense fungi, born of the damp and flushed by the sudden warmth, covering every inch of it. With the exception of his short and enforced stay in the camp of Kilquegg, Maelcho had been all this time alone, and alone he still wandered, day after day, over this jewel-sprinkled ground and under this gold-bedecked canopy. Late in the afternoon of a day that he had been thus wandering aimlessly since the Earliest dawn, he came to a halt in the middle of a small ravine, the bottom of which was littered with big stones. Having seated himself upon one of these, he remained for a long time, staring vaguely before him into the forest.
It had been another lovely day. Even now at six o'clock in the evening, the splendour was only slowly dying out of the sky and still showed between the trees, filling the whole background with something of the sober splendour of some great, though partially ruined, church window. The rock upon which Maelcho sat had another and a larger one above it, overlapping it in the fashion of a menhir. There was just space between the two for a man to bestow his body in. As night came on, the seanchaí simply retreated into this sort of natural dog-kennel and sat crouched upon the ground, looking out between the two stones and waiting for sleep to visit him.
The moon rose presently above the trees, giving to the scattered rocks the air of a big neglected graveyard. From his stony kennel, he could see miles away, as it seemed, into the forest, which looked vacant. But surely, at that very moment something was moving slowly along the top of the ridge which overlooked his ravine? He fixed his eyes upon the spot and waited. Presently, from behind one of the moon-streaked trunks, something — a living creature, a skeleton-like object clothed in white, passed into sight and advanced along the ridge. After it came another, equally white, equally skeleton-like object, and then another, and another, slowly emerging out of the darkness, until there were no less than twenty mysterious figures, all clad in white robes, which seemed to hang like shrouds about them, and all moving along just within the glimpses of the moon.
Who and what were they? Maelcho merely sat between his stones and gazed at them; with a little more wonder than if they had been a company of white owls, but not with a great deal more. That they were dead men, or ghosts of some sort, he had not a doubt, but what then? What could be more natural? He had seen so many ghosts in the last two years, was a ghost himself for all practical purposes. That a party of dead men should be strolling about in the moonlight, at such a place and at such a time, seemed, on the whole, a far more probable event than that a company of live ones should be doing so.
Under the cold white drizzle of moonlight the line of white objects drew nearer and nearer, till now they were quite close to where he sat. Suddenly, it became evident that they on their side had seen him, for the foremost ghost stopped dead short, the result being that the one next to it instantly overtook it, and, the others doing the same, in a minute there was a dense cluster of ghosts, all packed one behind the other, and all gazing down at Maelcho with hollow moon-filled eyes.
Maelcho remained perfectly still for another minute. Then, with an impulse of breaking through the spell, he sprang to his feet, shouting hoarsely and waving his arms in the air, as he might have done to scare away a flock of birds. In an instant, the whole flock of white figures had scattered in all directions, uttering shrill cries, and each endeavouring to escape separately. One of the flying ghosts tripped in its fright against a tree root and falling violently to the ground, pitched head forwards into the hollow and lay there, uttering lamentable cries for aid.
As a hawk pounces upon a pigeon, so Maelcho pounced upon it, picked it up, shook it and turned it towards the moonlight. The moonlight lit up the thin wizened face and shaven crown of a very old monk, half dead from terror. For a minute, Maelcho continued to hold him. Then it seemed to dawn upon him what his prisoner was, for he relaxed the tightness of his grasp. Smoothing down the ghost's robe, once more he set him upon his feet.
The rest of the flying figures had meanwhile paused, and two of them had ventured to turn back and were at that moment peering cautiously into the hollow.
“Brother Malachi! Brother Malachi! Are you alive, Brother Malachi?” came presently in quavering accents from above.
A squeak, like the squeak of a mouse caught in a trap:
“I live, my brothers, truly, I believe I live still,” came, in trembling and all but inaudible accents, from the hapless one below.
“God b
e praised, he is alive!” was reported to the rest by the two pioneers.
Then another and still more adventurous monk advanced from the main body and peered right over into the hollow, but started back at sight of the dark figure, in whose grasp Brother Malachi appeared to be engulfed.
“Oh! Oh! What is that which is holding you? Speak, Brother Malachi, what is it?” he cried tremulously.
“I don't know, my brother, verily, I don't know. My eyes are closed, lest they should behold some evil thing. Nevertheless, it begins to seem to me that it may be only a man; only a poor sinful man like ourselves.”
Unlikely as such a supposition seemed, it was beginning to gain ground with the other monks also, since a demon would evidently long ere this have torn poor Brother Malachi to pieces and departed into the darkness.
“Speak to it, brother.”
“No, brother, you; do you question it.”
At last, the same bold brother who had spoken before advanced to the very edge and peered over.
“Wha-a-a-t are you?” he asked falteringly.
Maelcho rubbed his hand over his brow. That was a question which always awakened the strangest thoughts in him, which always gave him a topsy-turvy feeling of not being, what yet he knew he was. At last, however, his own name rose to his lips, and he uttered it aloud.
Evidently, it was not unknown amongst that ghostly fraternity. “Maelcho!” “Maelcho!” and next “Brother Michael!” “Brother Michael Galbraith,” passed from mouth to mouth. What connection there was between these two names was not explained, but the same brother who had stepped forward before advanced again, this time into the open moonlight, and addressing Maelcho, made him understand that they wished him to follow them. Without knowing why they wished him to do so, or where he was to go, with his usual dull acceptance of anything that was suggested, Maelcho did as he was told and leaving the hollow, mounted to the ridge. They set off together in the same direction in which the ghosts were advancing when they had caught sight of him.
