“He was a strange, moody, solitary man, pitied, though secretly dreaded, by his neighbours. They might have credited him with possession—particularly with a bad local form of possession; to suspect it was enough in itself to keep their mouths shut from questioning him, or their ears from inviting confession of his sufferings. For, so their surmise were correct, and he in the grip of the hurlers, a word wrung from him out of season would have brought the whole village under the curse of its dead.”
I broke in here. “Kelvin, for the Lord’s sake! you are too cimmerian. Titillate your glooms with a touch of that spiritual laughter.”
Agreeably to my banter, he smiled.
“There’s fun in it,” he said; “only it’s rather ghastly fun. What do you say to the rival teams meeting in one or other of the village graveyards, and whacking a skull about with long shank-bones?”
“I should say, It doesn’t surprise me in the least. Anything turning upon a more esoteric psychology would. What pitiful imaginations you Christmas-number seers are possessed of!”
“I dare say. But I’m not imagining. It’s you practical souls that imagine—that common sense, for instance, is reason; that the top-hat is the divinely-inspired shibboleth of the chosen; and so on. But you don’t disappoint me. Shall I go on?”
“O, yes! go on.”
“The hurlers meet under the full moon, they say, in one or other of the rival graveyards; but they must have a living bachelor out of each parish to keep goal for them.”
“I see! ‘They say’? I see!”
“The doom of the poor wretch thus chosen is, as you may suppose, an appalling one. He must go, or suffer terrors damning out of reason. There is no power on earth can save him. One night he is sitting, perhaps, in his cabin at any peaceful work. The moor, mystic under the moonlight, stretches from miles away up to his walls, surrounding and isolating them. His little home is an ark, anchored amid a waste and silent sea of flowers. Suddenly the latch clinks up, advances, falls. The night air breathing in passes a presence standing in the opening, and quivers and dies. Stealthily the door gapes, ever so little, ever so softly, and a face, like the gliding rim of the moon, creeps round its edge. It is the face, he recognizes appalled, of one long dead. The eyeplaces are black hollows; but there is a movement in them like the glint of water in a deep well. A hand lifts and beckons. The goal-keeper is chosen, and must go. For seven years, it is said, he must serve the hurling-matches of the dead.”