“Cheer up Art, old chap! Surely you, at any rate, have no cause to be down on your luck! Of all men that live, I should think you ought to be about the very happiest!”
“That’s it, old fellow,” I answered. “I fear that there must be something terrible coming. I shall never be quite happy till Norah and all of us are quite away from the Hill.”
“What on earth do you mean? Why, you have just bought the whole place!”
“It may seem foolish, Dick; but the words come back to me and keep ringing in my ears—‘The Mountain holds—and it holds tight.’” Dick laughed:—
“Well, Art, it is not my fault, or Mr. Caicy’s, if you don’t hold it tight. It is yours now, every acre of it; and, if I don’t mistake, you are going to make it in time—and not a long time either—into the fairest bower to which the best fellow ever brought the fairest lady! There now, Art, isn’t that a pretty speech?”
Dick’s words made me feel ashamed of myself, and I made an effort to pull myself together, which lasted until Dick and I said good-night.
CHAPTER XVI.
A GRIM WARNING.
I cannot say the night was a happy one. There were moments when I seemed to lose myself and my own anxieties in thoughts of Norah and the future, and such moments were sweet to look back on—then as they are now; but I slept only fitfully and dreamt frightfully.
It was natural enough that my dreams should centre around Knockcalltecrore; but there was no good reason why they should all be miserable or terrible. The Hill seemed to be ever under some uncomfortable or unnatural condition. When my dreams began, it was bathed in a flood of yellow moonlight, and at its summit was the giant Snake, the jewel of whose crown threw out an unholy glare of yellow light, and whose face and form kept perpetually changing to those of Murtagh Murdock.
I can now, with comparatively an easy effort, look back on it all, and disentangle or give a reason for all the phases of my thought. The snake “wid side whiskers” was distinctly suggested the first night I heard the legend at Mrs. Kelligan’s; the light from the jewel was a part of the legend itself; and so on with every fact and incident. Presently, as I dreamt, the whole Mountain seemed to writhe and shake as though the great Snake was circling round it, deep under the earth; and again this movement changed into the shifting of the bog. Then through dark shadows that lay athwart the hill I could see the French soldiers, with their treasure-chest, pass along in dusky, mysterious silence, and vanish in the hill side. I saw Murdock track them; and, when they were gone, he and old Moynahan—who suddenly and mysteriously appeared beside him—struggled on the edge of the bog, and, with a shuddering wail, the latter threw up his arms and sank slowly into the depths of the morass. Again Norah and I were wandering together, when suddenly Murdock’s evil face, borne on a huge serpent body, writhed up beside us; and in an instant Norah was whirled from my side and swept into the bog, I being powerless to save her or even help her.