“Don’t talk like that!” she said, in half command, half entreaty. “’T is not trade or work or mines that keeps a nation alive when ’tis fit to die. One can have them all, and riches untold, and still sink wid a broken heart. ’T is nearly three hundred years since the first of the exiled O’Mahonys sailed away yonder—from Skull and Crookhaven they wint—to fight and die in Spain. Thin others wint—Conagher and Domnal and the rest—to fight and die in France; and so for centuries the stream of life has flowed away from Ireland wid every other family the same as wid ours. What nation under the sun could stand the drain? ’T is twelve years now since the best and finest of them all sailed away to fight in France, and to—to die—oh, wirra!—who knows where? So”—her great eyes flashed proudly through their tears—“don’t talk of mines to me! ’T is too much like the English!”
Bernard somehow felt himself grown much taller and older as he listened to this outburst of passionate lamentation, with its whiplash end of defiance, and realized that this beautiful girl was confiding it all to him. He threw back his shoulders, and laid a hand gently on her arm.
“Come, come,” he pleaded, with a soothing drawl, “don’t give away like that! We’ll take a bite of something to eat, and get down again where the grass grows. Why, you’ve no idea—the bottom of a coal-mine is sociable and lively compared with this. I’d get the blues myself up here, in another half-hour!”
A few steps were taken in silence, and then the young man spoke again, with settled determination in his voice.
“You can say what you like,” he ground out between his teeth, “or, rather, you needn’t say any more than you like; but I’ve got my own idea about this convent business, and I don’t like it, and I don’t for a minute believe that you like it. Mind, I’m not asking you to tell me whether you do or not—only I want you to say just this: Count on me as your friend—call it cousin, too, if you like; keep me in mind as a fellow who’ll go to the whole length of the rope to help you, and break the rope like a piece of paper twine if it’s necessary to go further. That’s all.”
It is the property of these weird mountain-tops to make realities out of the most unlikely things. On a lower terrestrial level Kate’s mind might have seen nothing but fantastic absurdity in this proffer of confidential friendship and succor, from a youth whom she met twice. Here in the finer and more eager air, lifted up to be the companion of clouds, the girl looked with grave frankness into his eyes and gave him her hand in token of the bond.
Without further words, they rejoined John Fat, and sat down to lunch.
Indeed, there were few further words during the afternoon which John Pat was not privileged to hear. He sat with them during the meal, in the true democratic spirit of the sept relation, and he kept close behind them on their rambling, leisurely descent of the mountain-side. From the tenor of their talk he gathered vaguely that the strange young man was some sort of relation from America, and as relations from America present, perhaps, the one idea most universally familiar to the Irish peasant’s mind, his curiosity was not aroused. Their conversation, for the most part, was about that remarkable O’Mahony who had gone away years ago and whom John Pat only dimly remembered.
A couple of miles from Muirisc, the homeward-bound trio—for Bernard had tacitly made himself a party to the entire expedition and felt as if he, too, were going home—encountered, in the late afternoon, two men sitting by the roadside ditch.