“Then this is the best way over. Here, give me your hand, and be careful of that loose beam.”
They scrambled over the summit and, amid a shower of sliding bricks, slipped down on the other side. A dark figure lay stretched upon the stones, moving a little and still holding a flickering, lighted candle. It was Michael.
“Yes, Miss Betsey dear,” he affirmed cheerfully, when they had at last brought him to recognize who they were, “and I’ve a broken leg I’m thinking from the way it feels by not having any feeling at all. And will you hold up the candle and see what is running down my face?”
“Oh, Michael, Michael, what were you doing, how could you be so foolish?” Betsey reproached him; “your head is cut and what is running over your face is blood.” She began, forthwith, to try to tie it up with her handkerchief.
“Then glory be to all the Saints,” was Michael’s unexpectedly joyful reply; “there is nothing that will break the charm of ill luck like the letting of blood. It will all go well now.”
Betsey looked helplessly at David. Was the poor old man gone out of his wits entirely?
“Don’t you know better than to risk your life over such nonsense? Won’t you ever learn better, Michael?” David said severely, although the pathetic broken figure on the stones was one to call forth only pity.
“Yes,” assented the old Irishman meekly, “I know better and the priest is always telling me so. But yet—when there’s trouble to them you love and seemingly no way out of it, why, you look back at the old fancies and wonder if they were not true after all, and you feel the need to try this thing or to try that thing, just in case there might be help in it.”
“And what were you doing here?” David asked.
“It is on this house that the ill luck lies, for it was in its burning that the evil fortune began and it is only through its building up again that happiness can come back to Miss Miranda. And so—and so—just to make the luck change, it is the old way to take a candle in your hand and to walk through every part of the house saying spells as you go. And the last of the spells must be said in the hour before midnight in the dark of the moon. But Miss Betsey stopped me,” he concluded regretfully. “This was to be the last night, yet I did not get the whole of the way.”