They walked on through the scattered tree trunks — twenty white ghosts and one black one. It was tolerably clear of undergrowth, but the masses of boulders obliged them to keep in Indian file and delayed their advance. Now and then, one of the younger monks would diverge a little from the straight line, in order to examine some snare laid for the rabbits or to collect armfuls of dry leaves, which seemed to be one of the objects of these nocturnal excursions. After walking for about an hour, the ground began to rise, and they presently found themselves confronted with a long low cliff of limestone. This they followed for some distance along the foot, until they came to where a narrow fissure opened in it. Through this fissure the monks passed one by one, Maelcho submissively following them.
It became pitch-dark the minute they got inside, the steep rock-walls on either hand cutting off the rays of moonlight, which had hitherto kept them company. Sometimes, they stumbled over slimy boulders or across leg-breaking holes in the ground; sometimes, their feet were in water, or they were caught by bushes, sticking out of the ledges. After a couple of sharp twists, a red light broke suddenly upon their eyes as they turned a corner. It came from where the side of the fissure ended abruptly, leaving a hollow space at the bottom, from the low arch of which a row of enormous stalactites hung down a yard or more, and below which the light flowed out, making a red quivering lane of the pools, which stretched to their feet. It proved to be the merest flicker of light, only a bit of lighted bog-wood stuck in the ground, but by comparison with the utter blackness they had been wading through, it seemed vivid and even blinding. Behind, sharply defined by it, a small white figure rose from a heap of straw, stretching out a pair of thin eager hands and hailing the new-comers in a voice which, though hollow and broken with coughs, seemed so curiously, unaccountably joyous, that it startled the ear almost more than the red illumination had done the eye. Even Maelcho's dulled and frozen wits were roused by it. It awoke in his mind the once familiar, but now all but utterly forgotten, sense of welcome and home-coming. It seemed to be addressed to him personally, that eager friendly voice, so human and so kindly.
Chapter XL.
Unlike the former and artificial cave, which Maelcho had shared with the children, and which was fairly dry, the one in which he now found himself literally ran with moisture. From every stalactite and from every inch of the surface of the limestone, the drops fell heavily. In some places, they ran in a steady stream, which had worn a regular channel along the floor. In others, the drops gathered at first slowly, imperceptibly, till, growing larger and larger, the force of capillary attraction was overborne, and they fell to the ground with a thud that was like the precursors of a thunder-storm. The whole atmosphere was charged with moisture. It seemed to reach the lungs like one of those dense mountain clouds into which a traveller strays accidentally and emerges, feeling as if he had been wading through a stream.
In the driest corner lay the sick monk, Michael Galbraith. His bed consisted of a little straw; covering a heap of withered leaves, of which a fresh supply had that night been brought in, not, as the next day showed, before it was needed, for the old supply was in many places worn completely through, by the movements of his fevered body, so that the ribs of the stalagmite floor were laid entirely bare.
Upon being told who Maelcho was, he had testified the liveliest satisfaction, repeating his name again and again with the same joyous intonation of welcome, which had almost brought tears to that poor, seldom welcomed vagrant's eyes. It seemed indeed to be the little monk's way to greet everyone and everything with the same friendliness. He was like a man who, out of the superabundance of his own extraordinary good fortune, cannot help overflowing and bestowing a share of it upon all who came within his reach. His little form shook with sociability, and his fevered eyes sparkled joyously in their sockets every time anyone approached to speak to him.
And yet, this was no easy bed upon which he was lying! For hours of the day and night, his cough never seemed to cease for a single instant. Like the drip of the water, the sound of it seemed to be part and parcel of the place he inhabited; to pervade and to fill every corner of it. His own cheerfulness, however, never flagged. He possessed a small wooden cross, not a regular crucifix, merely two bits of wood nailed together, the angles of which were almost worn away by the perpetual clutch of his fevered fingers. When the fits of coughing overtook him, he would strain this cross tightly, holding it before his eyes, and seemingly his whole body drew strength from it, as from an elixir. Even when apparently at the last gasp, his clutch never relaxed, nor yet that eager look of expectation which shone in his eyes. It was not a look of resignation or of piety, so much as of simple pleasure and anticipation; the look of a man who grasps some infallible specific, which he has only to drain to the uttermost, and all will go well with him.
He was dying rapidly, as everyone, including himself, knew perfectly well. It was not a question of months or weeks, but of days, or rather hours. Whether he would last through the day then passing; whether he would die at night, or in the daytime; above all whether he would for a certainty die before they were forced, as they soon would be forced, to fly to some new retreat; these were matters that were continually debated before him, with elation on his own part, with something very like conscious envy on the part of the other brothers.
A rough bench, made of two logs of wood, laid together and supported at the ends, had been set in the mouth of the cave, and it was upon this his days were chiefly spent. When free from the clutch of his tormentor, he would amuse himself with a thousand trifles. Now it was the birds, that came hopping in and about the ravine; now perhaps the moths, which flitted like ghosts round the cave; now again some big bumble bee, humming past with an air of prodigious importance. If one of the brothers slipped in their comings or goings through the ravine, or if the new comer's big form got wedged between the masses of stalagmite in the cave, then his laughter rang out, filling the whole gloomy place with its feeble friendly sound.
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