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B M 1D^ 177

STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN
THE SECRET ROSE
ROSA ALCHEMICA

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

MBW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

THE SECRET ROSE

ROSA ALCHEMICA

BY

W. B. YEATS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1914

AU rightt reserved

New and Retibeb Edition
Copyright, 1914,

By the macmillan company.

Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1914.

KorbiaaD ^tees

J. S. Cushlng Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

■ "6

CONTENTS

PASB

STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN ... 1

Red Hanrahan 3

The Twisting of the Rope .... 22

' Hanrahan and Cathleen the Daughter of -

hoolihan 35

Red Hanrahan's Curse 42

Hanrahan' 3 Vision 64

The Death of Hanrahan .... 64

Dedication to A. E 77

THE SECRET ROSE 79

To the Secret Rose 81

The Crucifixion of the Outcast . . 83

Out of the Rose 99

The Wisdom of the King . . . .112

The Heart of the Spring .... 124
The Curse of the Fires and of the

Shadows 134

The Old Men of the Twilight . . . 145

Where there is Nothing, there is God . 154
Proud Costello, MacDermot's Daughter

AND the Bitter Tongue .... 163

ROSA ALCHEMICA 189

STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

I owe thanks to Lady Gregory, who helped me
to rewrite The Stories of Red Hanrahan in the
beautiful country speech of Kiliartan, and
nearer to the tradition of the people among whom
he, or some likeness of him, drifted and is
remembered.

RED HANRAHAN

Haneahan, the hedge schoolmaster, a
tall, strong, red-haired young man, came
into the bam where some of the men of the
village were sitting on Samhain Eve. It
had been a dwelling-house, and when the
man that owned it had built a better one,
he had put the two rooms together, and
kept it for a place to store one thing or
another. There was a fire on the old
hearth, and there were dip candles stuck
in bottles, and there was a black quart
bottle upon some boards that had been
put across two barrels to make a table.
Most of the men \yere sitting beside the
fire, and one of them was singing a long
wandering song, about a Munster man
and a Connaught man that were quarrel-
ling about their two provinces.

Hanrahan went to the man of the house
and said, ' I got your message ' ; but when
he had said that, he stopped, for an old
3

4 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

mountainy man that had a shirt and
trousers of unbleached flannel, and that
was sitting by himself near the door, was
looking at him, and moving an old pack
of cards about in his hands and muttering.
'Don't mind him,' said the man of the
house; 'he is only some stranger came in
awhile ago, and we bade him welcome, it
being Samhain night, but I think he is not
in his right wits. Listen to him now and
you will hear what he is saying.'

They Ustened then, and they could hear
the old man muttering to himself as he
turned the cards, 'Spades and Diamonds,
Courage and Power; Clubs and Hearts,
Knowledge and Pleasure.'

'That is the kind of talk he has been
going on with for the last hour,' said the
man of the house, and Hanrahan turned
his eyes from the old man as if he did not
like to be looking at him.

'I got your message,' Hanrahan said
then; ' "he is in the barn with his three
first cousins from Kilchriest," the messen-
ger said, "and there are some of the
neighbours with them."'

RED HANRAHAN 5

' It is my cousin over there is wanting to
see you,' said the man of the house, and
he called over a young frieze-coated man,
who was Ustening to the song, and said,
'This is Red Hanrahan you have the
message for.'

'It is a kind message, indeed,' said the
young man, 'for it comes from your sweet-
heart, Mary Lavelle.'

'How would you get a message from her,
and what do you know of her ? '

'I don't know her, indeed, but I was in
Loughrea yesterday, and a neighbour of
hers that had some deahngs with me was
saying that she bade him send you word,
if he met anyone from this side in the
market, that her mother has died from
her, and if you have a mind yet to join
with herself, she is wilhng to keep her
word to you.'

'I will go to her indeed,' said Hanrahan.

'And she bade you make no delay, for if
she has not a man in the house before the
month is out, it is hkely the httle bit of
land will be given to another.'

When Hanrahan heard that, he rose up

6 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

from the bench he had sat down on. 'I
will make no delay indeed/ he said, 'there
is a full moon, and if I get as far as Gil-
chreist to-night, I will reach to her before
the setting of the sun to-morrow.'

When the others heard that, they began
to laugh at him for being in such haste to
go to his sweetheart, and one asked him if
he would leave his school in the old lime-
kiln, where he was giving the children such
good learning. But he said the children
would be glad enough in the morning to
find the place empty, and no one to keep
them at their task; and as for his school
he could set it up again in any place, hav-
ing as he had his little inkpot hanging from
his neck by a chain, and his big Virgil and
his primer in the skirt of his coat.

Some of them asked him to drink a glass
before he went, and a young man caught
hold of his coat, and said he must not leave
them without singing the song he had made
in praise of Venus and of Mary Lavelle.
He drank a glass of whiskey, but he said he
would not stop but would set out on his
journey.

RED HANRAHAN ,7

'There's time enough, Red Hanrahan,'
said the man of the house. 'It will be
time enough for you to give up sport when
you are after your marriage, and it might be
a long time before we will see you again.'

'I will not stop,' said Hanrahan; 'my
mind would be on the roads all the time,
bringing me to the woman that sent for me,
and she lonesome and watching till I come.'

Some of the others came about him,
pressing him that had been such a pleasant
comrade, so full of songs and every kind of
trick and fun, not to leave them till the
night would be over, but he refused them
all, and shook them off, and went to the
door. But as he put his foot over the
threshold, the strange old man stood up
and put his hand that was thin and
withered like a bird's claw on Hanrahan's
hand, and said: 'It is not Hanrahan, the
learned man and the great songmaker, that
should go out from a gathering like this, on
a Samhain night. And stop here, now,'
he said, 'and play a hand with me; and
here is an old pack of cards has done its
work many a night before this, and old as

8 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

it is, there has been much of the riches of
the world lost and won over it.'

One of the young men said, 'It isn't
much of the riches of the world has stopped
with yourself, old man,' and he looked at
the old man's bare feet, and they all
laughed. But Hanrahan did not laugh,
but he sat down very quietly, without a
word. Then one of them said, ' So you will
stop with us after all, Hanrahan ' ; and the
old man said: 'He will stop indeed, did
you not hear me asking him ? '

They all looked at the old man then as if
wondering where he came from. 'It is far
I am come,' he said, ' through France I have
come, and through Spain, and by Lough
Greine of the hidden mouth, and none has
refused me anything.' And then he was
silent and nobody liked to question him,
and they began to play. There were six
men at the boards playing, and the others
were looking on behind. They played
two or three games for nothing, and then
the old man took a fourpenny bit, worn
very thin and smooth, out from his pocket,
and he called to the rest to put something

RED HANRAHAN 9

on the game. Then they all put down
something on the boards, and little as it
was it looked much, from the way it was
shoved from one to another, first one man
winning it and then his neighbour. And
sometimes the luck would go against a man
and he would have nothing left, and then
one or another would lend him something,
and he would pay it again out of his
winnings, for neither good nor bad luck
stopped long with anyone.

And once Hanrahan said as a man would
say in a dream, 'It is time for me to be
going the road' ; but just then a good card
came to him, and he played it out, and all
the money began to come to him. And
once he thought of Mary Lavelle, and he
sighed ; and that time his luck went from
him, and he forgot her again.

But at last the luck went to the old man
and it stayed with him, and all they had
flowed into him, and he began to laugh
little laughs to himself, and to sing over
and over to himself, 'Spades and Dia-
monds, Courage and Power,' and so on, as
if it was a verse of a song.

10 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

And after a while anyone looking at the
men, and seeing the way their bodies were
rocking to and fro, and the way they kept
their eyes on the old man's hands, would
think they had drink taken, or that the
whole store they had in the world was put
on the cards ; but that was not so, for the
quart bottle had not been disturbed since
the game began, and was nearly full yet,
and all that was on the game was a few
sixpenny bits and shillings, and maybe a
handful of coppers.

' You are good men to win and good men
to lose,' said the old man, ^you have play in
your hearts.' He began then to shuffle the
cards and to mix them, very quick and fast,
till at last they could not see them to be
cards at all, but you would think him to be
making rings of fire in the air, as little lads
would make them with whirling a lighted
stick; and after that it seemed to them
that all the room was dark, and they could
see nothing but his hands and the cards.

And all in a minute a hare made a leap
out from between his hands, and whether
it was one of the cards that took that shape,

RED HANRAHAN 11

or whether it was made out of nothing in
the palms of his hands, nobody knew, but
there it was running on the floor of the
barn, as quick as any hare that ever lived.

Some looked at the hare, but more kept
their eyes on the old man, and while they
were looking at him a hound made a leap
out between his hands, the same way as the
hare did, and after that another hound and
another, till there was a whole pack of them
following the hare round and round the
barn.

The players were all standing up now,
with their backs to the boards, shrinking
from the hounds, and nearly deafened with
the noise of their yelping, but as quick as
the hounds were they could not overtake
the hare, but it went round, till at the last
it seemed as if a blast of wind burst open
the barn door, and the hare doubled and
made a leap over the boards where the men
had been playing, and went out of the door
and away through the night, and the
hounds over the boards and through the
door after it.

Then the old man called out, ' Follow the

12 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

hounds, follow the hounds, and it is a great
hunt you will see to-night,' and he went out
after them. But used as the men were to
go hunting after hares, and ready as they
were for any sport, they were in dread to go
out into the night, and it was only Hanra-
han that rose up and that said, 'I will
follow, I will follow on.'

'You had best stop here, Hanrahan,' the
young man that was nearest him said, ' for
you might be going into some great danger.'
But Hanrahan said, 'I will see fair play, I
will see fair play,' and he went stumbling
out of the door like a man in a dream, and
the door shut after him as he went.

He thought he saw the old man in front
of him, but it was only his own shadow that
the full moon cast on the road before him,
but he could hear the hounds crying after
the hare over the wide green fields of
Granagh, and he followed them very fast
for there was nothing to stop him; and
after a while he came to smaller fields that
had little walls of loose stones around them,
and he threw the stones down as he crossed
them, and did not wait to put them up

RED HANRAHAN 13

again ; and he passed by the place where
the river goes under ground at Ballylee,
and he could hear the hounds going before
him up towards the head of the river.
Soon he found it harder to run, for it was
uphill he was going, and clouds came over
the moon, and it was hard for him to see his
way, and once he left the path to take a
short cut, but his foot slipped into a bog-
hole and he had to come back to it. And
how long he was going he did not know, or
what way he went, but at last he was up on
the bare mountain, with nothing but the
rough heather about him, and he could
neither hear the hounds nor any other
thing. But their cry began to come to him
again, at first far off and then very near,
and when it came quite close to him, it
went up all of a sudden into the air, and
there was the sound of hunting over his
head ; then it went away northward till he
could hear nothing more at all. 'That's
not fair,' he said, that's not fair.' And
he could walk no longer, but sat down on
the heather where he was, in the heart of
Slieve Echtge, for all the strength had

14 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

gone from him, with the dint of the long
journey he had made.

And after a while he took notice that
there was a door close to him, and a light
coming from it, and he wondered that being
so close to him he had not seen it before.
And he rose up, and tired as he was he went
in at the door, and although it was night
time outside, it was daylight he found
within. And presently he met with an old
man that had been gathering summer
thyme and yellow flag-flowers, and it
seemed as if all the sweet smells of the
summer were with them. And the old
man said : ' It is a long time you have been
coming to us, Hanrahan the learned man
and the great songmaker.'

And with that he brought him into a very
big shining house, and every grand thing
Hanrahan had ever heard of, and every
colour he had ever seen, were in it. There
was a high place at the end of the house,
and on it there was sitting in a high chair a
woman, the most beautiful the world ever
saw, having a long pale face and flowers
about it, but she had the tired look of one

RED HANRAHAN 15

that had been long waiting. And there
was sitting on the step below her chair four
grey old women, and the one of them was
holding a great cauldron in her lap; and
another a great stone on her knees, and
heavy as it was it seemed light to her ; and
another of them had a very long spear that
was made of pointed wood ; and the last of
them had a sword that was without a
scabbard.

Hanrahan stood looking at them for a
long time, but none of them spoke any word
to him or looked at him at all. And he
had it in his mind to ask who that woman
in the chair was, that was like a queen, and
what she was waiting for ; but ready as he
was with his tongue and afraid of no person,
he was in dread now to speak to so beauti-
ful a woman, and in so grand a place. And
then he thought to ask what were the four
things the four grey old women were hold-
ing like great treasures, but he could not
think of the right words to bring out.

Then the first of the old women rose up,
holding the cauldron between her two
hands, and she said ' Pleasure,' and Hanra-

16 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

han said no word. Then the second old
woman rose up with the stone in her hands,
and she said ' Power ' ; and the third old
woman rose up with the spear in her hand,
and she said ' Courage ' ; and the last of the
old women rose up having the sword in her
hands, and she said 'Knowledge.' And
everyone, after she had spoken, waited as
if for Hanrahan to question her, but he
said nothing at all. And then the four old
women went out of the door, bringing their
four treasures with them, and as they went
out one of them said, 'He has no wish
for us'; and another said, 'He is weak,
he is weak'; and another said, 'He is
afraid ' ; and the last said, ' His wits are
gone from him.' And then they all said,
'Echtge, daughter of the Silver Hand,
must stay in her sleep. It is a pity, it is a
great pity.'

And then the woman that was like a
queen gave a very sad sigh, and it seemed
to Hanrahan as if the sigh had the sound
in it of hidden streams ; and if the place
he was in had been ten times grander and
more shining than it was, he could not have

RED HANRAHAN 17

hindered sleep from coming on him; and
he staggered hke a drunken man and lay
down there and then.

When Hanrahan awoke, the sun was
shining on his face, but there was white
frost on the grass around him, and there
was ice on the edge of the stream he was
lying by, and that goes running on through
Daire-caol and Druim-da-rod. He knew
by the shape of the hills and by the shining
of Lough Greine in the distance that he was
upon one of the hills of Slieve Echtge, but
he was not sure how he came there; for
all that had happened in the barn had gone
from him, and all of his journey but the
soreness of his feet and the stiffness in his
bones.

It was a year after that, there were men
of the village of Cappaghtagle sitting by the
fire in a house on the roadside, and Red
Hanrahan that was now very thin and
worn and his hair very long and wild, came
to the half-door and asked leave to come
in and rest himself ; and they bid him
welcome because it was Samhain night.

18 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

He sat down with them, and they gave
him a glass of whiskey out of a quart
bottle ; and they saw the little inkpot hang-
ing about his neck, and knew he was a
scholar, and asked for stories about the
Greeks.

He took the Virgil out of the big pocket
of his coat, but the cover was very black
and swollen with the wet, and the page
when he opened it was very yellow, but
that was no great matter, for he looked at
it like a man that had never learned to read.
Some young man that was there began to
laugh at him then, and to ask why did he
carry so heavy a book with him when he
was not able to read it.

It vexed Hanrahan to hear that, and he
put the Virgil back in his pocket and asked
if they had a pack of cards among them,
for cards were better than books. When
they brought out the cards he took them
and began to shuffle them, and while he
was shuffling them something seemed to
come into his mind, and he put his hand to
his face like one that is trying to remember,
and he said : ' Was I ever here before, or

RED HANRAHAN 19

where was I on a night Uke this ? ' and then
of a sudden he stood up and let the cards
fall to the floor, and he said, 'Who was it
brought me a message from Mary Lavelle ? '

'We never saw you before now, and we
never heard of Mary Lavelle,' said the
man of the house. 'And who is she/ he
said, ' and what is it you are talking about ? '

' It was this night a year ago, I was in a
barn, and there were men playing cards,
and there was money on the table, they
were pushing it from one to another here
and there — and I got a message, and I was
going out of the door to look for my sweet-
heart that wanted me, Mary Lavelle.'
And then Hanrahan called out very loud :
' Where have I been since then ? Where
was I for the whole year ? '

'It is hard to say where you might have
been in that time,' said the oldest of the
men, 'or what part of the world you may
have travelled ; and it is like enough you
have the dust of many roads on your feet ;
for there are many go wandering and for-
getting like that,' he said, 'when once they
have been given the touch.'

20 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

'That is true/ said another of the men.
' I knew a woman went wandering hke that
through the length of seven years ; she
came back after, and she told her friends
she had often been glad enough to eat the
food that was put in the pig's trough.
And it is best for you to go to the priest
now,' he said, 'and let him take off you
whatever may have been put upon you.'

'It is to my sweetheart I will go, to Mary
Lavelle,' said Hanrahan; 'it is too long I
have delayed, how do I know what might
have happened her in the length of a year ? '

He was going out of the door then, but
they all told him it was best for him to stop
the night, and to get strength for the
journey; and indeed he wanted that, for
he was very weak, and when they gave him
food he eat it like a man that had never
seen food before, and one of them said,
'He is eating as if he had trodden on the
hungry grass.' It was in the white light
of the morning he set out, and the time
seemed long to him till he could get to
Mary Lavelle's house. But when he came
to it, he found the door broken, and the

RED HANRAHAN 21

thatch dropping from the roof, and no
hving person to be seen. And when he
asked the neighbours what had happened
her, all they could say was that she had
been put out of the house, and had married
some labouring man, and they had gone
looking for work to London or Liverpool
or some big place. And whether she found
a worse place or a better he never knew,
but anyway he never met with her or with
news of her again.

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE

Hanrahan was walking the roads one
time near Kinvara at the fall of day, and he
heard the sound of a fiddle from a house a
little way off the roadside. He turned up
the path to it, for he never had the habit of
passing by any place where there was music
or dancing or good company, without
going in. The man of the house was stand-
ing at the door, and when Hanrahan came
near he knew him and he said : ' A welcome
before you, Hanrahan, you have been lost
to us this long time.' But the woman of
the house came to the door and she said to
her husband : ' I would be as well pleased
for Hanrahan not to come in to-night, for
he has no good name now among the
priests, or with women that mind them-
selves, and I wouldn't wonder from his
walk if he has a drop of drink taken.'
But the man said, ' I will never turn away
22

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 23

Hanrahan of the poets from my door/
and with that he bade him enter.

