“Look up. Behold your son’s head!”
Sorley Boy, stood, as did we, and looked up. There on a pole, rocking in the breeze, above the city gate, looked down upon us a head, livid and scarred, with eyes set and tawny locks streaming in the wind. ’Twas a terrible ghastly sight! for, battered as it was, even I could recognise the once noble features of Alexander McDonnell, as I had seen him last, reeling under the cowardly blow of that foul Englishman.
The old chief uttered a cry scarcely less terrible to hear than the head was to see. Then, suddenly commanding himself, he blazed round on the Deputy and hissed through his teeth:
“My son hath many heads!”
I never saw a man change colour as did Sir John Perrott when he met that look and heard those bitter words. Men say he went home that afternoon with that look burned into his breast, and those words dinging in his ears. Nor, go where he would, could he escape the one or the other. They possessed him waking and sleeping, in council and in war, at home and abroad. And, when at last he died, some say he was found crouched in a corner of his room with his fingers over his eyes and his thumbs on his ears.
Nor, after what I saw, did I find it in my heart to pity him.
As for Sorley Boy, he walked out of Dublin like a man in a dream. None of us durst speak to him, or say so much as a word in his hearing. Nor had we the heart to do it. Ludar with his clenched teeth looked straight before him; and the Scots who followed, only half comprehending what had happened, dropped into sullen silence, and gave no sound but the dull beat of their steps on the road.
About an hour beyond Dublin, Sorley Boy halted and turned to Ludar.
“Ludar McDonnell,” said he, sternly, “we part here. I have no son—no son. Farewell.”
And he and the soldiers marched on without another word, leaving Ludar and me looking after them, and marvelling if all this were what it seemed or some horrid vision.