Tales of Our Coast

by Unknown

III

A young woman of the rarest beauty, tall and slender, and with the carriage of a great lady, came into the chamber and moved across to the high, carved chair which Murtogh made ready for her, and seated herself upon it as upon a throne. She had a pale fair skin, and her hair, coiled heavily in plaits upon her shoulders, was of the hue of a red harvest sun. There were jewels in this hair and upon her throat and hands, and her long robes were of rich shining stuffs. A chain of wooden beads, with a cross of gold at the end, hung from her girdle, and she gathered this in her fingers as she sat.

The boy, Donogh baoth, came with her, and crouched in humility on the floor at her side. His thick form and dark hair, and his over-large head, spoke a likeness now to his father which was not to be noted before. When, as if under the spell of her attraction, he nestled nearer the lady's chair, and touched her garment with his hand, she drew it away.

Murtogh Mordha, before he took his seat again, and leant back to half lie upon the skins thrown over it, told her the Spaniard's name, and explained to her his errand. The Spaniard, bowing himself low, sank upon one knee, and reverently kissed her hand, as Murty had seen his father kiss the ring of the Bishop of Ross. He was proud to observe this, because his wife was holier and more saintly still than any bishop.

The lady smiled upon the Spaniard, and all that she said to him, and he to her, was in his tongue. 'I cannot speak it well,' she said. Her voice had the sweetness of a perfume in the air. 'I lived at Seville, in the old convent there, for only two years. I have no joy of remembrance now, save in the peace and charm of those years there; but I fear my memory of the dear speech is dimmed. But I will listen with all my ears,—and oh, so gladly!'

She fastened her regard upon his eyes,—the great, rolling, midnight eyes,—and held it there, that she might the better follow his speech.

'Beautiful lady,' the Spaniard said, 'I learn only now the power our language, spoken by such lips, may have to enthrall the hearing. Condone my error, I pray you, but I caught from Father Donatus that you were this strong chieftain's wife, and I see that you are his daughter; and even that is strange, to look upon him and you!

'I am his wife, but only in name, naught else,' she answered. The wave of comprehension sweeping over the surface of the Spaniard's eyes made instant confidence between them. 'I am in captivity here. He is a pirate, a Goth, a murderous barbarian. He and his savages here—but of this more a little hence. I beg you now to speak something of your mission,—your errand here. He is as helpless to follow our words as one of those hounds; but no dog is keener to suspicion.'

The Spaniard, with eager swiftness of speech, piled one upon another the curtailed topics of his business. The lady, moving her fingers along the beads, gleaned the narrow pith of it, and dressed it forth in new phrases for the lord of Dunlogher.

'The King of Spain will send this month,' she said in the Irish, 'a mighty army to drive the heretic English to the last man from this Island of Saints. They have wounded God too long! The last drop of Heavens patience is dried up by their crimes. Their Queen was not born in lawful wedlock, and the Blessed Sacraments are daily profaned by her and her accursed people. Those who sustain and honour God now will be sustained and honoured by Him through glorious Eternity.'

'These things are well known to me,' said Murtogh. 'I would not need the King of Spain to tell them to me. How will he speak concerning myself?'

The lady was not afraid to smile into the eyes of the Spaniard. 'You are to speak after a moment or two,' she told him, with a calm voice; 'but hear me this little first. My heart is broken here. I do not know how I have had the courage to live. These jewels I wear, the fabrics of my raiment, the wines on the board yonder, are all the booty of blood-stained waves down at the foot of this terrible cliff. He and his savages burn false lights, and lure ships to the rocks, and rob and murder their people. It was thus unhappily I came here, and in fear of my life, while I was still half dead from the water, I suffered the marriage words to be read over me,—but now you must speak.'

'I would show you tears rather than words, dear lady,' the Spaniard said; 'and blows on your behalf more preferably than either. Father Donatus whispered the tithe of this to me. The whole truth burns like fire in my heart. As my fathers gave their life blood to drive the infidel from Grenada,—so I lay my own poor life at your dear feet. If aught but harm to you could come from it, I would slay him now where he lolls there on the skins. He is looking at you now, waiting for you to speak.'

'The King of Spain has heard much of you,' she began in the Irish, without turning her head. 'He is filled with admiration for your strength and valour. He desires deeply to know what you will be doing. When you will take arms, and join him with your great might in the battles, then there cannot be any doubt of his victory.'

'That it is easy to see,' replied Murtogh. 'But the King of Spain's battles are not my battles. There would be some reason to be given, to call me out for his wars. The English will be doing me no hurt. They cannot come here to me, by water or by land; and if they did I would not let any of them depart alive. For what cause should I go to them? Let the King of Spain tell me what it would be in his mind to do in my behalf, when I did this thing for him.'