There were a good many neighbours
gathered in the house, and some of them
remembered Hanrahan ; but some of the
httle lads that were in the corners had only
heard of him, and they stood up to have a
view of him, and one of them said : ' Is not
that Hanrahan that had the school, and
that was brought away by Them?' But
his mother put her hand over his mouth
and bade him be quiet, and not be saying
things like that. 'For Hanrahan is apt
to grow wicked,' she said, 'if he hears talk
of that story, or if anyone goes questioning
him.' One or another called out then,
asking him for a song, but the man of the
house said it was no time to ask him for a
song, before he had rested himself; and
he gave him whiskey in a glass, and Hanra-
han thanked him and wished him good
health and drank it off.

The fiddler was tuning his fiddle for
another dance, and the man of the house
said to the young men, they would all
know what dancing was like when they saw

24 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

Hanrahan dance, for the like of it had never
been seen since he was there before. Han-
rahan said he would not dance, he had
better use for his feet now, travelling as he
was through the five provinces of Ireland.
Just as he said that, there came in at the
half-door Oona, the daughter of the house,
having a few bits of bog deal from Conne-
mara in her arms for the fire. She threw
them on the hearth and the flame rose up,
and showed her to be very comely and
smiling, and two or three of the young men
rose up and asked for a dance. But Han-
rahan crossed the floor and brushed the
others away, and said it was with him she
must dance, after the long road he had
travelled before he came to her. And it is
likely he said some soft word in her ear, for
she said nothing against it, and stood out
with him, and there were little blushes in
her cheeks. Then other couples stood up,
but when the dance was going to begin,
Hanrahan chanced to look down, and he
took notice of his boots that were worn and
broken, and the ragged grey socks showing
through them ; and he said angrily it was

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 25

a bad floor, and the music no great things,
and he sat down in the dark place beside
the hearth. But if he did, the girl sat
down there with him.

The dancing went on, and when that
dance was over another was called for, and
no one took much notice of Oona and Red
Hanrahan for a while, in the corner where
they were. But the mother grew to be
uneasy, and she called to Oona to come and
help her to set the table in the inner room.
But Oona that had never refused her before,
said she would come soon, but not yet, for
she was Hstening to whatever he was saying
in her ear. The mother grew yet more
uneasy then, and she would come nearer
them, and let on to be stirring the fire or
sweeping the hearth, and she would listen
for a minute to hear what the poet was say-
ing to her child. And one time she heard
him telling about white-handed Deirdre,
and how she brought the sons of Usnach to
their death; and how the blush in her
cheeks was not so red as the blood of kings'
sons that was shed for her, and her sorrows
had never gone out of mind ; and he said it

26 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

was maybe the memory of her that made
the cry of the plover on the bog as sorrow-
ful in the ear of the poets as the keening of
young men for a comrade. And there
would never have been that memory of her,
he said, if it was not for the poets that had
put her beauty in their songs. And the
next time she did not well understand what
he was saying, but as far as she could hear,
it had the sound of poetry though it was
not rhymed, and this is what she heard
him say : ' The sun and the moon are the
man and the girl, they are my life and your
life, they are travelling and ever travelling
through the skies as if under the one hood.
It was God made them for one another.
He made your life and my life before the
beginning of the world, he made them that
they might go through the world, up and
down, like the two best dancers that go on
with the dance up and down the long floor
of the barn, fresh and laughing, when all
the rest are tired out and leaning against
the wall.'

The old woman went then to where her
husband was playing cards, but he would

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 27

take no notice of her, and then she went to
a woman of the neighbours and said : ' Is
there no way we can get them from one
another ?' and without waiting for an an-
swer she said to some young men that were
talking together : ' What a good are you
when you cannot make the best girl in the
house come out and dance with you?
And go now the whole of you/ she said,
'and see can you bring her away from the
poet's talk.' But Oona would not hsten to
any of them, but only moved her hand as if
to send them away. Then they called to
Hanrahan and said he had best dance with
the girl himself, or let her dance with one of
them. When Hanrahan heard what they
were saying he said : ' That is so, I will
dance with her; there is no man in the
house must dance with her but myself.'

He stood up with her then, and led her
out by the hand, and some of the young
men were vexed, and some began mocking
at his ragged coat and his broken boots.
But he took no notice, and Oona took no
notice, but they looked at one another as if
all the world belonged to themselves alone.

28 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

But another couple that had been sitting
together Hke lovers stood out on the floor
at the same time, holding one another's
hands and moving their feet to keep time
with the music. But Hanrahan turned his
back on them as if angry, and in place of
dancing he began to sing, and as he sang he
held her hand, and his voice grew louder,
and the mocking of the young men stopped,
and the fiddle stopped, and there was noth-
ing heard but his voice that had in it the
sound of the wind. And what he sang was
a song he had heard or had made one time
in his wanderings on Slieve Echtge, and the
words of it as they can be put into English
were like this :

O Death's old bony finger

Will never find us there

In the high hollow townland

Where love's to give and to spare ;

Where boughs have fruit and blossom

At all times of the year ;

Where rivers are running over

With red beer and brown beer.

An old man plays the bagpipes

In a gold and silver wood ;

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 29

Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.

And while he was singing it Oona moved
nearer to him, and the colour had gone
from her cheek, and her eyes were not blue
now, but grey with the tears that were in
them, and anyone that saw her would
have thought she was ready to follow him
there and then from the west to the east of
the world.

But one of the young men called out :
' Where is that country he is singing about ?
Mind yourself, Oona, it is a long way off,
you might be a long time on the road before
you would reach to it,' And another said :
' It is not to the Country of the Young you
will be going if you go with him, but to
Mayo of the bogs.' Oona looked at him
then as if she would question him, but he
raised her hand in his hand, and called out
between singing and shouting : ' It is very
near us that country is, it is on every side ;
it may be on the bare hill behind it is, or
it may be in the heart of the wood.' And
he said out very loud and clear: 'In the
heart of the wood ; oh, death will never

30 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

find us in the heart of the wood. And will
you come with me there, Oona ? ' he said.

But while he was saying this the two old
women had gone outside the door, and
Oona's mother was crying, and she said :
'He has put an enchantment on Oona.
Can we not get the men to put him out of
the house ? '

'That is a thing you cannot do,' said the
other woman, 'for he is a poet of the Gael,
and you know well if you would put a poet
of the Gael out of the house, he would put
a curse on you that would wither the corn in
the fields and dry up the milk of the cows,
if it had to hang in the air seven years.'

'God help us,' said the mother, 'and why
did I ever let him into the house at all, and
the wild name he has !'

'It would have been no harm at all to
have kept him outside, but there would
great harm come upon you if you put him
out by force. But listen to the plan I have
to get him out of the house by his own
doing, without anyone putting him from
it at all.'

It was not long after that the two women

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 31

came in again, each of them having a
bundle of hay in her apron. Hanrahan
was not singing now, but he was talking
to Oona very fast and soft, and he was
saying : ' The house is narrow but the
world is wide, and there is no true lover
that need be afraid of night or morning or
sun or stars or shadows of evening, or any
earthly thing.' 'Hanrahan,' said the
mother then, striking him on the shoulder,
'will you give me a hand here for a min-
ute?' 'Do that, Hanrahan,' said the
woman of the neighbours, 'and help us to
make this hay into a rope, for you are ready
with your hands, and a blast of wind has
loosened the thatch on the haystack.'

'I will do that for you,' said he, and he
took the little stick in his hands, and the
mother began giving out the hay, and he
twisting it, but he was hurrying to have
done with it, and to be free again. The
women went on talking and giving out the
hay, and encouraging him, and saying what
a good twister of a rope he was, better than
their own neighbours or than any one they
had ever seen. And Hanrahan saw that

32 STORIES OF RED HAN RAH AN

Oona was watching him, and he began to
twist very quick and with his head high,
and to boast of the readiness of his hands,
and the learning he had in his head, and
the strength in his arms. And as he was
boasting, he went backward, twisting the
rope always till he came to the door that
was open behind him, and without thinking
he passed the threshold and was out on the
road. And no sooner was he there than
the mother made a sudden rush, and threw
out the rope after him, and she shut the
door and the half-door and put a bolt upon
them.

She was well pleased when she had done
that, and laughed out loud, and the neigh-
bours laughed and praised her. But they
heard him beating at the door, and saying
words of cursing outside it, and the mother
had but time to stop Oona that had her
hand upon the bolt to open it. She made
a sign to the fiddler then, and he began a
reel, and one of the young men asked no
leave but caught hold of Oona and brought
her into the thick of the dance. And when
it was over and the fiddle had stopped,

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 33

there was no sound at all of anything out-
side, but the road was as quiet as before.

As to Hanrahan, when he knew he was
shut out and that there was neither shelter
nor drink nor a girl's ear for him that
night, the anger and the courage went out
of him, and he went on to where the waves
were beating on the strand.

He sat down on a big stone, and he began
swinging his right arm and singing slowly to
himself, the way he did always to hearten
himself when every other thing failed him.
And whether it was that time or another
time he made the song that is called to this
day 'The Twisting of the Rope,' and that
begins, 'What was the dead cat that put
me in this place,' is not known.

But after he had been singing awhile,
mist and shadows seemed to gather about
him, sometimes coming out of the sea, and
sometimes moving upon it. It seemed to
him that one of the shadows was the queen-
woman he had seen in her sleep at SHeve
Echtge ; not in her sleep now, but mocking,
and calling out to them that were behind
her : ' He was weak, he was weak, he had no

34 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

courage.' And he felt the strands of the
rope in his hand yet, and went on twisting
it, but it seemed to him as he twisted, that
it had all the sorrows of the world in it.
And then it seemed to him as if the rope had
changed in his dream into a great water-
worm that came out of the sea, and that
twisted itself about him, and held him
closer and closer, and grew from big to
bigger till the whole of the earth and skies
were wound up in it, and the stars them-
selves were but the shining of the ridges of
its skin. And then he got free of it, and
went on, shaking and unsteady, along the
edge of the strand, and the grey shapes
were flying here and there around him.
And this is what they were saying, 'It is a
pity for him that refuses the call of the
daughters of the Sidhe, for he will find no
comfort in the love of the women of the
earth to the end of life and time, and the
cold of the grave is in his heart for ever.
It is death he has chosen ; let him die, let
him die, let him die.'

HANRAHAN AND CATHLEEN THE
DAUGHTER OF HOOLIHAN

It was travelling northward Hanrahan
was one time, giving a hand to a farmer now
and again in the hurried time of the year,
and telling his stories and making his share
of songs at wakes and at weddings.

He chanced one day to overtake on the
road to Collooney one Margaret Rooney, a
woman he used to know in Munster when
he was a young man. She had no good
name at that time, and it was the priest
routed her out of the place at last. He
knew her by her walk and by the colour
of her eyes, and by a way she had of putting
back the hair off her face with her left hand.
She had been wandering about, she said,
selling herrings and the like, and now she
was going back to Sligo, to the place in
the Burrough where she was living with
another woman, Mary Gillis, who had
much the same story as herself. She would
35

36 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

be well pleased, she said, if he would come
and stop in the house with them, and be
singing his songs to the bacachs and blind
men and fiddlers of the Burrough. She
remembered him well, she said, and had a
wish for him ; and as to Mary Gillis, she
had some of his songs off by heart, so he
need not be afraid of not getting good
treatment, and all the bacachs and poor
men that heard him would give him a share
of their own earnings for his stories and
his songs while he was with them, and
would carry his name into all the parishes
of Ireland.

He was glad enough to go with her, and
to find a woman to be listening to the story
of his troubles and to be comforting him.
It was at the moment of the fall of day
when every man may pass as handsome
and every woman as comely. She put her
arm about him when he told her of the
misfortune of the Twisting of the Rope,
and in the half light she looked as well as
another.

They kept in talk all the way to the
Burrough, and as for Mary Gillis, when she

HAN RAH AN AND CATHLEEN 37

saw him and heard who he was, she went
near crying to think of having a man with
so great a name in the house.

Hanrahan was well pleased to settle
down with them for a while, for he was
tired with wandering ; and since the day
he found the little cabin fallen in, and Mary
Lavelle gone from it, and the thatch
scattered, he had never asked to have any
place of his own ; and he had never
stopped long enough in any place to see
the green leaves come where he had seen
the old leaves wither, or to see the wheat
harvested where he had seen it sown. It
was a good change to him to have shelter
from the wet, and a fire in the evening time,
and his share of food put on the table with-
out the asking.

He made a good many of his songs while
he was living there, so well cared for and
so quiet. The most of them were love
songs, but some were songs of repentance,
and some were songs about Ireland and
her griefs, under one name or another.

Every evening the bacachs and beggars
and blind men and fiddlers would gather

38 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

into the house and hsten to his songs and
his poems, and his stories about the old
time of the Fianna, and they kept them
in their memories that were never spoiled
with books ; and so they brought his name
to every wake and wedding and pattern
in the whole of Connaught. He was
never so well off or made so much of as he
was at that time.

One evening of December he was singing
a little song that he said he had heard from
the green plover of the mountain, about
the fair-haired boys that had left Limerick,
and that were wandering and going astray
in all parts of the world. There were a
good many people in the room that night,
and two or three little lads that had crept
in, and sat on the floor near the fire, and
were too busy with the roasting of a potato
in the ashes or some such thing to take
much notice of him ; but they remembered
long afterwards when his name had gone
up, the sound of his voice, and what way
he had moved his hand, and the look of
him as he sat on the edge of the bed, with
his shadow falling on the whitewashed wall

HANRAHAN AND CATHLEEN 39

behind him, and as he moved going up as
high as the thatch. And they knew then
that they had looked upon a king of the
poets of the Gael, and a maker of the
dreams of men.

Of a sudden his singing stopped, and his
eyes grew misty as if he was looking at
some far thing.

Mary Gillis was pouring whiskey into a
mug that stood on a table beside him, and
she left off pouring and said, ' Is it of leav-
ing us you are thinking ? '

Margaret Rooney heard what she said,
and did not know why she said it, and she
took the words too much in earnest and
came over to him, and there was dread in
her heart that she was going to lose so
wonderful a poet and so good a comrade,
and a man that was thought so much of,
and that brought so many to her house.

'You would not go away from us, my
heart?' she said, catching him by the
hand.

'It is not of that I am thinking,' he said,
'but of Ireland and the weight of grief
that is on her.' And he leaned his head

40 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

against his hand, and began to sing these
words, and the sound of his voice was hke
the wind in a lonely place.

The old brown thorn trees break in two high

over Cummen Strand
Under a bitter black wind that blows from the

left hand ;
Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black

wind and dies,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame

out of the eyes
Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.

The winds was bundled up the clouds high over

Knocknarea
And thrown the thunder on the stones for all

that Maeve can say ;
Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our

hearts abeat,
But we have all bent low and low and kissed the

quiet feet
Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on
Cloothna-Bare,

For the wet winds are blowing out of the cling-
ing air ;

HAN RAH AN AND CATHLEEN 41

Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our

blood,
But purer than a tall candle before the Holy

Rood
Is Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.

While he was singing, his voice began
to break, and tears came rolling down his
cheeks, and Margaret Rooney put down
her face into her hands and began to cry
along with him. Then a blind beggar
by the fire shook his rags with a sob, and
after that there was no one of them all
but cried tears down.

RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE

One fine May morning a long time after
Hanrahan had left Margaret Rooney's
house, he was walking the road near Col-
looney, and the sound of the birds sing-
ing in the bushes that were white with
blossom set him singing as he went. It
was to his own little place he was going,
that was no more than a cabin, but that
pleased him well. For he was tired of so
many years of wandering from shelter to
shelter at all times of the year, and al-
though he was seldom refused a welcome
and a share of what was in the house, it
seemed to him sometimes that his mind
was getting stiff like his joints, and it was
not so easy to him as it used to be to make
fun and sport through the night, and to
set all the boys laughing with his pleasant
talk, and to coax the women with his songs.
And a while ago, he had turned into a
cabin that some poor man had left to go
42

RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE 43

harvesting and had never come to again.
And when he had mended the thatch and
made a bed in the corner with a few sacks
and bushes, and had swept out the floor, he
was well content to have a little place for
himself, where he could go in and out as
he liked, and put his head in his hands
through the length of an evening if the
fret was on him, and loneliness after the
old times. One by one the neighbours
began to send their children in to get some
learning from him, and with what they
brought, a few eggs, or an oaten cake or
a couple of sods of turf, he made out a
way of living. And if he went for a wild
day and night now and again to the
Burrough, no one would say a word, know-
ing him to be a poet, with wandering in
his heart.

It was from the Burrough he was coming
that May morning, light-hearted enough,
and singing some new song that had come
to him. But it was not long till a hare
ran across his path, and made away into
the fields, through the loose stones of
the wall. And he knew it was no good

44 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

sign a hare to have crossed his path, and he
remembered the hare that had led him
away to SHeve Echtge the time Mary
Lavelle was waiting for him, and how he
had never known content for any length
of time since then. ^And it is likely
enough they are putting some bad thing
before me now/ he said.

And after he said that he heard the sound
of crying in the field beside him, and he
looked over the wall. And there he saw
a young girl sitting under a bush of white
hawthorn, and crying as if her heart would
break. Her face was hidden in her hands,
but her soft hair and her white neck and
the young look of her, put him in mind of
Bridget Purcell and Margaret Gillane
and Maeve Connelan and Oona Curry
and Celia DriscoU, and the rest of the girls
he had made songs for and had coaxed
the heart from with his flattering tongue.

