“No, no!” he whispered anxiously, clutching my wrist more tightly, “he knows nothing about it; he wasn’t here. No one knows but Mary Hourihane, and it was all her fault. Owen!” he cried, his voice rising hysterically, “don’t stare at me! I declare to God I never did anything to you until she came in and asked me to help her to take you—there—out through that window—out to Poul-na-coppal.” He dragged me from the window into the dark corner by the fireplace. “Hide there! Be quick! lest she should see you!” he panted, his teeth chattering, and the perspiration breaking out on his forehead. “I hear her coming. There she is!” fixing frenzied eyes on the wall opposite. “Look at the bog-mould on her hands. She says she did it for my sake! Don’t let her come near me; she will put her arms round my neck, and I shall die!” He let go my hand, and made a rush to the window. “She is out there too!” he said, with an awful cry, turning back and cowering again in the corner by the fireplace; “and there—and there; she is everywhere! Don’t leave me, Owen!”
But his appeal did not stop me in my flight from the room for help.
CHAPTER VIII.
POUL-NA-COPPAL.
“The rose-winged hours that flutter in the van
Of Love’s unquestioning, unrevealèd span—
Visions of golden futures; or that last
Wild pageant of the accumulated past
That clangs and flashes for a drowning man.”
“Wenn ich in deine Augen seh
So schwindet all’ mein Leid und Weh.”
I am not very clear as to what happened next, Mrs. Rourke told me afterwards that I had burst into the kitchen with “a face on me like death,” only able to say, “The master—go to the master!”