The lady spoke to the Spaniard. 'The last of my people are killed. They would not have seemed different to you perhaps,—to you who were bred in the gentle graces of Spain,—but they were not the ferocious barbarians these O'Mahonys are. My father was learned in Latin and English, and it was his dream that I should wed in Spain.'

'Oh, rapturous vision!' said Don Tello, with new flames kindling in his eyes. 'And if it shall be proved prophetic as well, beautiful lady! Something of this, too, the priest whispered; but the precious words return to me as your dear lips breathed them forth,—"wife only in name." I long to hear them once again.'

The lady repeated them, with tender deliberation, and a languorous gleam in her blue eyes began to answer his burning gaze. 'I have held the fierce beast at arm's length,' she said, 'because he is also a fool. I would give a year of my life to be able to laugh in his face, and slap these beads across it. I have told him—the blessed thought came to me even while we knelt at the altar together—that I am bound by a vow. His big empty head is open to all the fancies that fly. He believes that an enchanted woman drives up her horses from the bottom of the lake, down at the foot of the small tower here, every night for food; and he spreads corn for them which the thieves about him fatten on. He believes in witches rising from the sea, and leprechauns, and changelings, like any ignorant herdsman out in the bog, but he is a frightened Churchman, too. He believes that I am a saint!'

'As I swear by the grave of my mother, you are!' panted Don Tello. 'But speak now to him.'

'The King of Spain will do very great things in your behalf,' she recited, in Murtogh's tongue. 'He will make you of the rank of a commander in his armies, and he will ennoble you.'

'I am noble now,' Murtogh made comment, 'as noble as the King of Spain himself. I am not a MacCarthy or an O'Driscoll, that I would be craving titles to my name.'

'Then he will send large rich ships here,' she began again, with weariness in her tone, 'to bring you costly presents. And the Pope, he will grant you ten years' indulgence,—or it may be twenty.'

'Ask him,' broke in Murtogh, sitting up with a brightened face, his hand outstretched to secure silence for the thought that stirred within him,—'ask if the Holy Father would be granting just the one spiritual favour I would beg. Will this gentleman bind the King of Spain to that?'

'And may I wholly trust,' she asked the Spaniard, with half-closed eyes, through which shone the invitation of her mood, 'may I trust in your knightly proffer of help? Do not answer till I have finished. You are the first who has come to me—here in this awful dungeon—and I have opened my heart to you as perhaps I should not. But you have the blood of youth in your veins, like me; you are gallant and of high lineage; you are from the land where chivalry is the law of gentle life,—is it true that you will be my champion?'

The Spaniard rose with solemn dignity, though his great eyes flashed devouringly upon her, and his breast heaved under its cuirass. He half lifted his sword from the sheath, and kissed the cross of its hilt. 'Oh, my beloved, I swear!' he said, in sombre earnestness.

She translated the action and utterance to Murtogh. 'Whatever of a spiritual nature you would crave of his Holiness he would grant.'

'But it would be a cruel time of waiting, to send all the long way to Rome and back,' he objected, 'and this matter lies like lead upon my soul.'

She looked up into the Spaniard's eyes, and let her own lashes tremble, and fed the ravening conflagration of his gaze with a little sigh. 'It would be very sweet to believe,' she murmured, 'too sweet for sense, I fear me. Nay, Don Tello, I need not such a world of persuasion—only—only—lift your right hand, with thumb and two fingers out, and swear again. And say, "Bera, I swear!"'

'It is your name?' he asked, and as she closed her eyes in assent, and slowly opened them to behold his oath, he lifted the fingers and waved them toward her, and passionately whispered, 'Bera, queen of my Heaven, star of my soul, I swear!'

'That is the sign of the Pope himself,' she explained, with indifference, to Murtogh. 'Whatever wish you offered up you have it already granted. It is Don Tello who bears the holy authority from the Pope.'

The lord of Dunlogher hurled himself to his feet with a boisterous energy before which the lady, wondering, drew herself away. He stretched his bared arms towards her, then flung them upward as in invocation to the skies. The beatitude of some vast triumph illumined his glance.

'Oh, then, indeed, I am Murty Mordha!' he cried. 'It is I who am prouder than all the Kings on earth! It is I who have won my love! Oh, glory to the Heavens that send me this joy! Glory and the praise of the saints! Glory! Glory!'