She looked up, and he saw her to be a
girl of the neighbours, a farmer's daughter.
'What is on you, Nora?' he said. 'Noth-
ing you could take from me, Red Hanra-
han.' 'If there is any sorrow on you it

RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE 45

is I myself should be well able to serve
you,' he said then, 'for it is I know the
history of the Greeks, and I know well
what sorrow is and parting, and the hard-
ship of the world. And if I am not able
to save you from trouble,' he said, 'there
is many a one I have saved from it with
the power that is in my songs, as it was in
the songs of the poets that were before me
from the beginning of the world. And it
is with the rest of the poets I myself will
be sitting and talking in some far place
beyond the world, to the end of life and
time,' he said. The girl stopped her
crying, and she said, 'Owen Hanrahan, I
often heard you have had sorrow and
persecution, and that you know all the
troubles of the world since the time you
refused your love to the queen-woman in
Slieve Echtge ; and that she never left
you in quiet since. But when it is people
of this earth that have harmed you, it is
yourself knows well the way to put harm
on them again. And will you do now what
I ask you, Owen Hanrahan?' she said.
'I will do that indeed,' said he.

46 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

'It is my father and my mother and my
brothers,' she said, 'that are marrying me
to old Paddy Doe, because he has a farm
of a hundred acres under the mountain.
And it is what you can do, Hanrahan,'
she said, 'put him into a rhyme the same
way you put old Peter Kilmartin in one
the time you were young, that sorrow
may be over him rising up and lying down,
that will put him thinking of Collooney
churchyard and not of marriage. And
let you make no delay about it, for it is
for to-morrow they have the marriage
settled, and I would sooner see the sun
rise on the day of my death than on that
day.'

'I will put him into a song that will
bring shame and sorrow over him ; but
tell me how many years has he, for I
would put them in the song ? '

'O, he has years upon years. He is
as old as you yourself. Red Hanrahan.'
'As old as myself/ said Hanrahan, and his
voice was as if broken ; ' as old as myself ;
there are twenty years and more between
us ! It is a bad day indeed for Owen

RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE 47

Hanrahan when a young girl with the
blossom of May in her cheeks thinks him
to be an old man. And my grief ! ' he
said, 'you have put a thorn in my heart.'

He turned from her then and went down
the road till he came to a stone, and he sat
down on it, for it seemed as if all the weight
of the years had come on him in the minute.
And he remembered it was not many days
ago that a woman in some house had said :
'It is not Red Hanrahan you are now but
yellow Hanrahan, for your hair is turned
to the colour of a wisp of tow.' And
another woman he had asked for a drink
had not given him new milk but sour;
and sometimes the girls would be whisper-
ing and laughing with young ignorant
men while he himself was in the middle of
giving out his poems or his talk. And he
thought of the stiffness of his joints when
he first rose of a morning, and the pain of
his knees after making a journey, and it
seemed to him as if he was come to be a
very old man, with cold in the shoulders
and speckled shins and his wind breaking
and he himself withering away. And

48 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

with those thoughts there came on him a
great anger against old age and all it
brought with it. And just then he looked
up and saw a great spotted eagle sailing
slowly towards Ballygawley, and he cried
out: 'You, too, eagle of Ballygawley, are
old, and your wings are full of gaps, and I
will put you and your ancient comrades,
the Pike of Dargan Lake and the Yew of
the Steep Place of the Strangers into my
rhyme, that there may be a curse on you
forever.'

There was a bush beside him to the left,
flowering like the rest, and a little gust of
wind blew the white blossoms over his
coat. 'May blossoms,' he said, gathering
them up in the hollow of his hand, 'you
never know age because you die away in
your beauty, and I will put you into my
rhyme and give you my blessing.'

He rose up then and plucked a little
branch from the bush, and carried it in
his hand. But it is old and broken he
looked going home that day with the
stoop in his shoulders and the darkness
in his face.

RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE 49

When he got to his cabin there was no
one there, and he went and lay down on
the bed for a while as he was used to do
when he wanted to make a poem or a
praise or a curse. And it was not long he
was in making it this time, for the power
of the curse-making bards was upon him.
And when he had made it he searched his
mind how he could send it out over the
whole countryside.

Some of the scholars began coming in
then, to see if there would be any school
that day, and Hanrahan rose up and sat
on the bench by the hearth, and they all
stood around him.

They thought he would bring out the
Virgil or the Mass book or the primer, but
instead of that he held up the little branch
of hawthorn he had in his hand yet.
'Children,' he said, Hhis is a new lesson
I have for you to-day.

' You yourselves and the beautiful people
of the world are Uke this blossom, and old
age is the wind that comes and blows the
blossom away. And I have made a curse
upon old age and upon the old men, and

50 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

listen now while I give it out to you.' And
this is what he said, —

The poet, Owen Hanrahan, under a bush of

may
Calls down a curse on his own head because it

withers grey ;
Then on the speckled eagle cock of Ballygawley

Hill,
Because it is the oldest thing that knows of cark

and ill ;
And on the yew that has been green from the

times out of mind
By the Steep Place of the Strangers and the
. Gap of the Wind ;
And on the great grey pike that broods in

Castle Dargan Lake
Having in his long body a many a hook and

ache;
Then curses he old Paddy Bruen of the Well of

Bride
Because no hair is on his head and drowsiness

inside.
Then Paddy's neighbour, Peter Hart, and

Michael Gill, his friend,
Because their wandering histories are never at

an end.
And then old Shemus Cullinan, shepherd of

the Green Lands

RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE 51

Because he holds two crutches between his

crooked hands ;
Then calls a curse from the dark North upon

old Paddy Doe,
Who plans to lay his withering head upon a

breast of snow,
Who plans to wreck a singing voice and break a

merry heart.
He bids a curse hang over him till breath and

body part ;
But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of

the may,
Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows

away.

He said it over to the children verse by
verse till all of them could say a part of it,
and some that were the quickest could say
the whole of it.

'That will do for to-day,' he said then.
'And what you have to do now is to go out
and sing that song for a while, to the tune
of the Green Bunch of Rushes, to everyone
you meet, and to the old men themselves.'

'I will do that,' said one of the httle
lads ; * I know old Paddy Doe well. Last
Saint John's Eve we dropped a mouse

52 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

down his chimney, but this is better than
a mouse.'

* I will go into the town of Sligo and sing
it in the street,' said another of the boys.
'Do that,' said Hanrahan, 'and go into
the Burrough and tell it to Margaret
Rooney and Mary GilHs, and bid them
sing it, and to make the beggars and the
bacachs sing it wherever they go.' The
children ran out then, full of pride and of
mischief, calling out the song as they ran,
and Hanrahan knew there was no danger
it would not be heard.

He was sitting outside the door the next
morning, looking at his scholars as they
came by in twos and threes. They were
nearly all come, and he was considering
the place of the sun in the heavens to know
whether it was time to begin, when he
heard a sound that was like the buzzing of
a swarm of bees in the air, or the rushing of
a hidden river in time of flood. Then he
saw a crowd coming up to the cabin from
the road, and he took notice that all the
crowd was made up of old men, and that
the leaders of it were Paddy Bruen,

RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE 53

Michael Gill and Paddy Doe, and there
was not one in the crowd but had in his
hand an ash stick or a blackthorn. As
soon as they caught sight of him, the sticks
began to wave hither and thither like
branches in a storm, and the old feet to run.

He waited no longer, but made off up
the hill behind the cabin till he was out of
their sight.

After a while he came back round the
hill, where he was hidden by the furze
growing along a ditch. And when he came
in sight of his cabin he saw that all the
old men had gathered around it, and one
of them was just at that time thrusting a
rake with a wisp of lighted straw on it
into the thatch.

'My grief,' he said, 'I have set Old
Age and Time and Weariness and Sickness
against me, and I must go wandering again.
And, O Blessed Queen of Heaven,' he said,
' protect me from the Eagle of Ballygawley,
the Yew Tree of the Steep Place of the
Strangers, the Pike of Castle Dargan Lake,
and from the lighted wisps of their kindred,
the Old Men!'

HANRAHAN'S VISION

It was in the month of June Hanrahan
was on the road near Sligo, but he did not
go into the town, but turned towards
Ben Bulben ; for there were thoughts of
the old times coming upon him, and he
had no mind to meet with common men.
And as he walked he was singing to himself
a song that had come to him one time in
his dreams :

O Death's old bony finger
Will never find us there
In the high hollow townland
Where love's to give and to spare ;
Where boughs have fruit and blossom
At all times of the year ;
Where rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
— — An old man plays the bagpipes
In a gold and silver wood ;
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.
54

HANRAHAN'S VISION 55

The little fox he murmured,
' O what of the world's bane ? '
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein ;
But the little red fox murmured,
' O do not pluck at his rein,
He is riding to the townland
That is the world's bane.'

When their hearts are so high
That they would come to blows.
They unhook their heavy swords
From golden and silver boughs :
But all that are killed in battle
Awaken to life again :
It is lucky that their story
Is not known among men.
For O, the strong farmers
That would let the spade lie,
Their hearts would be like a cup
That somebody had drunk dry.

Michael will unhook his trumpet

From a bough overhead.

And blow a little noise

When the supper has been spread.

Gabriel will come from the water

With a fish tail, and talk

Of wonders that have happened

56 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

On wet roads where men walk,
And lift up an old horn
Of hammered silver, and drink
Till he has fallen asleep
Upon the starry brink.

Hanrahan had begun to climb the
mountain then, and he gave over singing,
for it was a long climb for him, and every
now and again he had to sit down and to
rest for a while. And one time he was
resting he took notice of a wild briar bush,
with blossoms on it, that was growing
beside a rath, and it brought to mind the
wild roses he used to bring to Mary Lavelle,
and to no woman after her. And he tore
off a little branch of the bush, that had
buds on it and open blossoms, and he
went on with his song :

The little fox he murmured,
'O what of the world's bane?'
The sun was laughing sweetly.
The moon plucked at my rein ;
But the little red fox murmured,
* O do not pluck at his rein.
He is riding to the townland
That is the world's bane.'

HANRAHAN'S VISION 57

And he went on climbing the hill, and
left the rath, and there came to his mind
some of the old poems that told of lovers,
good and bad, and of some that were
awakened from the sleep of the grave it-
self by the strength of one another's love,
and brought away to a life in some shadowy
place, where they are waiting for the
judgment and banished from the face of
God.

And at last, at the fall of day, he came to
the Steep Place of the Strangers, and there
he laid himself down along a ridge of rock,
and looked into the valley, that was full
of grey mist spreading from mountain to
mountain.

And it seemed to him as he looked that
the mist changed to shapes of shadowy
men and women, and his heart began to
beat with the fear and the joy of the sight.
And his hands, that were always restless,
began to pluck off the leaves of the roses
on the little branch, and he watched them
as they went floating down into the valley
in a little fluttering troop.

Suddenly he heard a faint music, a

58 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

music that had more laughter in it and
more crying than all the music of this
world. And his heart rose when he heard
that, and he began to laugh out loud, for he
knew that music was made by some who
had a beauty and a greatness beyond the
people of this world. And it seemed to
him that the little soft rose leaves as they
went fluttering down into the valley began
to change their shape till they looked like
a troop of men and women far off in the
mist, with the colour of the roses on them.
And then that colour changed to many
colours, and what he saw was a long line
of tall beautiful young men, and of queen-
women, that were not going from him but
coming towards him and past him, and
their faces were full of tenderness for all
their proud looks, and were very pale
and worn, as if they were seeking and
ever seeking for high sorrowful things.
And shadowy arms were stretched out of
the mist as if to take hold of them, but
could not touch them, for the quiet that
was about them could not be broken.
And before them and beyond them, but

HANRAHAN'S VISION 59

at a distance as if in reverence, there were
other shapes, sinking and rising and coming
and going, and Hanrahan knew them by
their whirHng flight to be the Sidhe, the
ancient defeated gods ; and the shadowy
arms did not rise to take hold of them,
for they were of those that can neither sin
nor obey. And they all lessened then in
the distance, and they seemed to be going
towards the white door that is in the side
of the mountain.

The mist spread out before him now like
a deserted sea washing the mountains with
long grey waves, but while he was looking
at it, it began to fill again with a flowing
broken witless life that was a part of itself,
and arms and pale heads covered with
tossing hair appeared in the greyness. It
rose higher and higher till it was level with
the edge of the steep rock, and then the
shapes grew to be solid, and a new proces-
sion half lost in mist passed very slowly
with uneven steps, and in the midst of
each shadow there was something shining
in the starlight. They came nearer and
nearer, and Hanrahan saw that they also

60 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

were lovers, and that they had heart-
shaped mirrors instead of hearts, and they
were looking and ever looking on their own
faces in one another's mirrors. They
passed on, sinking downward as they
passed, and other shapes rose in their
place, and these did not keep side by side,
but followed after one another, holding
out wild beckoning arms, and he saw that
those who were followed were women,
and as to their heads they were beyond all
beauty, but as to their bodies they were
but shadows without life, and their long
hair was moving and trembling about
them, as if it lived with some terrible life
of its own. And then the mist rose of a
sudden and hid them, and then a light
gust of wind blew them away towards the
north-east, and covered Hanrahan at the
same time with a white wing of cloud.

He stood up trembling and was going to
turn away from the valley, when he saw
two dark and half-hidden forms standing
as if in the air just beyond the rock, and
one of them that had the sorrowful eyes
of a beggar said to him in a woman's

HANRAHAN'S VISION 61

voice, 'Speak to me, for no one in this
world or any other world has spoken to me
for seven hundred years.'

' Tell me who are those that have passed
by,' said Hanrahan.

'Those that passed first,' the woman
said, 'are the lovers that had the greatest
name in the old times, Blanad and Deirdre
and Grania and their dear comrades, and
a great many that are not so well known
but are as well loved. And because it
was not only the blossom of youth they
were looking for in one another, but the
beauty that is as lasting as the night and
the stars, the night and the stars hold
them for ever from the warring and the
perishing, in spite of the wars and the
bitterness their love brought into the world.
And those that came next,' she said, 'and
that still breathe the sweet air and have the
mirrors in their hearts, are not put in
songs by the poets, because they sought
only to triumph one over the other, and
so to prove their strength and beauty, j
and out of this they made a kind of love. I
And as to the women with shadow-bodies,

62 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

j they desired neither to triumph nor to
I love but only to be loved, and there is
' no blood in their hearts or in their bodies
until it flows through them from a kiss,
-V and their life is but for a moment. All
these' are unhappy, but I am the unhappiest
of all, for I am Dervadilla, and this is
Dermot, and it was our sin brought the
Norman into Ireland. And the curses
of all the generations are upon us, and
none are punisiied as we are punished.
It was but the blossom of the man and of
the woman we loved in one another, the
dying beauty of the dust and not the ever-
lasting beauty. When we died there was
no lasting unbreakable quiet about us,
and the bitterness of the battles we brought
into Ireland turned to our own punishment.
We go wandering together for ever, but
Dermot that was my lover sees me always
as a body that has been a long time in the
ground, and I know that is the way he
sees me. Ask me more, ask me more, for
all the years have left their wisdom in my
heart, and no one has listened to me for
seven hundred years.'

HANRAHAN'S VISION 63

A great terror had fallen upon Hanrahan,
and lifting his arms above his head he
screamed out loud three times, and the
cattle in the valley hfted their heads and
lowed, and the birds in the wood at the
edge of the mountain awaked out of their
sleep and fluttered through the trembling
leaves. But a little below the edge of
the rock, the troop of rose leaves still
fluttered in the air, for the gateway of
Eternity had opened and shut again in
one beat of the heart.

THE DEATH OF HANRAHAN

Hanrahan, that was never long in one
place, was back again among the villages
that are at the foot of Slieve Echtge, lUe-
ton and Scalp and Ballylee, stopping some-
times in one house and sometimes in
another, and finding a welcome in every-
place for the sake of the old times and of
his poetry and his learning. There was
some silver and some copper money in
the little leather bag under his coat, but
it was seldom he needed to take anything
from it, for it was little he used, and there
was not one of the people that would
have taken payment from him. His hand
had grown heavy on the blackthorn he
leaned on, and his cheeks were hollow
and worn, but so far as food went, potatoes
and milk and a bit of oaten cake, he had
what he wanted of it ; and it is not on the
edge of so wild and boggy a place as Echtge
a mug of spirits would be wanting, with the
64

THE DEATH OF HAN RAH AN 65

taste of the turf smoke on it. He would
wander about the big wood at Kinadife, or
he would sit through many hours of the day
among the rushes about Lake Belshragh,
listening to the streams from the hills,
or watching the shadows in the brown
bog pools ; sitting so quiet as not to startle
the deer that came down from the heather
to the grass and the tilled fields at the fall
of night. As the days went by it seemed
as if he was beginning to belong to some
world out of sight and misty, that has for
its mearing the colours that are beyond all
other colours and the silences that are
beyond all silences of this world. And
sometimes he would hear coming and going
in the wood music that when it stopped
went from his memory like a dream ; and
once in the stillness of midday he heard a
sound hke the clashing of many swords,
that went on for long time without any
break. And at the fall of night and at
moonrise the lake would grow to be like a
gateway of silver and shining stones, and
there would come from its silence the faint
sound of keening and of frightened laughter

66 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

broken by the wind, and many pale
beckoning hands.

