“Wings to your heart!” he praised her. “The foot of the roe is on you.”
II
Art O’Connor was into his fish beyond a doubt. He was backing carefully out of the thigh-deep water, the butt of the rod in his groin, and the point making a lovely deep curve out over the pool. The point nodded twice, and the taut line made a slow circle in the water.
“Give him his head a bit,” shouted Michael Oge, “and keep your point up!”
He merely shouted that out of custom, for Art O’Connor knew his stuff and did a competent job of work, wearing his fish out in the heavy water and neatly coaxing him downstream to the wide landing-net. In ten minutes Mickeen Oge had a clean-run grilse expertly on the gravel.
“Look at the neat prow of him!” Mickeen Oge pointed out to Betty, the two, heads together, gloating over the fish.
“Oh! the beauty!”
“As pretty a grilse as’ll come out of the river this season! Five pounds, with an ounce or two spare, and clean as a new shilling! But how in thunder did the game fellow fight his way up from Dunmore tide?”
“Queer freak of luck!” said Art O’Connor. “Hold that rod a moment, Mickeen Oge. I want to look at something.”
His voice was strangely quiet, and there was an uncanny lack of enthusiasm about him. He turned away, crossed the gravel, scrambled up the slippery grass of the bank, and climbed on top of the drystone wall. There he balanced himself and, hand shading eyes, examined the prospect before him. There was only a curving slope of brown-green pasture shining under the low sun, with thin dark streaks where thistles cast long shadows. Beyond it, on one hand, was the belt of trees, and, on the other, over the lifting curve, the chimneys of the hotel showed half a mile away.
The field was empty of any living thing, but, as he looked, over the slope from the hotel a woman came strolling easily.
She was Kate O’Brien. O’Connor waited for her on top of the wall. She was clothed in some thin faintly-yellow stuff, and the thoroughbred lines of her and the depths in her eyes might make any man’s pulse stir. Her dark head was bare, and in her hand she swung an old panama. She must have been walking for some time, for there was the least delicate touch of color under the pallor of her face.
“You are looking in the wrong airt,” she called to him. “The bonny view is behind you. Here is only grass withered by the sun and thistles not shaken by any wind. What stand you there to see?”
She had intoned the words for him. He stared down at her intently.
“A woman clothed in strange raiment,” he said softly.
She smiled at him. “That woman is in the palace of a king—never in this place.”
“No. Thinner than that air shimmering above the trees, vanished like a dream—but the terrible beauty of her stays in my mind.”
“Ah-h!” said Kate O’Brien. “I was too hard on you last night, and your poor Yankee mind has given way. I am very sorry.”
“You may well be, if her blood is in you—and it is. She was of your race but ten times more beautiful—and nearly as wicked.”
She frowned up at him. “What in the world do you mean?”
“Never mind! I have caught the nicest grilse in the river.”
“And it has gone to your head! But where—oh, where? And on an evening like this, too. I must see it. Give me your hand!”
Her fingers grasped his, and with the ease of the country-bred she balanced on the wall, and, still holding his hand, leaped to the path with him, and slid down the grass to the gravel.
“My—oh, my!” she said, bending over the grilse. “Won’t the others be jealous!”
“As the devil himself—and small wonder,” said Mickeen Oge. “I’m surprised at you, Art O’Connor. Here you are with the first grilse of the season, and you as calm as a post.”
“Sorry! That fish gives me no kick.” He looked intently at the other. “Tell me, Flynn, is there a woman in these parts—young and very beautiful—who goes round with a bare head of copper-red hair, and a grass-green shawl on her shoulders?”
“My God!” Mickeen Oge’s eyes widened in horror.
Betty Caverley drew in her breath sharply, and Kate O’Brien cried out:
“What have you seen, Art O’Connor?”
“I have seen her.”
“Where—here?”
“Up there—I’ll tell you. Oh, I know the legend.” His voice was very serious, entirely hiding any emotion, and his words gave them a very vivid impression of what he had seen and felt.
