It is not so easy to understand how, with that ideal Voter—that stern unbending moralist—before his eyes, he should feel that there was a great need for him to be possessed of money before offering himself to any constituency. The fact remained, however, that everyone to whom he had confided his Parliamentary aspirations, had assured him at the outset that money had to be secured before a constituency could be reckoned on. His friend Edmund Airey had still further impressed upon him this fact; and now he had made up his mind that his aspirations should not be discouraged through the lack of money.
He would ask Helen Craven that very night if she would have the goodness to marry him.
CHAPTER VII.—ON THE ADVANTAGES OF A FULL MOON.
WHY the fact of his having made up his mind to ask Miss Craven who, without being an American, still possessed many qualities which are generally accepted as tending to married happiness, should cause him to feel a great longing to leave Castle Innisfail, its occupants, and its occupations behind him for evermore, it is difficult to explain on any rational grounds. That feeling was, however, upon him, and he strode away across the billowy moorland in the direction of the cliffs of the fjord known as Lough Suangorm.
The moon was at its full. It had arisen some little way up the sky and was showering its red gold down the slopes of the two cone-shaped mountains that guard the pass of Lamdhu; the deep glen was flooded with moonlight—Harold could perceive in its hollows such objects as were scarcely visible on the ordinary gray days of the West of Ireland. Then he walked until he was on the brink of the great cliffs overhanging the lough. From the high point on which he stood he could follow all the curves of the lough out to the headlands at its entrance seven miles away. Beyond those headlands the great expanse of sea was glittering splendidly in the moonlight, though the moon had not risen high enough to touch the restless waters at the base of the cl iffs on which he stood. The waters were black as they struggled within their narrow limits and were strangled in the channel. Only a white thread of surf marked the breaking place of the waves upon the cliffs.
He went down the little track, made among the rocks of the steep slope, until he reached the natural cavern that bore the name of the Banshee’s Cave.
It was scarcely half-way up the face of the cliff. From that hollow in the rocks the descent to the waters of the lough was sheer; but the cave was easily accessible by a zig-zag path leading up from a small ledge of rocks which, being protected by a reef that started up abruptly half a dozen yards out in the narrow channel, served as a landing place for the fishing boats, of which there were several owned in the tiny village of Carrigorm.
He stood at the entrance to the cavern, thinking, not upon the scene which, according to the boatman’s story, had been enacted at the place several hundreds—perhaps thousands (the chronology of Irish legends is vague)—of years before, but upon his own prospects.