He was sitting looking into the water one
evening in harvest time, thinking of all
the secrets that were shut into the lakes
and the mountains, when he heard a cry
coming from the south, very faint at first,
but getting louder and clearer as the
shadow of the rushes grew longer, till he
could hear the words, 'I am beautiful, I
am beautiful ; the birds in the air, the
moths under the leaves, the flies over the
water look at me, for they never saw any
one so beautiful as myself. I am young;
I am young : look upon me, mountains ;
look upon me, perishing woods, for my
body will shine like the white waters when
you have been hurried away. You and
the whole race of men, and the race of the
beasts and the race of the fish and the
winged race are dropping like a candle
that is nearly burned out, but I laugh out
because I am in my youth.' The voice
would break off from time to time, as if
tired, and then it would begin again,
calling out always the same words, 'I am

THE DEATH OF HANRAHAN 67

beautiful, I am beautiful.' Presently the
bushes at the edge of the little lake trem-
bled for a moment, and a very old woman
forced her way among them, and passed
by Hanrahan, walking with very slow
steps. Her face was of the colour of earth,
and more wrinkled than the face of any old
hag that was ever seen, and her grey hair
was hanging in wisps, and the rags she was
wearing did not hide her dark skin that
was roughened by all weathers. She
passed by him with her eyes wide open, and
her head high, and her arms hanging
straight beside her, and she went into the
shadow of the hills towards the west.

A sort of dread came over Hanrahan
when he saw her, for he knew her to be
one Winny Byrne, that went begging from
place to place crying always the same cry,
and he had often heard that she had once
such wisdom that all the women of the
neighbours used to go looking for advice
from her, and that she had a voice so
beautiful that men and women would
come from every part to hear her sing at a
wake or a wedding ; and that the Others,

68 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

the great Sidhe, had stolen her wits one
Samhain night many years ago, when she
had fallen asleep on the edge of a rath,
and had seen in her dreams the servants
of Echtge of the hills.

And as she vanished away up the hillside,
it seemed as if her cry, 'I am beautiful, I
am beautiful,' was coming from among
the stars in the heavens.

There was a cold wind creeping among
the rushes, and Hanrahan began to shiver,
and he rose up to go to some house where
there would be a fire on the hearth. But
instead of turning down the hill as he was
used, he went on up the hill, along the
little track that was maybe a road and
maybe the dry bed of a stream. It was
the same way Winny had gone, and it led
to the little cabin where she stopped when
she stopped in any place at all. He walked
very slowly up the hill as if he had a great
load on his back, and at last he saw a
light a little to the left, and he thought it
likely it was from Winny's house it was
shining, and he turned from the path to go
to it. But clouds had come over the sky,

THE DEATH OF HAN RAH AN 69

and he could not well see his way, and after
he had gone a few steps his foot slipped
and he fell into a bog drain, and though he
dragged himself out of it, holding on to
the roots of the heather, the fall had given
him a great shake, and he felt better fit
to lie down than to go travelling. But
he had always great courage, and he made
his way on, step by step, till at last he
came to Winny's cabin, that had no win-
dow, but the light was shining from the
door. He thought to go into it and to
rest for a while, but when he came to the
door he did not see Winny inside it, but
what he saw was four old grey-haired
women playing cards, but Winny herself
was not among them. Hanrahan sat
down on a heap of turf beside the door,
for he was tired out and out, and had no
wish for talking or for card-playing, and
his bones and his joints aching the way
they were. He could hear the four women
talking as they played, and calling out
their hands. And it seemed to him that
they were saying, like the strange man in
the barn long ago : ' Spades and Diamonds,

70 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

Courage and Power. Clubs and Hearts,
Knowledge and Pleasure.' And he went
on saying those words over and over to
himself ; and whether or not he was in his
dreams, the pain that was in his shoulder
never left him. And after a while the
four women in the cabin began to quarrel,
and each one to say the other had not
played fair, and their voices grew from
loud to louder, and their screams and their
curses, till at last the whole air was filled
with the noise of them around and above
the house, and Hanrahan, hearing it
between sleep and waking, said : * That is
the sound of the fighting between the
friends and the ill-wishers of a man that is
near his death. And I wonder,' he said,
'who is the man in this lonely place that
is near his death.'

It seemed as if he had been asleep a
long time, and he opened his eyes, and the
face he saw over him was the old wrinkled
face of Winny of the Cross Road. She
was looking hard at him, as if to make
sure he was not dead, and she wiped away
the blood that had grown dry on his face

THE DEATH OF HAN RAH AN 71

with a wet cloth, and after a while she
partly helped him and partly lifted him
into the cabin, and laid him down on what
served her for a bed. She gave him a
couple of potatoes from a pot on the fire,
and, what served him better, a mug of
spring water. He slept a little now and
again, and sometimes he heard her singing
to herself as she moved about the house,
and so the night wore away. When the
sky began to brighten with the dawn he
felt for the bag where his little store of
money was, and held it out to her, and she
took out a bit of copper and a bit of silver
money, but she let it drop again as if it
was nothing to her, maybe because it was
not money she was used to beg for, but
food and rags ; or maybe because the rising
of the dawn was filling her with pride
and a new belief in her own great beauty.
She went out and cut a few armfuls of
heather, and brought it in and heaped it
over Hanrahan, saying something about
the cold of the morning, and while she did
that he took notice of the wrinkles in her
face, and the greyness of her hair, and the

72 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

broken teeth that were black and full of
gaps. And when he was well covered
with the heather she went out of the door
and away down the side of the mountain,
and he could hear her cry, ' I am beautiful,
I am beautiful,' getting less and less as she
went, till at last it died away altogether.

Hanrahan lay there through the length
of the day, in his pains and his weakness,
and when the shadows of the evening were
falling he heard her voice again coming
up the hillside, and she came in and boiled
the potatoes and shared them with him
the same way as before. And one day
after another passed like that, and the
weight of his flesh was heavy about him.
But little by little as he grew weaker he
knew there were some greater than himself
in the room with him, and that the house
began to be filled with them; and it
seemed to him they had all power in their
hands, and that they might with one
touch of the hand break down the wall
the hardness of pain had built about him,
and take him into their own world. And
sometimes he could hear voices, very faint

THE DEATH OF HAN RAH AN 73

and joyful, crying from the rafters or out
of the flame on the hearth, and other times
the whole house was filled with music that
went through it like a wind. And after a
while his weakness left no place for pain,
and there grew up about him a great
silence like the silence in the heart of a
lake, and there came through it like the
flame of a rushlight the faint joyful voices
ever and always.

One morning he heard music somewhere
outside the door, and as the day passed
it grew louder and louder until it drowned
the faint joyful voices, and even Winny's
cry upon the hillside at the fall of evening.
About midnight and in a moment, the
walls seemed to melt away and to leave his
bed floating on a pale misty Ught that
shone on every side as far as the eye could
see; and after the first blinding of his
eyes he saw that it was full of great
shadowy figures rushing here and there.

At the same time the music came very
clearly to him, and he knew that it was
but the continual clashing of swords.

'I am after my death,' he said, 'and in

74 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

the very heart of the music of Heaven.
0 Cherubim and Seraphim, receive my
soul!'

At his cry the light where it was nearest
to him filled with sparks of yet brighter
light, and he saw that these were the
points of swords turned towards his heart ;
and then a sudden flame, bright and burn-
ing like God's love or God's hate, swept
over the light and went out and he was
in darkness. At first he could see nothing,
for all was as dark as if there was black
bog earth about him, but all of a sudden
the fire blazed up as if a wisp of straw had
been thrown upon it. And as he looked
at it, the fight was shining on the big
pot that was hanging from a hook, and
on the flat stone where Winny used to bake
a cake now and again, and on the long
rusty knife she used to be cutting the
roots of the heather with, and on the
long blackthorn stick he had brought into
the house himself. And when he saw
those four things, some memory came into
Hanrahan's mind, and strength came back
to him, and he rose sitting up in the bed,

THE DEATH OF HAN RAH AN 75

?nd he said very loud and clear: 'The
Cauldron, the Stone, the Sword, the Spear.
What are they ? Who do they belong to ?
And I have asked the question this time/
he said.

And then he fell back again, weak, and
the breath going from him.

Winny Byrne, that had been tending the
fire, came over then, having her eyes fixed
on the bed ; and the faint laughing voices
began crying out again, and a pale light,
grey like a wave, came creeping over the
room, and he did not know from what
secret world it came. He saw Winny's
withered face and her withered arms that
were grey like crumbled earth, and weak
as he was he shrank back farther towards
the wall. And then there came out of
the mud-stiffened rags arms as white and
as shadowy as the foam on a river, and
they were put about his body, and a voice
that he could hear well but that seemed
to come from a long way off said to him
in a whisper: ' You will go looking for me
no more upon the breasts of women.'

'Who are you?' he said then.

76 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

'I am one of the lasting people, of the
lasting unwearied Voices, that make my
dwelling in the broken and the dying, and
those that have lost their wits ; and I
came looking for you, and you are mine
until the whole world is burned out like a
candle that is spent. And look up now,'
she said, 'for the wisps that are for our
wedding are lighted.'

He saw then that the house was crowded
with pale shadowy hands, and that every
hand was holding what was sometimes like
a wisp lighted for a marriage, and some-
times like a tall white candle for the dead.

When the sun rose on the morning of
the morrow Winny of the Cross Roads
rose up from where she was sitting beside
the body, and began her begging from
townland to townland, singing the same
song as she walked, 'I am beautiful, I
am beautiful. The birds in the air, the
moths under the leaves, the flies over the
water look at me. Look at me, perishing
woods, for my body will be shining like
the lake water after you have been hur-
ried away. You and the old race of

THE DEATH OF HANRAHAN 77

men, and the race of the beasts, and the
race of the fish, and the winged race, are
wearing away like a candle that has been
burned out. But I laugh out loud, be-
cause I am in my youth.'

She did not come back that night or any
night to the cabin, and it was not till the
end of two days that the turf cutters
going to the bog found the body of Red
Owen Hanrahan, and gathered men to
wake him and women to keen him, and
gave him a burjdng worthy of so great a
poet.

My dear A. E. — I dedicate this hook to you
because, whether you think it well or ill written,
you will sympathize with the sorrows and the
ecstasies of its personages, perhaps even more
than I do myself. Although I wrote these stories
at different times and in different manners, and
without any definite plan, they have but one sub-
ject, the war of spiritual with natural order;
and how can I dedicate such a book to anyone
but to you, the one poet of modern Ireland who
has moulded a spiritual ecstasy into verse?
My friends in Ireland sometimes ask me when
I am going to write a really national poem or

78 STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN

romance, and by a national poem or romance I
understand them to mean a poem or romance
founded upon some famous moment of Irish
history, and built up out of the thoughts and feel-
ings which move the greater number of patriotic
Irishmen. I on the other hand believe that
poetry and romance cannot be made by the most
conscientious study of famous moments and of
the thoughts and feelings of others, but only by
looking into that little, infinite, faltering, eternal
flame that we call ourselves. If a writer wishes
to interest a certain people among whom he has
grown up, or fancies he has a duty towards them,
he may choose for the symbols of his art their
legends, their history, their beliefs, their opinions,
because he has a right to choose among things less
than himself, but he cannot choose among the
substances of art. So far, however, as this book
is visionary it is Irish, for Ireland which is
still predominantly Celtic has preserved with
some less excellent things a gift of vision, which
has died out among more hurried and more suc-
cessful nations: no shining candelabra have
prevented us from looking into the darkness, and
when one looks into the darkness there is always
something there.

W. B. YEATS.
London, 1896.

THE SECRET ROSE

As for living, our servants will do that for us.
— Villiers de L'Isle Adam.

Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing
the withered wrinkles made in her face by old
age, wept, and wondered why she had twice
been carried away. — From Leonardo da Vinci's
note books.

TO THE SECRET ROSE

Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,
Enfold me in my hour of hours ; where those
Who sought thee at the Holy Sepulchre,
Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir
And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep
Among pale eyelids heavy with the sleep
Men have named beauty. Your great leaves

enfold
The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold
Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose

eyes
Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of Elder

rise
In druid vapour and make the torches dim;
Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him
Who met Fand walking among flaming dew,
By a grey shore where the wind never blew,
And lost the world and Emir for a kiss;
And him who drove the gods out of their liss
And till a hundred morns had flowered red
Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead;
o 81

82 THE SECRET ROSE

And the proud dreaming king who flung the
crown

And sorrow away, and calling hard and clown

Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep
woods;

And him who sold tillage and house and
goods,

And sought through lands and islands num-
berless years

Until he found with laughter and with tears

A woman of so shining loveliness

That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,

A little stolen tress. I too await

The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and
die?

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind
blows.

Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE
OUTCAST

A MAN, with thin brown hair and a pale
face, half ran, half walked, along the road
that wound from the south to the town of
Sligo. Many called him Cumhal, the son
of Cormac, and many called him the Swift,
Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and
he wore a short parti-coloured doublet,
and had pointed shoes, and a bulging
wallet. Also he was of the blood of the
Ernaans, and his birth-place was the Field
of Gold ; but his eating and sleeping places
were the four provinces of Eri, and his
abiding place was not upon the ridge of the
earth. His eyes strayed from the Abbey
tower of the White Friars and the town
battlements to a row of crosses which
stood out against the sky upon a hill a
little to the eastward of the town, and he
clenched his fist, and shook it at the
crosses. He knew they were not empty,
83

84 THE SECRET ROSE

for the birds were fluttering about them ;
and he thought how, as Hke as not, just
such another vagabond as himself was
hanged on one of them ; and he muttered :
'If it were hanging or bowstringing, or
stoning or beheading, it would be bad
enough. But to have the birds pecking
your eyes and the wolves eating your feet !
I would that the red wind of the Druids
had withered in his cradle the soldier of
Dathi, who brought the tree of death out
of barbarous lands, or that the lightning,
when it smote Dathi at the foot of the
mountain, had smitten him also, or that
his grave had been dug by the green-haired
and green-toothed merrows deep at the
roots of the deep sea.'

While he spoke, he shivered from head
to foot, and the sweat came out upon his
face, and he knew not why, for he had
looked upon many crosses. He passed
over two hills and under the battlemented
gate, and then round by a left-hand way
to the door of the Abbey. It was studded
with great nails, and when he knocked at
it, he roused the lay brother who was the

CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 85

porter, and of him he asked a place in the
guest-house. Then the lay brother took
a glowing turf on a shovel, and led the
way to a big and naked outhouse strewn
with very dirty rushes ; and lighted a
rush-candle fixed between two of the stones
of the wall, and set the glowing turf upon
the hearth and gave him two unlighted
sods and a wisp of straw, and showed
him a blanket hanging from a nail, and
a shelf with a loaf of bread and a jug of
water, and a tub in a far corner. Then
the lay brother left him and went back to
his place by the door. And Cumhal the
son of Cormac began to blow upon the
glowing turf that he might light the two
sods and the wisp of straw ; but the sods
and the straw would not light, for they
were damp. So he took off his pointed
shoes, and drew the tub out of the corner
with the thought of washing the dust of
the highway from his feet ; but the water
was so dirty that he could not see the
bottom. He was very hungry, for he
had not eaten all that day ; so he did not
waste much anger upon the tub, but took

86 THE SECRET ROSE

up the black loaf, and bit into it, and then
spat out the bite, for the bread was hard
and mouldy. Still he did not give way
to his anger, for he had not drunken these
many hours ; having a hope of heath beer
or wine at his day's end, he had left the
brooks untasted, to make his supper the
more delightful. Now he put the jug
to his lips, but he flung it from him straight-
way, for the water was bitter and ill-smell-
ing. Then he gave the jug a kick, so that
it broke against the opposite wall, and he
took down the blanket to wrap it about
him for the night. But no sooner did he
touch it than it was alive with skipping
fleas. At this, beside himself with anger,
he rushed to the door of the guest-house,
but the lay brother, being well accustomed
to such outcries, had locked it on the out-
side ; so he emptied the tub and began to
beat the door with it, till the lay brother
came to the door and asked what ailed
him, and why he woke him out of sleep.
'What ails me!' shouted Cumhal, 'are
not the sods as wet as the sands of the
Three Rosses? and are not the fleas in

CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 87

the blanket as many as the waves of the
sea and as lively? and is not the bread as
hard as the heart of a lay brother who has
forgotten God ? and is not the water in
the jug as bitter and as ill-smelhng as his
soul ? and is not the foot-water the colour
that shall be upon him when he has been
charred in the Undying Fires?' The lay
brother saw that the lock was fast, and
went back to his niche, for he was too
sleepy to talk with comfort. And Cumhal
went on beating at the door, and presently
he heard the lay brother's foot once more,
and cried out at him, 'O cowardly and
tyrannous race of friars, persecutors of
the bard and the gleeman, haters of life
and joy ! O race that does not draw the
sword and tell the truth ! O race that
melts the bones of the people with coward-
ice and with deceit ! '

'Gleeman,' said the lay brother, 'I also
make rhymes ; I make many while I sit
in my niche by the door, and I sorrow to
hear the bards railing upon the friars.
Brother, I would sleep, and therefore I
make known to you that it is the head of

88 THE SECRET ROSE

the monastery, our gracious abbot, who
orders all things concerning the lodging
of travellers.'

'You may sleep,' said Cumhal, 'I will
sing a bard's curse on the abbot.' And
he set the tub upside down under the
window, and stood upon it, and began to
sing in a very loud voice. The singing
awoke the abbot, so that he sat up in bed
and blew a silver whistle until the lay
brother came to him. 'I cannot get a
wink of sleep with that noise,' said the
abbot. 'What is happening?'

'It is a gleeman,' said the lay brother,
'who complains of the sods, of the bread,
of the water in the jug, of the foot-water,
and of the blanket. And now he is sing-
ing a bard's curse upon you, O brother
abbot, and upon your father and your
mother, and your grandfather and your
grandmother, and upon all your relations.'

'Is he cursing in rhyme ?'

'He is cursing in rhyme, and with two
assonances in every line of his curse.'

The abbot pulled his night-cap off and
crumpled it in his hands, and the circular

CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 89

brown patch of hair in the middle of his
bald head looked like an island in the midst
of a pond, for in Connaught they had not
yet abandoned the ancient tonsure for the
style then coming into use. 'Unless we
do not somewhat,' he said, 'he will teach
his curses to the children in the street, and
the girls spinning at the doors, and to the
robbers upon Ben Bulben.'