“I was fishing out there in the middle of the pool, doing the best I knew, cursing myself for a mutt, wondering when I’d have resolution enough to give the darn thing up—same as you had, Flynn—and I decided to give it just one more whirl with a small lure Major MacDonald had tied for me, just ten last casts and no more. I didn’t come out of the water. I stood out there, thigh-deep, and changed shrimp for fly, and as I was testing the last knot I noticed quite suddenly that everything was strangely hushed all round me. Queerly still! Like that pause that comes in summer when the sun sets—and the sun was not yet set. Weirder than that. I had felt the same hush once before—in a three-quarter eclipse of the sun. A thrush had been singing in the trees over there across the water, and now no thrush was singing, and the murmur of the river down the run, though it had grown louder in the stillness, seemed to come from another world. It gave me a sort of forlorn feeling—as if I were a stranger in a lonely place under a light that never was on land or sea, and all that strange world watching me—and not caring—as I tugged at the last knot. I felt that someone was looking at the back of my neck—perhaps that was all.
“I turned round then and looked up—up there. And there, leaning on the wall was the woman—no ghost woman—flesh and blood, or I have no eyes to see—the sun shining on her red hair, and her scarf green as grass on her shoulders. She was not looking at me. She was looking over my head at the far side of the pool, and, as I watched her, she raised a white arm, and pointed. I looked where she pointed—out there under that rock—and I saw the tail-swirl of a half-risen fish. There it was—the first rise I had seen in all the afternoon. Half by instinct I pulled out yards of line and threw over it, saw the silver streak—and struck too soon. Missed it clean. I looked over my shoulder again, and the woman was still there and still pointing. I tried the fish again and then again, and the third time he came and I gave it him good and hard. You know how the shock of the check goes up your arms and makes your heart jump? It was then I yelled. That is all. . . . There is the grilse, and when I went to look, there was no woman any more . . . only, after a time, Miss O’Brien came walking across the field from the hotel. Did you see any woman, Miss O’Brien?”
“I saw no one,” said Kate O’Brien gravely; “but a woman could have reached the woods while you played the grilse.”
“That is so.” His eyes came round to Mickeen Oge. “I know the local legend, Flynn. Was it a hoax, or was the woman she whom you inadequately call the Red Girl?”
“You have seen someone that I do not know,” said Mickeen Oge sternly. “The game is hers and yours.”
“Very well! I will play it with her—flesh or spirit. But it is no game, either. I only saw her over my shoulder, but she was fit to sit with Mona Lisa amongst the rocks—more beautiful by far and no less wicked. A woman I never saw before, yet a woman strangely familiar—like a face out of a secret dream, perhaps the dream of the race, God save us!” He took a stride down to the margin of the pool and threw his hand out. An odd harsh challenge was in his voice. “If that woman’s face appeared in the depths of that pool a man might be impelled to dive to it—and drown, as men have drowned in the legend.”
He swung from them without another word or look, and stalked up the shore, ignoring his grilse, his rod, everything but his own concentration on something that had moved him deeply.
“He was touched to the quick,” said Betty Caverley, and then another thought struck her. She caught Mickeen Oge’s arm. “You must be v
ery careful, Michael.”
He relaxed at her touch. “All right, girl. I play no woman’s games—dead or alive.”
Kate O’Brien looked gloomily after Art O’Connor, some secret anger in her eyes. “Wicked as Mona Lisa!” she murmured. Then she smiled grimly. “Yes, Betty! for a hundred percent American he was touched deeply.”
Chapter III
I
MICKEEN OGE strode slowly, but not aimlessly, down a small wooded glen that angled west from the hotel. A lively runnel of water flowed and fell and tinkled below the path, and, two miles down, joined the main river. Some distance short of this junction the path turned from the stream and mounted amongst the trees, and Mickeen Oge went upwards with it.
At the edge of the trees, on the lip of the glen, he came suddenly on the grass-topped walls of the bailly yard of ruined Castle Aonach. A jagged gap in the thick masonry let him through to what was now only an acre of ragged grass, scattered with clumps of wild raspberry canes, and with big elder bushes growing out of the base of the walls. At the other side of this ragged acre rose the ancient keep pierced by a bold high arch and, to the right of this, a gaping doorway that led to the turret stairs and the broken battlements.
