“More?” I asked.
Her manner now showed the utmost dejection. Her eyes were downcast, and as I regarded her I asked myself why it was that one so fair should have dark, almost black eyelashes—eyelashes which gave a strange shadow to her eyes. Her next words brought me quickly out of this musing.
“The ’Wise Man’” said she, “is set against her going. His words are of darkness and blood, and he declares that he sees danger for us all in the near future. I’m afraid—you know he sees with other eyes than ours.”
And she said this with such evident terror that inwardly, but not without some dread, I cursed the “Wise Man,”—a certain Teige O’Toole, called “Teige of the Open Vision” by the people, who counted him to be a seer and a prophet. He was certainly skilled in many things, and his knowledge was not as the knowledge of other men.
As she stood beside me, wistfully, entreatingly, and fearfully, I pondered for a brief space and then I said—
“I will go and speak with Teige O’Toole, and will return anon,” and forthwith went in search of him.
I found him sitting on a rock, looking out to sea, murmuring disconsolately to himself. Straightway I asked him what it was that he had to say against Grace O’Malley’s intended visit to Galway, but he would vouchsafe no reply other than the awesome words which he kept on repeating and repeating—
“Darkness and blood; then a little light; blood and darkness, then again light—but darkness were better.”
Whereat I shuddered, feeling an inward chill; yet I begged of him not once, nor twice, to make plain his meaning to me. He would not answer, so that I lost patience with him, and had he not been an aged man and an uncanny I would have shaken the explanation of his mysterious words out of his lips, and, as it was, was near doing so.
Rising quickly from the stone whereon he had been sitting, he moved away with incredible swiftness as if he had read my thoughts, leaving me staring blankly after him.