'Shall I go, then,' said the other, 'and
give him dry sods, a fresh loaf, clean water
in a jug, clean foot-water, and a new
blanket, and make him swear by the
blessed Saint Benignus, and by the sun
and moon, that no bond be lacking, not
to tell his rhymes to the children in the
street, and the girls spinning at the doors,
and the robbers upon Ben Bulben ? '

'Neither our Blessed Patron nor the sun
and moon would avail at all,' said the
abbot; 'for to-morrow or the next day
the mood to curse would come upon him,
or a pride in those rhymes would move
him, and he would teach his lines to the
children, and the girls, and the robbers.
Or else he would tell another of his craft

90 THE SECRET ROSE

how he fared in the guest-house, and he in
his turn would begin to curse, and my
name would wither. For learn there is no
steadfastness of purpose upon the roads,
but only under roofs and between four
walls. Therefore I bid you go and awaken
Brother Kevin, Brother Dove, Brother
Little Wolf, Brother Bald Patrick, Brother
Bald Brandon, Brother James and Brother
Peter. And they shall take the man,
and bind him with ropes, and dip him
in the river that he shall cease to sing.
And in the morning, lest this but make
him curse the louder, we will crucify
him.'

'The crosses are all full,' said the lay
brother.

'Then we must make another cross. If
we do not make an end of him another will,
for who can eat and sleep in peace while
men like him are going about the world?
Ill should we stand before blessed Saint
Benignus, and sour would be his face when
he comes to judge us at the Last Day,
were we to spare an enemy of his when
we had him under our thumb ! Brother,

CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 91

the bards and the gleemen are an evil race,
ever cursing and ever stirring up the people,
and immoral and immoderate in all things,
and heathen in their hearts, always longing
after the Son of Lir, and Aengus, and Brid-
get, and the Dagda, and Dana the Mother,
and all the false gods of the old days;
always making poems in praise of those
kings and queens of the demons, Finvaragh,
whose home is under Cruachmaa, and Red
Aodh of Cnocna-Sidhe, and Cleena of the
Wave, and Aoibhell of the Grey Rock,
and him they call Donn of the Vats of the
Sea; and railing against God and Christ
and the blessed Saints.' While he was
speaking he crossed himself, and when he
had finished he drew the night-cap over his
ears, to shut out the noise, and closed his
eyes, and composed himself to sleep.

The lay brother found Brother Kevin,
Brother Dove, Brother Little Wolf, Brother
Bald Patrick, Brother Bald Brandon,
Brother James and Brother Peter sitting
up in bed, and he made them get up. Then
they bound Cumhal, and they dragged
him to the river, and they dipped him in it

92 THE SECRET ROSE

at the place which was afterwards called
Buckley's Ford.

'Gleeman/ said the lay brother, as they
led him back to the guest-house, 'why do
you ever use the wit which God has given
you to make blasphemous and immoral
tales and verses ? For such is the way of
your craft. I have, indeed, many such
tales and verses well nigh by rote, and so
I know that I speak true ! And why do
you praise with rhyme those demons,
Finvaragh, Red Aodh, Cleena, Aoibhell
and Donn? I, too, am a man of great
wit and learning, but I ever glorify our
gracious abbot, and Benignus our Patron,
and the princes of the province. My soul
is decent and orderly, but yours is like
the wind among the salley gardens. I
said what I could for you, being also a
man of many thoughts, but who could
help such a one as you?'

'Friend,' answered the gleeman, 'my
soul is indeed like the wind, and it blows
me to and fro, and up and down, and puts
many things into my mind and out of my
mind, and therefore am I called the Swift,

CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 93

Wild Horse.' And he spoke no more that
night, for his teeth were chattering with
the cold.

The abbot and the friars came to him
in the morning, and bade him get ready
to be crucified, and led him out of the
guest-house. And while he still stood
upon the step a flock of great grass-
barnacles passed high above him with
clanking cries. He lifted his arms to
them and said, *0 great grass-barnacles,
tarry a little, and mayhap my soul will
travel with you to the waste places of the
shore and to the ungovernable sea ! ' At
the gate a crowd of beggars gathered about
them, being come there to beg from any
traveller or pilgrim who might have spent
the night in the guest-house. The abbot
and the friars led the gleeman to a place
in the woods at some distance, where many
straight young trees were growing, and
they made him cut one down and fashion
it to the right length, while the beggars
stood round them in a ring, talking and
gesticulating. The abbot then bade him
cut off another and shorter piece of wood.

94 THE SECRET ROSE

and nail it upon the first. So there was
his cross for him; and they put it upon
his shoulder, for his crucifixion was to be
on the top of the hill where the others were.
A half-mile on the way he asked them to
stop and see him juggle for them ; for
he knew, he said, all the tricks of Aengus
the Subtle-hearted. The old friars were
for pressing on, but the young friars would
see him : so he did many wonders for
them, even to the drawing of live frogs
out of his ears. But after a while they
turned on him, and said his tricks were
dull and a shade unholy, and set the cross
on his shoulders again. Another half-
mile on the way, and he asked them to stop
and hear him jest for them, for he knew, he
said, all the jests of Conan the Bald, upon
whose back a sheep's wool grew. And the
young friars, when they had heard his
merry tales, again bade him take up his
cross, for it ill became them to listen to
such follies. Another half-mile on the
way, he asked them to stop and hear him
sing the story of White-breasted Deirdre,
and how she endured many sorrows, and

CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 95

how the sons of Usna died to serve her.
And the young friars were mad to hear
him, but when he had ended they grew
angry, and beat him for waking forgotten
longings in their hearts. So they set the
cross upon his back and hurried him to the
hill.

When he was come to the top, they took
the cross from him, and began to dig a hole
to stand it in, while the beggars gathered
round, and talked among themselves. 'I
ask a favour before I die,' says Cumhal.

'We will grant you no more delays,' says
the abbot.

'I ask no more delays, for I have drawn
the sword, and told the truth, and lived my
vision, and am content.'

'Would you, then, confess?'

'By sun and moon, not I ; I ask but to
be let eat the food I carry in my wallet.
I carry food in my wallet whenever I go
upon a journey, but I do not taste of it
unless I am well-nigh starved. I have
not eaten now these two days.'

'You may eat, then,' says the abbot,
and he turned to help the friars dig the hole.

96 THE SECRET ROSE

The gleeman took a loaf and some strips
of cold fried bacon out of his wallet and
laid them upon the ground. 'I will give a
tithe to the poor,' says he, and he cut a
tenth part from the loaf and the bacon.
'Who among you is the poorest?' And
thereupon was a great clamour, for the
beggars began the history of their sorrows
and their poverty, and their yellow faces
swayed like Gara Lough when the floods
have filled it with water from the bogs.

He listened for a little, and, says he, 'I
am myself the poorest, for I have travelled
the bare road, and by the edges of the sea ;
and the tattered doublet of parti-coloured
cloth upon my back and the torn pointed
shoes upon my feet have ever irked me,
because of the towered city full of noble
raiment which was in my heart. And I
have been the more alone upon the roads
and by the sea because I heard in my heart
the rustling of the rose-bordered dress of
her who is more subtle than Aengus, the
Subtle-hearted, and more full of the beauty
of laughter than Conan the Bald, and more
full of the wisdom of tears than White-

CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST 97

breasted Deirdre, and more lovely than a
bursting dawn to them that are lost in the
darkness. Therefore, I award the tithe
to myself ; but yet, because I am done
with all things, I give it unto you.'

So he flung the bread and the strips of
bacon among the beggars, and they fought
with many cries until the last scrap was
eaten. But meanwhile the friars nailed
the gleeman to his cross, and set it upright
in the hole, and shovelled the earth in at
the foot, and trampled it level and hard.
So then they went away, but the beggars
stayed on, sitting round the cross. But
when the sun was sinking, they also got
up to go, for the air was getting chilly.
And as soon as they had gone a little way,
the wolves, who had been showing them-
selves on the edge of a neighbouring cop-
pice, came nearer, and the birds wheeled
closer and closer. 'Stay, outcasts, yet a
little while,' the crucified one called in a
weak voice to the beggars, 'and keep the
beasts and the birds from me.' But the
beggars were angry because he had called
them outcasts, so they threw stones and

98 THE SECRET ROSE

mud at him, and went their way. Then
the wolves gathered at the foot of the
cross, and the birds flew lower and lower.
And presently the birds lighted all at once
upon his head and arms and shoulders,
and began to peck at him, and the wolves
began to eat his feet. 'Outcasts,' he
moaned, 'have you also turned against the
outcast ? '

OUT OF THE ROSE

One winter evening an old knight in
rusted chain-armour rode slowly along
the woody southern slope of Ben Bulben,
watching the sun go down in crimson clouds
over the sea. His horse was tired, as after
a long journey, and he had upon his helmet
the crest of no neighbouring lord or king,
but a small rose made of rubies that, glim-
mered every moment to a deeper crimson.
His white hair fell in thin curls upon his
shoulders, and its disorder added to the
melancholy of his face, which was the face
of one of those who have come but seldom
into the world, and always for its trouble,
the dreamers who must do what they
dream, the doers who must dream what
they do.

After gazing a while towards the sun, he
let the reins fall upon the neck of his horse,
and, stretching out both arms towards the
99

100 THE SECRET ROSE

west, he said, * 0 Divine Rose of Intellect-
ual Flame, let the gates of thy peace be
opened to me at last ! ' And suddenly a
loud squealing began in the woods some
hundreds of yards further up the mountain
side. He stopped his horse to listen, and
heard behind him a sound of feet and of
voices. 'They are beating them to make
them go into the narrow path by the gorge,'
said someone, and in another moment a
dozen peasants armed with short spears
had come up with the knight, and stood a
little apart from him, their blue caps in
their hands.

'Where do you go with the spears?' he
asked; and one who seemed the leader
answered : 'A troop of wood- thieves came
down from the hills a while ago and carried
off the pigs belonging to an old man who
lives by Glen Car Lough, and we turned
out to go after them. Now that we know
they are four times more than we are,
we follow to find the way they have taken ;
and will presently tell our story to De
Courcey, and if he will not help us, to
Fitzgerald ; for De Courcey and Fitz-

OUT OF THE ROSE 101

gerald have lately made a peace, and we
do not know to whom we belong.'

'But by that time,' said the knight, 'the
pigs will have been eaten.'

'A dozen men cannot do more, and it
was not reasonable that the whole valley
should turn out and risk their lives for
two, or for two dozen pigs.'

'Can you tell me,' said the knight, 'if
the old man to whom the pigs belong is
pious and true of heart ? '

'He is as true as another and more
pious than any, for he says a prayer
to a saint every morning before his
breakfast.'

'Then it were well to fight in his cause,'
said the knight, 'and if you will fight
against the wood-thieves I will take the
main brunt of the battle, and you know
well that a man in armour is worth many
like these wood-thieves, clad in wool and
leather.'

And the leader turned to his fellows and
asked if they would take the chance ; but
they seemed anxious to get back to their
cabins.

102 THE SECRET ROSE

'Are the wood- thieves treacherous and
impious ? '

'They are treacherous in all their deal-
ings/ said a peasant, 'and no man has
known them to pray.'

'Then,' said the knight, 'I will give five
crowns for the head of every wood-thief
killed by us in the fighting ' ; and he bid
the leader show the way, and they all
went on together. After a time they
came to where a beaten track wound into
the woods, and, taking this, they doubled
back upon their previous course, and began
to ascend the wooded slope of the moun-
tains. In a little while the path grew
very straight and steep, and the knight
was forced to dismount and leave his horse
tied to a tree-stem. They knew they
were on the right track : for they could
see the marks of pointed shoes in the soft
clay and mingled with them the cloven
footprints of the pigs. Presently the path
became still more abrupt, and they knew
by the ending of the cloven footprints
that the thieves were carrying the pigs.
Now and then a long mark in the clay

OUT OF THE ROSE 103

showed that a pig had slipped down, and
been dragged along for a little way. They
had journeyed thus for about twenty
minutes, when a confused sound of voices
told them that they were coming up with
the thieves. And then the voices ceased,
and they understood that they had been
overheard in their turn. They pressed on
rapidly and cautiously, and in about five
minutes one of them caught sight of a
leather jerkin half hidden by a hazel-bush.
An arrow struck the knight's chain-
armour, but glanced off harmlessly, and
then a flight of arrows swept by them with
the buzzing sound of great bees. They
ran and climbed, and climbed and ran
towards the thieves, who were now all vis-
ible standing up among the bushes with
their still quivering bows in their hands : for
they had only their spears and they must
at once come hand to hand. The knight
was in the front and struck down first
one and then another of the wood-thieves.
The peasants shouted, and, pressing on,
drove the wood-thieves before them until
they came out on the flat top of the moun-

104 THE SECRET ROSE

tain, and there they saw the two pigs
quietly grubbing in the short grass, so
they ran about them in a circle, and began
to move back again towards the narrow
path : the old knight coming now the last
of all, and striking down thief after thief.
The peasants had got no very serious hurts
among them, for he had drawn the brunt
of the battle upon himself, as could well be
seen from the bloody rents in his armour ;
and when they came to the entrance of the
narrow path he told them to drive the pigs
down into the valley, while he stood there
to guard the way behind them. So in a
moment he was alone, and, being weak
with loss of blood, might have been ended
there and then by the wood-thieves had
fear not made them begone out of sight
in a great hurry.

An hour passed, and they did not return ;
and now the knight could stand on guard
no longer, but had to lie down upon the
grass. A half-hour more went by, and
then a young lad with what appeared to
be a number of cock's feathers stuck round
his hat, came out of the path behind him.

OUT OF THE ROSE 105

and began to move about among the dead
thieves, cutting their heads off. Then
he laid the heads in a heap before the
knight, and said : ' 0 great knight, I have
been bid come and ask you for the crowns
you promised for the heads : five crowns
a head. They told me to tell you that
they have prayed to God and His Mother
to give you a long life, but that they are
poor peasants, and that they would have
the money before you die. They told
me this over and over for fear I might for-
get it, and promised to beat me if I did.'

The knight raised himself upon his el-
bow, and opening a bag that hung to his
belt, counted out the five crowns for each
head. There were thirty heads in all.

'0 great knight,' said the lad, 'they have
also bid me take all care of you, and light a
fire, and put this ointment upon your
wounds.' And he gathered sticks and
leaves together, and, flashing his flint and
steel under a mass of dry leaves, had made
a very good blaze. Then, drawing off the
coat of mail, he began to anoint the
wounds : but he did it clumsily, like one

106 THE SECRET ROSE

who does by rote what he had been told.
The knight motioned him to stop, and
said : ' You seem a good lad. '

'I would ask something of you for
myself.'

'There are still a few crowns/ said the
knight ; ' shall I give them to you ? '

'O no/ said the lad. 'They would be
no good to me. There is only one thing
that I care about doing, and I have no need
of money to do it. I go from village to
village and from hill to hill, and whenever
I come across a good cock I steal him and
take him into the woods, and I keep him
there under a basket until I get another
good cock, and then I set them to fight.
The people say I am an innocent, and do
not do me any harm, and never ask me to
do any work but go a message now and
then. It is because I am an innocent that
they send me to get the crowns : anyone
else would steal them ; and they dare not
come back themselves, for now that you
are not with them they are afraid of the
wood- thieves. Did you ever hear how,
when the wood-thieves are christened, the

OVT OF THE ROSE 107

wolves are made their god-fathers, and
their right arms are not christened at all ? '

'If you will not take these crowns, my
good lad, I have nothing for you, I fear,
unless you would have that old coat of
mail which I shall soon need no more.'

'There was something I wanted : yes, I
remember now,' said the lad. 'I want you
to tell me why you fought like the cham-
pions and giants in the stories and for so
little a thing. Are you indeed a man like
us? Are you not rather an old wizard
who lives among these hills, and will not a
wind arise presently and crumble you into
dust?'

'I will tell you of myself,' repHed the
knight, 'for now that I am the last of the
fellowship, I may tell all and witness for
God. Look at the Rose of Rubies on my
helmet, and see the symbol of my life and
of my hope.' And then he told the lad
this story, but with always more frequent
pauses; and, while he told it, the Rose
shone a deep blood-colour in the firelight,
and the lad stuck the cock's feathers in
the earth in front of him, and moved them

108 THE SECRET ROSE

about as though he made them actors in
the play.

'I Uve in a land far from this, and was
one of the Knights of St. John/ said the
old man; 'but I was one of those in the
Order who always longed for more arduous
labours in the service of the truth that can
only be understood within the heart. At
last there came to us a knight of Palestine,
to whom the truth of truths had been
revealed by God Himself. He had seen
a great Rose of Fire, and a Voice out of
the Rose had told him how men would
turn from the light of their own hearts, and
bow down before outer order and outer
fixity, and that then the light would cease,
and none escape the curse except the foolish
good man who could not, and the passion-
ate wicked man who would not, think.
Already, the Voice told him, the wayward
light of the heart was shining out upon
the world to keep the world alive, with a less
clear lustre, and that, as it paled, a strange
infection was touching the stars and the
hills and the grass and the trees with cor-
ruption, and that none of those who had

OUT OF THE ROSE 109

seen clearly the truth and the ancient way
could enter into the Kingdom of God, which
is in the Heart of the Rose, if they stayed
on willingly in the corrupted world ; and
so they must prove their anger against
the Powers of Corruption by dying in the
service of the Rose of God. While the
Knight of Palestine was telling us these
things we seemed to see in a vision a crim-
son Rose spreading itself about him, so
that he seemed to speak out of its heart,
and the air was filled with fragrance. By
this we knew that it was the very Voice
of God which spoke to us by the knight,
and we told him to direct us in all things,
and teach us how to obey the Voice. So
he bound us with an oath, and gave us
signs and words whereby we might know
each other even after many years, and he
appointed places of meeting, and he sent
us out in troops into the world to seek good
causes, and die in doing battle for them.
At first we thought to die more readily by
fasting to death in honour of some saint ;
but this he told us was evil, for we did it
for the sake of death, and thus took out

no THE SECRET ROSE

of the hands of God the choice of the time
and manner of our death, and by so doing
made His power the less. We must choose
our service for its excellence, and for this
alone, and leave it to God to reward us
at His own time and in His own manner.
And after this he compelled us to eat
always two at a table to watch each other
lest we fasted unduly. And the years
passed, and one by one my fellows died
in the Holy Land, or in warring upon the
evil princes of the earth, or in clearing
the roads of robbers ; and among them
died the knight of Palestine, and at last
I was alone. I fought in every cause
where the few contended against the many,
and my hair grew white, and a terrible
fear lest I had fallen under the displeasure
of God came upon me. But, hearing at
last how this western isle was fuller of wars
and rapine than any other land, I came
hither, and I have found the thing I sought,
and, behold ! I am filled with a great joy.'
Thereat he began to sing in Latin, and,
while he sang, his voice faltered and grew
faint. Then his eyes closed, and his lips

OUT OF THE ROSE 111

fell apart, and the lad knew he was dead.
'He has told me a good tale/ he said, 'for
there was fighting in it, but I did not under-
stand much of it, and it is hard to remember
so long a story.'