Mickeen Oge walked across the grass and through the gloom of the arch into the open beyond, and, surprisingly, there was the main river below him. The castle was perched on a promontory overhanging the water, and only a low shelter-wall fenced it from the steep rocky bank. He clambered over this shelter wall and down the rocks to the shelfy margin of the river, here forming a long, curving, sheltered pool, famous for the big fish it held.
Seating himself on a jut of boulder, Mickeen Oge slowly filled his pipe with cut plug. His face, ever smoothly austere, had now an added cast of gloom. He was waiting here for Art O’Connor, who was working the river downwards, and the American was a disturbance in his mind. He was such a likable man—and yet—? What did Mickeen Oge know about him? He said he was from the States, yet he had come straight to Lough Aonach from Canada, and Canada was British territory. How did he know about an out-of-the-way place like this? . . .
Very possibly, very naturally, Britain was interested in the underground republican movement in Ireland. She would use her own agents to find out what she could. Every one knew that Mickeen Oge Flynn was unchangeably republican; it was no secret that the old fighting organization was still active; many suspected that he controlled secret dumps of arms and munitions. Did O’Connor want to place these dumps? . . . He could try. . . .
As he set match to pipe a clink of shod shoes on stone came to his ears, and the man he was considering came round the curve of the shore, leisurely clumping along in thigh waders, his long rod like a spear above his head. Mickeen Oge nodded shortly in salutation.
Art O’Connor nodded back, smiled faintly, and turned to the river; but when he turned a troubled frown took the place of the smile.
“This the pool I should avoid?” he called over his shoulder.
“Why?”
“You know. Poul Cailin Rua—the Red Girl’s Pool.”
“You’ll know,” said Mickeen Oge.
“Here’s saying ‘How’ to it, at any rate.” His feet slipped smoothly through the shallow water, and his reel burred.
The lad could fish, sure enough, and had the fine leisurely patience of the true angler. There, now, was a nicely timed flick of the wrist that, delayed a split second, would break a hook barb on the boulders, and the fly at full stretch came down on the water like a caress. . . . A spy, too, must have the same leisurely patience and be acquainted of many arts. A man of indomitable hardihood, of infinite resource, his life on his sleeve and no weapon to guard it but his wit. . . .
Mickeen Oge, searching through his own mind, could discover no least resentment against the man. As a matter of fact, Mickeen Oge was here at Poul Cailin Rua as a self-appointed guardian. He was no believer in superstition, but there was something sinister and fatal in the legend of the Red Girl: she had been seen and men had drowned in that pool; and Mickeen Oge, half believing, half doubtful, would make sure that no fatality would take place while Art O’Connor fished the river. That was all.
So ran Mickeen Oge’s thoughts as he smoked and watched. So immersed was he in these thoughts that he did not notice the hush that came about him like a drift of cloud until Art O’Connor roused him by turning round in the water and staring at the high bank above his head.
Mickeen Oge turned and looked, too, and gooseflesh ran up his legs and loins.
“It is herself!” he exclaimed, and the astounding shock made him realize that he never had believed.
She leaned on the broken shelter-wall up there and looked out over his head at Art O’Connor. Her bare and shapely arms were over the green scarf that covered shoulders and bosom, and her red hair was like a flame. And she was beautiful—beautiful and tragic, her face like snow under sun, the light drowned in her eyes. A face that one has known in dreams, so familiar and so strange.
A splash in the pool behind him made him turn hastily and in fear.
Art O’Connor was coming into action. He charged for the shore so furiously that the water splashed over the tops of his waders, and spatters leaped above his head. Mickeen Oge again looked upwards. The Red Girl was gone.
II
Art O’Connor never hesitated. He did not even take time to lay down his best rod, but let it drop to shatter point across a rock. He faced the boulder-heaped bank and went upwards like a leopard.
