“Beautiful the beginning of love,
A man and a woman and the birds of Angus above them.”
GAELIC BARD.
The birth of the child Deirdre, daughter of the chief poet of Ulla, was attended with a great portent, for the child shrieked from the mother’s womb. Cathvah and the Druids were consulted concerning that omen. They addressed themselves to their art of divination, and having consulted their oracles and gods and familiar spirits, they gave a clear counsel to the Ultonians.
“This child,” they said, “will become a woman, in beauty surpassing all the women who have ever been born or will be born. Her union with a man will be a cause of great sorrow to the Ultonians. Let her, therefore, be exposed after birth; or, if you would not slay the Arch-Poet’s only child, let her be sternly immured; let her be reared to womanhood in utter and complete and inviolable solitude, and live and die in her virginity.”
The Ultonians determined that the child should live and be immured. These things took place in the reign of Factna the Righteous, father of Concobar. When the child was born she was called Deirdre. The Ultonians appointed for her a nurse and tutoress named Levarcam. They built for her and for the nurse a strong dun in a remote forest and set a ward there, and they made a solemn law enjoining perpetual virginity on the child of ill omen, and the Druids shed a zone of terror round the dun.
Concobar Mac Nessa in the wide circuit of his thoughts consulted always for the inviolability of that law, and the stern maintenance of the watching and warding.
Unseen and unobserved, forgotten by all save the wise elders of the Ultonians and by Concobar their King, whose thoughts ranged on all sides devising good for the Red Branch, the child Deirdre grew to be a maiden. Though her beauty was extraordinary, yet her mind was as beautiful as her form, so that the Lady Levarcam loved her exceedingly.
One day when the first flush of early womanhood came upon the maiden, she said to her tutoress as they sat together and conversed—
“Are all men like those our guards who defend us against savage beasts and the merciless Fomorians, dear Levarcam?”
“Those our guards are true and brave men,” said Levarcam.
“Surely they are,” said the girl, “and we lack no courtesy and due attention at their hands, but dear foster-mother, my question is not answered. Maybe it is not to be answered and that I am curious overmuch. Are all men grim, grave, and austere, wearing rugged countenances scored with ancient wounds, and bearing each man upon his shoulders the weight of some fearful responsibility? Are all men like that, dear Levarcam?”