And, taking the knight's sword, he be-
gan to dig a grave in the soft clay. He
dug hard, and a faint light of dawn had
touched his hair and he had almost done
his work when a cock crowed in the valley
below. *Ah,' he said, 'I must have that
bird ' ; and he ran down the narrow path
to the valley.

THE WISDOM OF THE KING

The High-Queen of Ireland had died
in childbirth, and her child was put to
nurse with a woman who lived in a little
house, within the border of the wood. One
night the woman sat rocking the cradle,
and meditating upon the beauty of the
child, and praying that the gods might
grant him wisdom equal to his beauty.
There came a knock at the door, and she
got up, not a little wondering, for the near-
est neighbours were in the High-King's
house a mile away; and the night was
now late. 'Who is knocking?' she cried,
and a thin voice answered, ' Open ! for I
am a crone of the grey hawk, and I come
from the darkness of the great wood.' In
terror she drew back the bolt, and a grey-
clad woman, of a great age, and of a height
more than human, came in and stood by
the head of the cradle. The nurse shrank

112

THE WISDOM OF THE KING 113

back against the wall, unable to take her
eyes from the woman, for she saw by the
gleaming of the firelight that the feathers
of the grey hawk were upon her head in-
stead of hair. But the child slept, and
the fire danced, for the one was too ig-
norant and the other too full of gaiety to
know what a dreadful being stood there.
' Open ! ' cried another voice, ' for I am a
crone of the grey hawk, and I watch over
his nest in the darkness of the great wood.'
The nurse opened the door again, though
her fingers could scarce hold the bolts for
trembling, and another grey woman, not
less old than the other, and with like
feathers instead of hair, came in and stood
by the first. In a little, came a third grey
woman, and after her a fourth, and then
another and another and another, until
the hut was full of their immense bodies.
They stood a long time in perfect silence
and stillness, for they were of those whom
the dropping of the sand has never troub-
led, but at last one muttered in a low thin
voice : ' Sisters, I knew him far away by
the redness of his heart under his silver

114 THE SECRET ROSE

skin' ; and then another spoke : ' Sisters,
I knew him because his heart fluttered
hke a bird under a net of silver cords' ;
and then another took up the word :
' Sisters, I knew him because his heart sang
Uke a bird that is happy in a silver cage.'
And after that they sang together, those
who were nearest rocking the cradle with
long wrinkled fingers; and their voices
were now tender and caressing, now like
the wind blowing in the great wood, and
this was their song :

Out of sight is out of mind :
Long have man and woman-kind,
Heavy of will and light of mood.
Taken away our wheaten food.
Taken away our Altar stone ;
Hail and rain and thunder alone,
And red hearts we turn to grey,
Are true till Time gutter away.

When the song had died out, the crone
who had first spoken, said : 'We have
nothing more to do but to mix a drop of
our blood into his blood.' And she
scratched her arm with the sharp point of
a spindle, which she had made the nurse

THE WISDOM OF THE KING 115

bring to her, and let a drop of blood, grey
as the mist, fall upon the lips of the child ;
and passed out into the darkness. Then
the others passed out in silence one by one ;
and all the while the child had not opened
his pink eyelids or the fire ceased to dance,
for the one was too ignorant and the other
too full of gaiety to know what great
beings had bent over the cradle.

When the crones were gone, the nurse
came to her courage again, and hurried to
the High-King's house, and cried out in
the midst of the assembly hall that the
Sidhe, whether for good or evil she knew
not, had bent over the child that night;
and the king and his poets and men of law,
and his hunstmen, and his cooks, and his
chief warriors went with her to the hut
and gathered about the cradle, and were
as noisy as magpies, and the child sat up
and looked at them.

Two years passed over, and the king died
fighting against the Fer Bolg; and the
poets and the men of law ruled in the name
of the child, but looked to see him become
the master himself before long, for no one

116 THE SECRET ROSE

had seen so wise a child, and tales of his
endless questions about the world and the
gods went hither and thither among the
houses of the poor. Everything had been
well but for a miracle that began to trouble
all men ; and all women, who, indeed,
talked of it without ceasing. The feathers
of the grey hawk had begun to grow in
the child's hair, and though his nurse cut
them continually, in but a little while they
would be more numerous than ever. This
had not been a matter of great importance,
for miracles were a little thing in those days,
but for an ancient law of Ireland that none
who had any blemish of body could sit
upon the throne ; and as a grey hawk was
a wild thing of the air which had never sat
at the board, or listened to the songs of
the poets, it was not possible to think of
one in whose hair its feathers grew as other
than marred and blasted ; nor could the
people separate from their admiration of
the wisdom that grew in him a horror as
at one of unhuman blood. Yet all were
resolved that he should reign, for they had
suffered much from foolish kings and their

THE WISDOM OF THE KING 117

own disorders, and moreover they desired
to watch out the spectacle of his days ;
and no one had any other fear but that his
great wisdom might bid him obey the law,
and call some other, who had but a com-
mon mind, to reign in his stead.

When the child was seven years old the
poets and the men of law were called to-
gether by the chief poet, and all these
matters weighed and considered. The
child had already seen that those about
him had hair only, and, though they had
told him that they too had had feathers
but had lost them because of a sin com-
mitted by their forefathers, they knew
that he would learn the truth when he
began to wander into the country round
about. After much consideration they
made a new law commanding everyone
upon pain of death to mingle artificially the
feathers of the grey hawk into his hair;
and they sent men with nets and shngs
and bows into the countries round about
to gather a sufficiency of feathers. They
decreed also that any who told the
truth to the child should be flung from a
cliff into the sea.

118 THE SECRET ROSE

The years passed, and the child grew
from childhood into boyhood and from
boyhood into manhood, and from being
curious about all things he became busy
with strange and subtle thoughts which
came to him in dreams, and with distinc-
tions between things long held the same
and with the resemblance of things long
held different. Multitudes came from
other lands to see him and to ask his
counsel, but there were guards set at the
frontiers, who compelled all that came to
wear the feathers of the grey hawk in
their hair. While they listened to him
his words seemed to make all darkness
light and filled their hearts like music ;
but when they returned to their own lands
his words seemed far off, and what they
could remember too strange and subtle
to help them in their lives. A number
indeed did live differently afterwards, but
their new life was less excellent than the
old : some among them had long served a
good cause, but when they heard him praise
it, they returned to their own lands to
find what they had loved less lovable, for

THE WISDOM OF THE KING 119

he had taught them how Httle a hair
divides the false and true; others, again,
who had served no cause, but built up in
peace the welfare of their own households,
found their bones softer and their will less
ready for toil, for he had shown them
greater purposes; and numbers of the
young, when they had heard him upon
all these things, remembered certain
strange words that made all kindly joys
and traffic between man and man as
nothing, and went different ways, but all
into vague regret.

When any asked him about the common
things of life ; disputes about the mearing
of a territory, or about the straying of
cattle, or about the penalty of blood ; he
would turn to those nearest him for ad-
vice ; but this was held to be from courtesy,
for none knew that these matters were
hidden from him by thoughts and dreams
that filled his mind like the marching and
counter-marching of armies. Far less
could any know that his heart wandered
lost amid throngs of overcoming thoughts
and dreams, shuddering at its own solitude.

120 THE SECRET ROSE

Among those who came to look at him
and to Hsten to him was the daughter of
a Uttle king who hved a great way ofif ;
and when he saw her he loved, for she was
beautiful, with a beauty unlike the women
of his land ; but Dana, the great mother,
had decreed her a heart that was but as
the heart of others, and when she thought
of the mystery of the hawk feathers she
was afraid. He called her to him when the
assembly was over and told her of her
beauty, and praised her simply and
frankly; and humbly asked her to give
him her love, for he was only subtle in his
dreams. Overwhelmed with his greatness,
she half consented, and yet half refused,
for she longed to marry some man who
could carry her over a mountain in his
arms. Day by day the king gave her
gifts ; gold enamelled cups and cloths
the merchants had carried from India or
maybe from China itself ; and still she
was ever between a smile and a frown ;
between yielding and withholding. He
laid down his wisdom at her feet, and told
how the heroes when they die return to the

THE WISDOM OF THE KING 121

world and begin their labour anew ; and a
multitude of things that even the Sidhe
have forgotten, either because they hap-
pened so long ago or because the Sidhe have
not time to think of them; and still she
half refused, and still he hoped, because he
could not believe that a beauty so much
like wisdom could hide a common heart.

There was a tall young man in the house
who had yellow hair, and was skilled in
wrestling ; and one day when the king
walked in the orchard, which was between
the foss and the forest, he heard his voice
among the salley bushes which hid the
waters of the foss. 'My dear,' it said, 'I
hate them for making you weave these
dingy feathers into your beautiful hair,
and all that the bird of prey upon the
throne may sleep easy o' nights' ; and then
the low, musical voice he loved answered :
* My hair is not beautiful like yours ; and
now that I have plucked the feathers out
of your hair I will put my hands through
it, thus, and thus, and thus ; for it does not
make me afraid.' Then the king remem-
bered many things that he had forgotten

122 THE SECRET ROSE

without understanding them, doubtful
words of his poets and his men of law,
doubts that he had reasoned away ; and
he called to the lovers in a trembling voice.
They came from among the salley bushes
and threw themselves at his feet and prayed
for pardon, and he stooped down and
plucked the feathers out of the hair of the
woman and turned away without a word.
He went to the hall of assembly, and
having gathered his poets and his men of
law about him, stood upon the dais and
spoke in a loud, clear voice : 'Men of law,
why did you make me sin against the
laws ? Men of verse, why did you make
me sin against the secrecy of wisdom, for
law was made by man for the welfare of
man, but wisdom the gods have made,
and no man shall live by its light, for it
and the hail and the rain and the thunder
follow a way that is deadly to mortal
things? Men of law and men of verse,
live according to your kind, and call Eocha
of the Hasty Mind to reign over you, for I
set out to find my kindred.' He then came
down among them, and drew out of the hair

THE WISDOM OF THE KING 123

of first one and then another the feathers
of the grey hawk, and, having scattered
them over the rushes upon the floor,
passed out, and none dared to follow him,
for his eyes gleamed hke the eyes of the
birds of prey ; and no man saw him again
or heard his voice. Some believed that he
found his eternal abode among the demons,
and some that he dwelt henceforth with
the dark and dreadful goddesses, who sit
all night about the pools in the forest
watching the constellations rising and
setting in those desolate mirrors.

THE HEART OF THE SPRING

A VERY old man, whose face was almost
as fleshless as the foot of a bird, sat meditat-
ing upon the rocky shore of the fiat and
hazel-covered isle which fills the widest
part of Lough Gill. A russet-faced boy of
seventeen years sat by his side, watching
the swallows dipping for flies in the still
water. The old man was dressed in
threadbare blue velvet and the boy wore a
frieze coat and had a rosary about his
neck. Behind the two, and half hidden
by trees, was a little monastery. It had
been burned down a long while before
by sacrilegious men of the Queen's party,
but had been roofed anew with rushes by
the boy, that the old man might find shelter
in his last days. He had not set his spade,
however, into the garden about it, and the
lilies and the roses of the monks had spread
out until their confused luxuriance met and

124

THE HEART OF THE SPRING 125

mingled with the narrowing circle of the
fern. Beyond the lilies and the roses the
ferns were so deep that a child walking
among them would be hidden from sight,
even though he stood upon his toes ; and
beyond the fern rose many hazels and small
oak trees.

'Master,' said the boy, 'this long fasting,
and the labour of beckoning after nightfall
to the beings who dwell in the waters and
among the hazels and oak-trees, is too
much for your strength. Rest from all
this labour for a little to-day for your hand
seemed more heavy upon my shoulder and
your feet less steady than I have known
them. Men say that you are older than
the eagles, and yet you will not seek
the rest that belongs to age.' He spoke
eagerly, as though his heart were in the
words; and the old man answered slowly
and deliberately, as though his heart were
in distant days and events.

' I will tell you why I have not been able
to rest,' he said. 'It is right that you
should know, for you have served me faith-
fully these five years, and even with affec-

126 THE SECRET ROSE

tion, taking away thereby a little of the
doom of loneliness which always falls upon
the wise. Now, too, that the end of my
labour and the triumph of my hopes is at
hand, it is the more needful for you to have
this knowledge.'

'Master, do not think that I would
question you. It is for me to keep the fire
alight, and the thatch close that the rain
may not come in, and strong, that the
wind may not blow it among the trees;
and to take down the heavy books from
the shelves, possessing the while an incuri-
ous and reverent heart, for God has made
out of His abundance a separate wisdom
for everything which lives, and to do these
things is my wisdom.'

'You are afraid,' said the old man, and
his eyes shone with a momentary anger.

'Sometimes at night,' said the boy,
'when you are reading, with the rod of
quicken wood in your hand, I look out of
the door and see, now a great grey man
driving swine among the hazels, and now
many little people in red caps who come
out of the lake driving little white cows

THE HEART OF THE SPRING 127

before them. I do not fear these little
people so much as the grey man ; for, when
they come near the house, they milk the
cows, and they drink the frothing milk,
and begin to dance ; and I know there is
good in the heart that loves dancing ; but
I fear them for all that. And I fear the tall
white-armed ladies who come out of the
air, and move slowly hither and thither,
crowning themselves with the roses or with
the lilies, and shaking about them their
living hair, which moves, for so I have
heard them tell each other, with the motion
of their thoughts, now spreading out and
now gathering close to their heads. They
have mild, beautiful faces, Aengus, son of
Forbis, but I am afraid of the Sidhe, and
afraid of the art which draws them about
us.'

'Why,' said the old man, 'do you fear the
ancient gods who made the spears of your
father's fathers to be stout in battle, and
the little people who came at night from
the depth of the lakes and sang among the
crickets upon their hearths? And in our
evil day they still watch over the loveliness

128 THE SECRET ROSE

of the earth. But I must tell you why I
have fasted and laboured when others
would sink into the sleep of age, for with-
out your help once more I shall have fasted
and laboured to no good end. When you
have done for me this last thing, you may
go and build your cottage and till your
fields, and take some girl to wife, and forget
the ancient gods. I have saved all the
gold and silver pieces that were given to me
by earls and knights and squires for keeping
them from the evil eye and from the love-
weaving enchantments of witches, and by
earls' and knights' and squires' ladies for
keeping the people of the Sidhe from mak-
ing the udders of their cattle fall dry, and
taking the butter from their churns. I
have saved it all for the day when my work
should be at an end, and now that the end
is at hand you shall not lack for money to
make strong the roof-tree of your cottage
and to keep cellar and larder full. I have
sought through all my life to find the secret
of life. I was not happy in my youth, for
I knew that it would pass ; and I was not
happy in my manhood^ for I knew that age

THE HEART OF THE SPRING 129

was coming; and so I gave myself, in
youth and manhood and age, to the search
for the Great Secret. I longed for a life
whose abundance would fill centuries, I
scorned the life of fourscore winters. I
would be — no, I will be ! — like the
Ancient Gods of the land. I read in my
youth, in a Hebrew manuscript I found in a
Spanish monastery, that there is a moment
after the Sun has entered the Ram and
before he has passed the Lion, which trem-
bles with the Song of the Immortal Powers,
and that whosoever finds this moment and
listens to the Song shall become like the
Immortal Powers themselves ; I came back
to Ireland and asked the fairy men, and
the cow-doctors, if they knew when this
moment was ; but though all had heard of
it, there was none could find the moment
upon the hour-glass. So I gave myself to
magic, and spent my life in fasting and in
labour that I might bring the Gods and
the Men of Faery to my side ; and now at
last one of the Men of Faery has told me
that the moment is at hand. One, who
wore a red cap and whose lips were white

130 THE SECRET ROSE

with the froth of the new milk, whispered
it into my ear. To-morrow, a Httle before
the close of the first hour after dawn, I
shall find the moment, and then I will go
away to a southern land and build myself a
palace of white marble amid orange trees,
and gather the brave and the beautiful
about me, and enter into the eternal king-
dom of my youth. But, that I may hear
the whole Song, I was told by the little
fellow with the froth of the new milk on
his lips, that you must bring great masses
of green boughs and pile them about the
door and the window of my room ; and
you must put fresh green rushes upon the
floor, and cover the table and the rushes
with the roses and the lilies of the monks.
You must do this to-night, and in the
morning at the end of the first hour after
dawn, you must come and find me.'

'Will you be quite young then?' said
the boy.