The bank was steep and high, and the climb took him some time; his filled waders cumbered him, too; so that, when he half rolled, half vaulted over the shelter-wall there was nothing to be seen. He stood there for a moment breathing quickly. Before him, in front of the keep, was a wide spread of grass, and, beyond that, the belt of trees fringing the small glen. No living foot could have reached the trees in the time he had taken to climb the brae. It was the ruined castle—or nowhere.
At a lumbering run he went echoing under the arch to the grass-grown bailly. It was empty. And then the black gape leading to the turret stairs caught his eye. “Got you this time, my lady!” he said grimly.
In three minutes he came out through the ruined doorway, a puzzled frown on his face. In the broken-arched, roofless chambers there had been no woman hiding, there had been no place to hide in, and the dart of nesting swallows had told him that no living woman had climbed up there.
He stood and looked across the ragged bailly, estimating the distance to the breach in the far wall. Surely, not even the flight of a wood-nymph could have reached the gap before he had come through the arch? Slowly, now, he strode, the water swishing in his wading-boots, across the grass, and looked down through the breached wall amongst the trees of the glen. No use scouting down there. Again he surveyed the bailly with trained western eyes. . . .
“Ah!” He stiffened like a setter at point.
His eyes, practised in reading sign, narrowed on one spot. Down by the wall, not fifteen paces away, a thick elder bush grew out of the foundations, and there, on the ground below it, lay a freshly broken frond of green; and now those trained eyes saw where feet had trampled lightly over the grass. He walked evenly across and halted by the bush.
“Come out!” he invited quietly. “Come out and let us have a look at you!”
There was no response. If any nymph had been changed into that plumed elder, no leaf quivered.
“Right! We’ll take a pin to this periwinkle.”
He stepped quickly into the angle between bush and wall and pulled the branches aside. There was no one there.
There was a cavity in the wall behind the thickest of the foliage, and he bent forward and looked in. The cavity was barely a yard across and not more than half that in depth. The sides of it were grouted in in the cement-tough mortar of the old builders, but the back of it was built up carefully of unmortared stones.
For a long time he stayed bent over, looking into the hole, and a small grim smile came about his lips.
“Well, I’m damned!” swore Art O’Connor.
“You have found it, then,” said a quiet voice behind him.
III
He straightened up and turned round.
Mickeen Oge Flynn stood within three strides of him, feet apart, hands on hips, head forward, not angry, not belligerent, just watchful.
O’Connor’s eyes narrowed.
“Found what?”
“What you were looking for.”
“I see. Were you in this conspiracy against me, too?”
“I am in no conspiracy against you; but, if you want to know, I am against what England stands for in this country.”
Art O’Connor was puzzled for a moment, and then illumination came to him in a flash.
“Buenos días! I deserved it all.” He took a step forward and the Irishman’s shoulders stiffened. “Gently, Mickeen Oge Flynn! Take it easy for a moment!” They were close to each other now. “You did not set the Red Girl on me, did you?”
“Did you set her on yourself?”
“By gum! I believe I did. But let that be. I wasn’t looking for what you have hidden behind those stones. Let me show you what I was looking at. See!”
He turned and pulled aside the elder bushes, and Mickeen Oge looked over his shoulder into the cavity in the wall. He used exactly the same words that Art O’Connor had used.
“Well, I’m damned!”
“How nearly damned was I!” said Art O’Connor a little grimly.
Mickeen Oge leaned over and reached a hand into the cavity, but the other pressed shoulder against him.
“Wait! Leave them for the present. Two can play at this game.” He looked back at Mickeen Oge. “Suppose we talk this over?”
“It was a dangerous game, whoever played it,” said Mickeen Oge. “We’ll do more than talk it over, by God!”
“Listen, Flynn!” The American caught Mickeen Oge by the arm and drew him away, and as they moved across the grass their voices went on murmuring interestedly. And, presently, Mickeen Oge stopped to chuckle, and Art O’Connor laughed.
The Quiet Man and Other Stories Page 19