The rhapsody was without meaning to the Spaniard. He stared in astonishment at the big chieftain with the shining countenance who shouted with such vehemence up at the oaken roof. Turning a glance of inquiry at the lady, he saw that she had grown white-faced, and was cowering backward in her chair.

'Our Lady save us!' she gasped at him in Spanish. 'He has asked the Pope to absolve me from my vow.'

Don Tello, no wiser, put his hand to his sword. 'Tell me quickly, what it is? What am I to do?' he demanded of her.

Murtogh, with a smile from the heart moistening his eyes and transfiguring all his face, strode to the Spaniard, and grasped his reluctant hand between his own broad palms, and gripped it with the fervour of a giant.

'I would have you tell him,' he called out to the Lady Bera. 'Tell him that he has no other friend in any land who will do for him what Murty Mordha will be doing. I will ride with him into the battle, and take all his blows on my own back. I will call him my son and my brother. Whatever he will wish, I will give it to him. And all his enemies I will slay and put down for him to walk upon. Oh, Bera, the jewel restored to me, the beautiful gem I saved from the waters, tell him these things for me! Why will your lips be so silent? Would they be waiting for my kisses to waken them? And Donogh, son of mine, come hither and take my other son's hand. I will hear you swear to keep my loyalty to him the same as myself. And, Owny Hea,—hither, man! You cannot see my benefactor, the man I will be giving my life for, but you have heard his voice. You will not forget it.'

The absence of all other sound of a sudden caught Murtogh's ear, and checked his flow of joyous words. He looked with bewilderment at the figure of his wife in the chair, motionless with clenched hands on her knees, and eyes fixed in a dazed stare upon vacancy. He turned again, and noted that Owny Hea had come up to the Spaniard, and was standing before him so close that their faces were near touching.

The old blind man had the smile of an infant on his withered face. He lifted his left hand to the Spaniard's breast and passed it curiously over the corselet and its throat-plate and arm-holes, muttering in Irish to himself, 'I will not forget. I will not at all forget.'

A zigzag flash of light darted briefly somewhere across Murtogh's vision. Looking with more intentness he saw that both the blind man's hands were at the arm-pit of the Spaniard, and pulled upon something not visible. Don Tello's big eyes seemed bursting from their black-fringed sockets. His face was distorted, and he curled the fingers of his hand like stiffened talons, and clawed once into the air with them. Then Owny Hea pushed him, and he pitched sprawling against Murtogh's legs, and rolled inert to the floor. His hot blood washed over Murtogh's sandalled feet.

A woman's shriek of horror burst into the air, and the hounds moaned and glided forward. Murtogh did not know why he stood so still. He could not rightly think upon what was happening, or put his mind to it. The bones in his arms were chilled, and would not move for him. He gazed with round eyes at Owny, and at the red dripping knife which the bard stretched out to him. He felt the rough tongue of a dog on his ankle. The dark corners of the chamber seemed to be moving from him a long distance away. There was a spell upon him, and he could not tremble.

The voice of Owny Hea came to him, and though it was soundless, like the speech of Dreamland, he heard all its words; 'Murtogh son of Teige, I have slain your guest for the reason that I have the Spanish, and I knew the meaning of his words to this woman, and he could not live any longer. The liathan priest, when he would be going, told this stranger that she you called your wife was your enemy, and made a mockery of you, and would give ear gladly to any means of dishonouring you. And the liathan priest spoke truly. While the woman repeated lies to you of the King of Spain and the Pope, she whispered foul scandal of you, and wicked love-words to that dog's-meat at your feet. It is I, Owen son of Aodh, who tell you these things. And now you know what you have to do!'

Murtogh turned slowly to the lady. She lay, without motion, in her chair, her head limp upon her shoulder, and the whiteness of sea foam on her cheek. Thoughts came again into his brain.

'I have the wisest mind of all in my family,' he said; 'I know what it is I will be doing.'

He drew the short sword from his girdle, and put his nail along its edge.

'Donogh baoth,' he said to his son, 'go below and seek out Conogher tuathal and Shane buidhe, and bid them seize the liathan priest between them, and bring him to me here where I am. And you will take some sleep for yourself then, for it is a late hour.'

The lad looked at the pale lady with the closed eyes, and at the sword in his father's hand. He set his teeth together, and lifted his head.

'I am of years enough to see it all,' he said. 'I have no sleep on my eyes.'

Murtogh bent over the corpse at his feet, and caressed the boy's head with his hand. 'I will not call you baoth (simple) any more,' he said, fondly. 'You are my true son, and here is my ring for your finger, and you may return with them when they fetch me my liathan cousin.'