*I will be as young then as you are, but
now I am still old and tired, and you must
help me to my chair and to my books.'

When the boy had left Aengus son of

THE HEART OF THE SPRING 131

Forbis in his room, and had Hghted the
lamp which, by some contrivance of the
wizard's, gave forth a sweet odour as of
strange flowers, he went into the wood and
began cutting green boughs from the hazels,
and great bundles of rushes from the west-
ern border of the isle, where the small rocks
gave place to gently sloping sand and clay.
It was nightfall before he had cut enough
for his purpose, and well-nigh midnight
before he had carried the last bundle to its
place, and gone back for the roses and the
lilies. It was one of those warm, beautiful
nights when everything seems carved of-
precious stones. Sleuth Wood away to
the south looked as though cut out of green
beryl, and the waters that mirrored it
shone like pale opal. The roses he was
gathering were like glowing rubies, and the
Ulies had the dull lustre of pearl. Every-
thing had taken upon itself the look of
something imperishable, except a glow-
worm, whose faint flame burnt on steadily
among the shadows, moving slowly hither
and thither, the only thing that seemed
aHve, the only thing that seemed perish-

132 THE SECRET ROSE

able as mortal hope. The boy gathered a
great armful of roses and lilies, and thrust-
ing the glow-worm among their pearl and
ruby, carried them into the room, where the
old man sat in a half-slumber. He laid
armful after armful upon the floor and
above the table, and then, gently closing
the door, threw himself upon his bed of
rushes, to dream of a peaceful manhood
with a desirable wife, and laughing children.
At dawn he got up, and went down to the
edge of the lake, taking the hour-glass with
him. He put some bread and wine into
the boat, that his master might not lack
food at the outset of his journey, and then
sat down to wait until the hour from dawn
had gone by. Gradually the birds began
to sing, and when the last grains of sand
were falling, everything suddenly seemed
to overflow with their music. It was the
most beautiful and living moment of the
year; one could listen to the spring's
heart beating in it. He got up and went
to find his master. The green boughs
filled the door, and he had to make a way
through them. When he entered the room

THE HEART OF THE SPRING 133

the sunlight was falling in flickering circles
on floor and walls and table, and every-
thing was full of soft green shadows. But
the old man sat clasping a mass of roses and
lilies in his arms, and with his head sunk
upon his breast. On the table, at his left
hand, was a leather wallet full of gold and
silver pieces, as for a journey, and at his
right hand was a long staff. The boy
touched him and he did not move. He
lifted the hands but they were quite cold,
and they fell heavily.

'It were better for him,' said the lad, ' to
have said his prayers and kissed his beads ! '
He looked at the threadbare blue velvet,
and he saw it was covered with the pollen
of the flowers, and while he was looking at
it a thrush, who had alighted among the
boughs that were piled against the window,
began to sing.

THE CURSE OF THE FIRES AND
OF THE SHADOWS

One summer night, when there was peace,
a score of Puritan troopers under the pious
Sir Frederick Hamilton, broke through the
door of the Abbey of the White Friars at
Sligo. As the door fell with a crash they
saw a little knot of friars gathered about
the altar, their white habits ghmmering in
the steady light of the holy candles. All
the monks were kneehng except the abbot,
who stood upon the altar steps with a
great brass crucifix in his hand. 'Shoot
them ! ' cried Sir Frederick Hamilton, but
nobody stirred, for all were new converts,
and feared the candles and the crucij&x.
The white lights from the altar threw the
shadows of the troopers up on to roof and
wall. As the troopers moved about, the
shadows began to dance among the corbels
and the memorial tablets. For a little
134

CURSE OF FIRES AND SHADOWS 135

while all was silent, and then five troopers
who were the body-guard of Sir Frederick
Hamilton lifted their muskets, and shot
down five of the friars. The noise and the
smoke drove away the mystery of the pale
altar fights, and the other troopers took
courage and began to strike. In a mo-
ment the friars lay about the altar steps,
their white habits stained with blood.
' Set fire to the house ! ' cried Sir Frederick
Hamilton, and a trooper carried in a heap
of dry straw, and piled it against the west-
ern wall, but did not fight it, because he
was still afraid of crucifix and of candles.
Seeing this, the five troopers who were Sir
Frederick Hamilton's body-guard went
up to the altar, and taking each a holy
candle set the straw in a blaze. The red
tongues of fire rushed up towards the roof,
and crept along the floor, setting in a blaze
the seats and benches. The dance of the
shadows passed away, and the dance of the
fires began. The troopers fell back tow-
ards the door in the southern wall, and
watched those yellow dancers springing
hither and thither.

136 THE SECRET ROSE

For a time the altar stood safe and apart
in the midst of its white Hght ; the eyes of
the troopers turned upon it. The abbot
whom they had thought dead had risen to
his feet and now stood before it with the
crucifix hfted in both hands high above his
head. Suddenly he cried with a loud
voice, ' Woe unto all who have struck down
those who have lived in the Light of the
Lord, for they shall wander among shadows,
and among fires ! ' And having so cried he
fell on his face dead, and the brass crucifix
rolled down the steps of the altar. The
smoke had now grown very thick, so that it
drove the troopers out into the open air.
Before them were burning houses. Behind
them shone the Abbey windows filled with
saints and martyrs, awakened, as from a sa-
cred trance, into an angry and animated life.
The eyes of the troopers were dazzled, and
for a while could see nothing but the flam-
ing faces of saints and martyrs. Presently,
however, they saw a man covered with dust
who came running towards them. 'Two
messengers,' he cried, 'have been sent by
the defeated Irish to raise against you the

CURSE OF FIRES AND SHADOWS 137

whole country about Manor Hamilton,
and if you do not stop them you will be
overpowered in the woods before you reach
home again ! They ride north-east be-
tween Ben Bulben and Cashel-na-Gael.'

Sir Frederick Hamilton called to him the
five troopers who had first fired upon the
monks and said, 'Mount quickly, and ride
through the woods towards the mountain,
and get before these men, and kill them.'

In a moment the troopers were gone,
and before many moments they had
splashed across the river at what is now
called Buckley's Ford, and plunged into
the woods. They followed a beaten track
that wound along the northern bank of the
river. The boughs of the birch and
quicken trees mingled above, and hid the
cloudy moonlight, leaving the pathway in
almost complete darkness. They rode at a
rapid trot, now chatting together, now
watching some stray weasel or rabbit
scuttling away in the darkness. Gradu-
ally, as the gloom and silence of the woods
oppressed them, they drew closer together,
and began to talk rapidly ; they were old

138 THE SECRET ROSE

comrades and knew each other's lives.
One was married, and told how glad his
wife would be to see him return safe from
this harebrained expedition against the
White Friars, and to hear how fortune had
made amends for rashness. The oldest
of the five, whose wife was dead, spoke of a
flagon of wine which awaited him upon an
upper shelf; while a third, who was the
youngest, had a sweetheart watching for
his return, and he rode a little way before
the others, not talking at all. Suddenly
the young man stopped, and they saw that
his horse was trembling. 'I saw some-
thing,' he said, 'and yet I do not know but
it may have been one of the shadows. It
looked like a great worm with a silver
crown upon his head.' One of the five
put his hand up to his forehead as if about
to cross himself, but remembering that he
had changed his religion he put it down,
and said : ' I am certain it was but a shadow,
for there are a great many about us, and of
very strange kinds.' Then they rode on in
silence. It had been raining in the earlier
part of the day, and the drops fell from

CURSE OF FIRES AND SHADOWS 139

the branches, wetting their hair and their
shoulders. In a httle they began to talk
again. They had been in many battles
against many a rebel together, and now
told each other over again the story of their
wounds, and so awakened in their hearts
the strongest of all fellowships, the fellow-
ship of the sword, and half forgot the
terrible solitude of the woods.

Suddenly the first two horses neighed,
and then stood still, and would go no
further. Before them was a glint of water,
and they knew by the rushing sound that
it was a river. They dismounted, and
after much tugging and coaxing brought
the horses to the river-side. In the midst
of the water stood a tall old woman with
grey hair flowing over a grey dress. She
stood up to her knees in the water, and
stooped from time to time as though
washing. Presently they could see that
she was washing something that half
floated. The moon cast a flickering light
upon it, and they saw that it was the dead
body of a man, and, while they were look-
ing at it, an eddy of the river turned the

140 THE SECRET ROSE

face towards them, and each of the five
troopers recognised at the same moment
his own face. While they stood dumb
and motionless with horror, the woman
began to speak, saying slowly and loudly :
'Did you see my son? He has upon
his head a crown of silver.' Then the
oldest of the troopers, he who had been
most often wounded, drew his sword and
said : ' I have fought for the truth of my
God, and need not fear the shadows of
Satan,' and with that rushed into the
water. In a moment he returned. The
woman had vanished, and though he had
thrust his sword into air and water he had
found nothing.

The five troopers remounted, and set
their horses at the ford, but all to no pur-
pose. They tried again and again, and
went plunging hither and thither, the
horses foaming and rearing. 'Let us,'
said the old trooper, 'ride back a little into
the wood, and strike the river higher up.'
They rode in under the boughs, the ground-
ivy crackling under the hoofs, and the
branches striking against their steel caps.

CVRSE OF FIRES AND SHADOWS 141

After about twenty minutes' riding they
came out again upon the river, and after
another ten minutes found a place where it
was possible to cross without sinking below
the stirrups. The wood upon the other
side was very thin, and broke the moon-
light into long streams. The wind had
arisen, and had begun to drive the clouds
rapidly across the face of the moon, so that
thin streams of light were dancing among
scattered bushes and small fir-trees. The
tops of the trees began also to moan, and
the sound of it was like the voice of the
dead in the wind ; and the troopers remem-
bered that the dead in purgatory are said
to be spitted upon the points of the trees
and upon the points of the rocks. They
turned a little to the south, in the hope
that they might strike the beaten path
again, but they could find no trace of it.
Meanwhile, the moaning grew louder and
louder, and the dancing of the moonlight
seemed more and more rapid. Gradually
they began to be aware of a sound of dis-
tant music. It was the sound of a bagpipe,
and they rode towards it with great joy.

142 THE SECRET ROSE

It came from the bottom of a deep, cup-
like hollow. In the midst of the hollow
was an old man with a red cap and withered
face. He sat beside a fire of sticks, and had
a burning torch thrust into the earth at his
feet, and played an old bagpipe furiously.
His red hair dripped over his face like the
iron rust upon a rock. 'Did you see my
wife ? ' he said, looking up a moment ;
' she was washing ! she was washing ! '
'1 am afraid of him,' said the young
trooper, 'I fear he is not a right man.'
'No,' said the old trooper, 'he is a man like
ourselves, for I can see the sun-freckles
upon his face. We will compel him to be
our guide ' ; and at that he drew his
sword, and the others did the same. They
stood in a ring round the piper, and pointed
their swords at him, and the old trooper
then told him that they must kill two
rebels, who had taken the road between
Ben Bulben and the great mountain spur
that is called Cashel-na-Gael, and that he
must get up on the horse before one of
them and be their guide, for they had lost
their way. The piper pointed to a neigh-

CURSE OF FIRES AND SHADOWS 143

bouring tree, and they saw an old white
horse ready bitted, bridled, and saddled.
He slung the pipe across his back, and,
taking the torch in his hand, got upon the
horse, and started off before them, as hard
as he could go.

The wood grew thinner now, and the
ground began to slope up toward the
mountain. The moon had already set, but
the stars shone brightly between the clouds.
The ground sloped more and more until at
last they rode far above the woods upon
the wide top of the mountain. The woods
lay spread out mile after mile below, and
away to the south shot up the red glare of
the burning town. The guide drew rein
suddenly, and pointing upwards with the
hand that did not hold the torch, shrieked
out, ' Look ; look at the holy candles ! '
and then plunged forward at a gallop,
waving the torch hither and thither. 'Do
you hear the hoofs of the messengers?'
cried the guide. ' Quick, quick ! or they
will be gone out of your hands ! ' and he
laughed as with delight of the chase. The
troopers thought they could hear far off,

144 THE SECRET ROSE

and as if below them, rattle of hoofs;
but now the ground began to slope more
and more, and the speed grew more head-
long moment by moment. They tried to
pull up, but they could not, for the horses
seemed to have gone mad. The guide
had thrown the reins on to the neck of the
old white horse, and was waving his arms
and singing in Gaelic. Suddenly they
saw the thin gleam of a river, at an im-
mense distance below, and knew that they
were upon the brink of the abyss that is
now called Lug-na-Gael, or in English the
Stranger's Leap. The six horses sprang
forward, and five screams went up into
the air, a moment later five men and horses
fell with a dull crash upon the green slopes
at the foot of the rocks.

THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT

At the place, close to the Dead Man's
Point, at the Rosses, where the disused
pilot-house looks out to sea through two
round windows like eyes, a mud cottage
stood in the last century. It also was a
watchhouse, for a certain old Michael
Bruen, who had been a smuggler, and was
still the father and grandfather of smug-
glers, lived there, and when, after nightfall,
a tall French schooner crept over the bay
from Roughley, it was his business to hang
a horn lanthorn in the southern window,
that the news might travel to Dorren's
Island, and from thence, by another horn
lanthorn, to the village of the Rosses.
But for this glimmering of messages, he
had little business with mankind, for he
was very old, and had no thought for any-
thing but for the making of his soul, bent
double over his Spanish beads. One night

L 145

146 THE SECRET ROSE

he had watched hour after hour, be-
cause a gentle and favourable wind was
blowing, and La Mere de Misericorde was
much overdue; and he was about to lie
down upon his heap of straw, because the
dawn was whitening the east, and he knew
that she would not dare to round Roughley
and come to an anchor after daybreak ;
when he saw a long line of herons flying
slowly from Dorren's Island and towards
the pools which lie, half choked with reeds,
behind what is called the Second Rosses.
He had never before seen herons flying over
the sea, for they are shore-keeping birds,
and partly because this had startled him
out of his drowsiness, and more because the
long delay of the schooner had emptied
his cupboard, he took down his rusty shot-
gun, of which the barrel was tied on with
a piece of string, and followed the herons
towards the pools.

In a little he came upon the herons, of
whom there were a great number, standing
with lifted legs in the shallow water ; and
crouching down behind a bank of rushes,
looked to the priming of his gun, and bent

THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT 147

for a moment over his rosary to murmur :
'Patron Patrick, let me shoot a heron;
made into a pie it will support me for
nearly four days, for I no longer eat as in
my youth. If you keep me from missing
I will say a rosary to you every night until
the pie is eaten.' Then he lay down, and,
resting his gun upon a large stone, turned
towards a heron which stood upon a bank
of smooth grass over a little stream that
flowed into the pool ; for he feared to take
the rheumatism by wading, as he would
have to do if he shot one of those which
stood in the water. But when he looked
along the barrel the heron was gone, and,
to his wonder and terror, a man of infinitely
great age and infirmity stood in its place.
He lowered the gun, and the heron stood
there with bent head and motionless
feathers, as though it had slept from the
beginning of the world. He raised the
gun, and no sooner did he look along the
iron than the old man was again before
him, only to vanish when he lowered the
gun for the second time. He laid the gun
down, and crossed himself three times, and

148 THE SECRET ROSE

said a Paternoster and an Ave Maria, and
muttered half aloud : ' Some enemy of
God and of my patron is standing upon the
smooth place and fishing in the blessed
water/ and then aimed very carefully and
slowly. He fired, and when the smoke had
gone saw an old man, huddled upon the
grass, and a long line of herons flying
towards the sea. He went round a bend of
the pool, and coming to the little stream
looked down on a figure wrapped in
faded clothes of an ancient pattern and
spotted with blood. He shook his head
at the sight of so great a wickedness.
Suddenly the clothes moved and an arm
was stretched upwards towards the
rosary which hung about his neck, and
long wasted fingers almost touched the
cross. He started back, crying : 'Wizard,
I will let no wicked thing touch my blessed
beads ' ; and the sense of a great danger
just escaped made him tremble.

'If you listen to me,' rephed a voice so
faint that it was like a sigh, 'you will know
that I am not a wizard, and you will let me
kiss the cross before I die.'

THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT 149

'I will listen to you/ he answered, 'but
I will not let you touch my blessed beads,'
and sitting on the grass a httle way from
the dying man, he reloaded his gun and
laid it across his knees and composed him-
self to listen.

'I do not know how many generations
ago we, who are now herons, were the men
of learning of King Leaghaire ; we neither
hunted, nor went to battle, nor listened to
the Druids preaching, and even love, if it
came to us at all, was but a brief trivial
thing. The Druids and the poets told us,
many a time, of a new Druid Patrick ; and
most among them were angry with him,
while a few thought his doctrine merely
the doctrine of the gods set out in new
symbols, and were for giving him wel-
come ; but we yawned when they spoke of
him. At last they came crying that he
was coming to the king's house, and fell to
their dispute, but we would listen to
neither party, for we were busy with a
dispute about the merits of the Great and
of the Little Metre ; nor were we disturbed
when they passed our door with sticks of

150 THE SECRET ROSE

enchantment under their arms, travelUng
towards the forest to drive him away,
nor when they returned after nightfall
with torn coats and despairing cries; for
the click of our knives writing our thoughts
in Ogham filled us with peace and our
dispute filled us with joy; nor even when
in the morning crowds passed us to hear
the preaching of the new Druid. The
crowds passed, and one, who had laid
down his knife to yawn and stretch himself,
heard a voice speaking far off in the king's
house ; but our hearts were deaf, and we
carved and disputed and read, and laughed
together. In a little we heard many feet
coming towards the house, and presently
two tall figures stood in the door, the one in
white, the other in a crimson coat ; and
we knew the Druid Patrick and our King
Leaghaire. We laid down the slender
knives and bowed before the king, but
it was not the loud rough voice of King
Leaghaire that spoke to us, but a voice
in which there seemed to be a strange
rapture: ''I preached the commandments
of God," it said ; ''within the king's house

THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT 151

and from the centre of the earth to the
windows of Heaven there was a great si-
lence, so that the eagle floated with unmov-
ing wings, and the fish with unmoving fins,
while the linnets and the wrens and the spar-
rows stilled their ever-trembhng tongues,
and the clouds were like white marble,
and the shrimps in the far-off sea-pools
became still, enduring eternity in patience,
although it was hard." And as he named
these things, it was like a king numbering
his people. ''But your slender knives
kept up their clicking, and, all else being
silent, the sound is not to be endured.
Because you have lived where the feet of
angels cannot touch you as they pass over
your heads, where the hair of demons
cannot sweep about you as they pass under
your feet, I shall make you an example for
ever and ever ; you shall become grey
herons and stand pondering in grey pools
and fht over the world in that hour when
it is most full of sighs ; and you shall preach
to the other herons until they also are hke
you, and are an example for ever ; and your
deaths shall come to you by chance and

152 THE SECRET ROSE

unforeseen, for you shall not be certain
about anything for ever and ever.'"

The voice became still, but the voteen
bent over his gun with his eyes upon the
ground, too stupid to understand what he
had heard ; and he had remained so, it may
be for a long time, had not a tug at his
rosary made him start out of his puzzled
dream. The old man of learning had
crawled along the grass, and was now trying
to draw the cross down low enough for his
lips to reach it.

'You must not touch my blessed beads/
cried the voteen, and struck the long
withered fingers with the barrel of his gun.
He need not have trembled, for the old
man fell back upon the grass with a sigh
and was quiet. He bent down and began
to consider the discoloured clothes, for
his fear grew less when he understood
clearly that he had something the man of
learning wanted, and now that the blessed
beads were safe, his fear had nearly all
gone ; and surely, he thought, if that big
cloak, and that little tight-fitting shirt
under it, were warm and without holes,

THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT 153

Saint Patrick would take the enchantment
out of them and leave them fit for use.
But the old discoloured clothes fell away
wherever his fingers touched them, and
presently a slight wind blew over the pool
and crumbled the old man of learning and
all his ancient gear into a little heap of
dust, and then made the little heap less and
less until there was nothing but the smooth
green grass.

WHERE THERE IS NOTHING,
THERE IS GOD

Abbot Malathgeneus, Brother Dove,
Brother Bald Fox, Brother Peter, Brother
Patrick, Brother Bittern, Brother Fair-
Brows sat about the fire, one mending
lines to lay in the river for eels, one fashion-
ing a snare for birds, one mending the
broken handle of a spade, one writing in a
large book, and one hammering at the
corner of a gold box that was to hold the
book ; and among the rushes at their feet
lay the scholars, who would one day be
Brothers. One of these, a child of eight
or nine years, called Olioll, lay upon his
back looking up through the hole in the
roof, through which the smoke went, and
watching the stars appearing and dis-
appearing in the smoke. He turned pres-
ently to the Brother who wrote in the big
book, and whose duty was to teach the
children, and said, 'Brother Dove, to what
154

WHERE THERE IS NOTHING 155

are the stars fastened?' The Brother,
pleased to find so much curiosity in the
stupidest of his scholars, laid down the pen
and said, ' There are nine crystalline spheres,
and on the first the Moon is fastened, on
the second the planet Mercury, on the
third the planet Venus, on the fourth
the Sun, on the fifth the planet Mars, on the
sixth the planet Jupiter, on the seventh the
planet Saturn ; these are the wandering
stars ; and on the eighth are fastened the
fixed stars; but the ninth sphere is a
sphere made out of the First Substance.'

'What is beyond that?' said the child.

'There is nothing beyond that ; there is
God.'

And then the child's eyes strayed to the
gold box, and he said, 'Why has Brother
Peter put a great ruby on the side of his
box?'

' The ruby is a symbol of the love of God.'

'Why is the ruby a symbol of the love of
God?'

'Because it is red, like fire, and fire
burns up everything, and where there is
nothing, there is God.'

156 THE SECRET ROSE

The child sank into silence, but presently
sat up and said, 'There is somebody out-
side.'

'No,' replied the Brother. 'It is only
the wolves ; I have heard them moving
about in the snow for some time. They
are growing very wild, now that the winter
drives them from the mountains. They
broke into a fold last night and carried
off many sheep, and if we are not careful
they will devour everything.'

' No, it is the footstep of a man, for it is
heavy ; but I can hear the footsteps of the
wolves also.'

He had no sooner done speaking than
somebody rapped three times.

'I will go and open, for he must be very
cold.'

' Do not open, for it may be a man-wolf,
and he may devour us all.'

But the boy had already drawn the
bolt, and all the faces, most of them a little
pale, turned towards the slowly-opening
door.

' He has beads and a cross, he cannot be a
man-wolf,' said the child, as a man with the

WHERE THERE IS NOTHING 157

snow heavy on his long, ragged beard, and
on his matted hair, that fell over his
shoulders and nearly to his waist, and upon
the tattered cloak that but half-covered his
withered brown body, came in and looked
slowly from face to face. Standing some
way from the fire, and with eyes that had
rested at last upon the Abbot Malath-
geneus, he said, '0 blessed abbot, let me
come to the fire and warm myself; that
I may not die of the cold and anger the
Lord with a wilful martyrdom.'

'Come to the fire,' said the abbot.
' It is a pitiful thing surely that any for
whom Christ has died should be as poor as
you.'

The man sat over the fire, and Olioll
took away his now dripping cloak and
laid meat and bread and wine before him ;
but he would eat only of the bread, and he
put away the wine, asking for water.
When his beard and hair had begun to dry
and his limbs had ceased to shiver, he spoke
again.

' Set me to some labour, the hardest there
is, for I am the poorest of God's poor.'

158 THE SECRET ROSE

Then the Brothers discussed together
what work they could put him to, and at
first to Uttle purpose, for there was no
labour that had not found its labourer;
but at last one remembered that Brother
Bald Fox, whose business it was to turn
the great quern in the quern-house, for
he was too stupid for anything else, was
getting old; and so he could go to the
quern-house in the morning.

The cold passed away, and the spring
grew to summer, and the quern was never
idle, nor was it turned with grudging
labour, for when any passed the beggar
was heard singing as he drove the handle
round. The last reason for gloom passed
from the brotherhood, for Olioll, who had
always been stupid and unteachable, grew
clever, and this was the more miraculous
because it had come of a sudden. One
day he had been even duller than usual,
and was beaten and told to know his
lesson better in future or be sent into a
lower class among httle boys who would
make a joke of him. He had gone out
in tears, and when he came the next day,

WHERE THERE IS NOTHING 159

although his stupidity had so long been
the byword of the school, he knew his
lesson so well that he passed to the head of
the class, and from that day was the best
of scholars. At first Brother Dove thought
this was an answer to his own prayers and
grew proud ; but when many far more
fervid prayers for more important things
had failed, he convinced himself that
the child was trafficking with bards, or
druids, or witches, and resolved to follow
and watch. He had told his thought to
the abbot, who told him to come to him the
moment he hit the truth; and the next
day, which was a Sunday, he stood in the
path when the abbot and the Brothers
were coming from vespers, and took the
abbot by the sleeve and said, 'The beggar
is of the greatest of saints and of the
workers of miracle. I followed OlioU but
now, and when he came to the little wood
by the quern-house I knew by the path
broken in the under-wood and by the
foot-marks in the muddy places that he had
gone that way many times. I hid behind
a bush where the path doubled upon itself

160 THE SECRET ROSE

at a sloping place, and understood by the
tears in his eyes that his stupidity was too
old and his wisdom too new to save him
from terror of the rod. When he was in
the quern-house I went to the window and
looked in, and the birds came down and
perched upon my head and my shoulders,
for they are not timid in that holy place ;
and a wolf passed by, his right side shaking
my habit, his left the leaves of a bush.
OlioU opened his book and turned to the
page I had told him to learn, and began
to cry, and the beggar sat beside him and
comforted him until he fell asleep. When
his sleep was of the deepest the beggar
knelt down and prayed aloud, and said,
"O Thou Who dwellest beyond the stars,
show forth Thy power as at the beginning,
and let knowledge sent from Thee awaken
in his mind, wherein is nothing from the
world"; and then a hght broke out of
the air and I smelt the breath of roses.
I stirred a little, and the beggar turned and
saw me, and, bending low, said, ''O
Brother Dove, if I have done wrong,
forgive me, and I will do penance. It was

WHERE THERE IS NOTHING 161

my pity moved me"; but I was afraid
and I ran away, and did not stop running
until I came here.'

Then all the Brothers began talking
together, one saying it was such and such a
saint, and one that it was not he but
another; and one that it was none of
these, for they were still in their brother-
hoods, but that it was such and such a
one ; and the talk was near to quarrelling,
for each had begun to claim so great a
saint for his native province. At last the
abbot said, 'He is none that you have
named, for at Easter I had greeting from
all, and each was in his brotherhood ;
but he is Aengus the Walker to Nowhere.
Ten years ago he went into the forest
that he might labour only with song to
the Lord ; but the fame of his holiness
brought many thousands to his cell, so
that a httle pride clung to a soul from
which all else had been driven. Nine
years ago he di-essed himself in rags, and
from that day nobody has seen him,
unless, indeed, it be true that he has been
seen Hving among the wolves on the

M

162 THE SECRET ROSE

mountains and eating the grass of the
fields. Let us go to him and bow down
before him; for at last, after long seek-
ing, he has found the nothing that is
God.'

PROUD COSTELLO, MACDERMOT'S
DAUGHTER AND THE BIT-
TER TONGUE

CosTELLO had come up from the fields
and lay upon the ground before the door
of his square tower, resting his head upon
his hands and looking at the sunset, and
considering the chances of the weather.
Though the customs of Ehzabeth and
James, now going out of fashion in Eng-
land, had begun to prevail among the
gentry, he still wore the great cloak of
the native Irish ; and the sensitive outlines
of his face and his big body had the pride
and strength of a simpler age. His eyes
wandered from the sunset to where the
long white road lost itself over the south-
western horizon and to a horseman who
toiled slowly up the hill. A few more
minutes and the horseman was near enough
for his little and shapeless body, his long
Irish cloak, and the dilapidated bagpipes
163

164 THE SECRET ROSE

hanging from his shoulders, and the
rough-haired garron under him, to be
seen distinctly in the grey dusk. So
soon as he had come within earshot, he
began crying : ' Is it sleeping you are,
Tumaus Costello, when better men break
their hearts on the great white roads ? Get
up out of that, proud Tumaus, for I have
news ! Get up out of that, you great
omadhaun ! Shake yourself out of the
earth, you great weed of a man ! '

Costello had risen to his feet, and as
the piper came up to him seized him by
the neck of his jacket, and lifting him out
of his saddle threw him on to the ground.

'Let me alone, let me alone,' said the
other, but Costello still shook him.

'I have news from MacDermot's daugh-
ter, Una. ' The great fingers were loosened,
and the piper rose gasping.

'Why did you not tell me,' said Costello,
'that you came from her? You might
have railed your fill.'

'I have come from her, but I will not
speak until I am paid for the shaking.'

Costello fumbled at the bag in which

PROUD COSTS LLO 165

he carried his money, and it was some time
before it would open, for his hand shook.
'Here is all the money in my bag,' he said,
dropping some French and Spanish money
into the hand of the piper, who bit the
coins before he would answer.

'That is right, that is a fair price, but
I will not speak till I have good protection,
for if the MacDermots lay their hands
upon me in any boreen after sundown, or
in Cool-a-vin by day, I will be left to rot
among the nettles of a ditch, or hung
where they hung the horse-thieves last
Beltaine four years.' And while he spoke
he tied the reins of his garron to a bar of
rusty iron that was mortared into the wall.

' I will make you my piper and my body-
servant,' said Costello, 'and no man dare
lay hands upon a man, or upon a dog if he
belong to Tumaus Costello.'

'And I will only tell my message,' said
the other, flinging the saddle on the ground,
'with a noggin in my hand, and a jug of
the Poteen beside me, for though I am
ragged and empty, my old fathers were
well clothed and full until their house was

166 THE SECRET ROSE

burnt and their cattle driven away seven
centuries ago by the Dillons, whom I shall
yet see on the hob of hell, and they screech-
ing/

Costello led him into the rush-strewn
hall, where were none of the comforts
which had begun to grow common among
the gentry, but a mediaeval gauntness and
bareness, and pointed to the bench in the
great chimney; and when the piper had
sat down, filled up a horn noggin and set
it on the bench beside him, and jug beside
that, and lit a torch that slanted out from
a ring in the wall ; and then turned towards
him and said : 'Will MacDermot's daugh-
ter come to me, Duallach, son of Daly ? '

'MacDermot's daughter will not come to
you, for her father has set women to
watch her, but I am to tell you that this
day week will be the eve of St. John and
the night of her betrothal to MacNamara
of the Lake, and she wants you to be
there that, when they tell her to drink
to him she loves best, she may drink to
you, Tumaus Costello, and let all know
where her heart is; and I myself advise

PROUD COSTELLO 167

you to go with good men about you, for
I have seen the horse-thieves with my
own eyes.' And then he held the now
empty noggin towards Costello, and cried :
'Fill my noggin again, for I wish the day
had come when all the water in the world
is to shrink into a periwinkle-shell, that I
might drink nothing but Poteen.'

Finding that Costello made no reply,
but sat in a dream, he burst out : ' Fill
my noggin, I tell you, for no Costello is
so great in the world that he should not
wait upon a Daly, even though the Daly
travel the road with his pipes and the
Costello have a bare hill, an empty house,
a horse, and a handful of cows.'

'Praise the Dalys if you will,' said
Costello as he filled the noggin, 'for you
have brought me a kind word from my
love.'

For the next few days Duallach went
here and there trying to raise a bodyguard,
and every man he met had some story
of Costello, how he killed the wrestler
when but a boy by so straining at the belt
that went about them both that he broke

168 THE SECRET ROSE

the big wrestler's back ; how when some-
what older he dragged fierce horses through
a ford for a wager ; how when he came to
manhood he broke the steel horseshoe
in Mayo ; and of many another deed of
his strength and pride ; but he could find
none who would trust themselves with
any so passionate and poor in a quarrel
with careful and wealthy persons like
MacDermot of the Sheep and MacNamara
of the Lake.

Then Costello went out himself, and
after listening to many excuses and in
many places, brought in a big half-witted
fellow, a farm-labourer who worshipped
him for his strength, a fat farmer whose
forefathers had served his family, and a
couple of lads who looked after his goats
and cows ; and marshalled them before
the fire. They had brought with them
their heavy sticks, and Costello gave them
an old pistol apiece, and kept them all
night drinking and shooting at a white
turnip which he pinned against the wall
with a skewer. Duallach sat on the bench
in the chimney playing ' The Green Bunch

PROUD COSTELLO 169

of Rushes/ 'The Unchion Stream/ and
'The Princes of Breffeny' on his old pipes,
and abusing now the appearance of the
shooters, now their clumsy shooting, and
now Costello because he had no better
servants. The labourer, the half-witted
fellow, the farmer and the lads were well
accustomed to Duallach's abusiveness, for
it was as inseparable from wake or wedding
as the squealing of his pipes, but they
wondered at the forbearance of Costello,
who seldom came either to wake or
wedding, and if he had would not have
been patient with a scolding piper.

On the next evening they set out for
Cool-a-vin, Costello riding a tolerable
horse and carrying a sword, the others
upon rough-haired ponies, and with their
cudgels under their arms. As they rode
over the bogs and in the boreens among
the hills they could see fire answering fire
from hill to hill, from horizon to horizon,
and everywhere groups who danced in the
red light of the turf. When they came to
MacDermot's house they saw before the
door an unusually large group of the very

170 THE SECRET ROSE

poor, dancing about a fire, in the midst of
which was a blazing cartwheel, that circular
dance which is so ancient that the gods, long
dwindled to be but fairies, dance no other.
From the door and through the loop-holes
on either side came the light of candles
and the sound of many feet dancing a
dance of Elizabeth and James.

They tied their horses to bushes, for the
number so tied already showed that the
stables were full, and shoved their way
through a crowd of peasants who stood
about the door, and went into the big hall
where the dance was. The labourer, the
half-witted fellow, the farmer and the two
lads mixed with a group of servants who
were looking on from an alcove, and
Duallach sat with the pipers on their
bench, but Costello made his way through
the dancers to where MacDermot stood
with MacNamara pouring Poteen out of a
porcelain jug into horn noggins.

'Tumaus Costello,' said the old man,
'you have done a good deed to forget
what has been, and come to the betrothal
of my daughter to Mac^^amara of the Lake.'

PROUD COSTELLO 171

'I come,' answered Costello, 'because
when in the time of Costello De Angalo
my ancestors overcame your ancestors
and afterwards made peace, a compact
was made that a Costello might go with
his body-servants and his piper to every
feast given by a MacDermot for ever,
and a MacDermot with his body-servants
and his piper to every feast given by a
Costello for ever.'

'If you come with evil thoughts and
armed men,' said MacDermot flushing, 'no
matter how good you are with your
weapons, it shall go badly with you, for
some of my wife's clan have come out of
Mayo, and my three brothers and their
servants have come down from the Ox
Mountains ' ; and while he spoke he kept
his hand inside his coat as though upon the
handle of a weapon,

'No,' answered Costello, 'I but come to
dance a farewell dance with your daughter.'

MacDermot drew his hand out of his
coat and went over to a pale girl who was
now standing but a little way off with
her mild eyes fixed upon the ground.

172 THE SECRET ROSE

'Costello has come to dance a farewell
dance, for he knows that you will never
see one another again.'

The girl lifted her eyes and gazed at
Costello, and in her gaze was that trust
of the humble in the proud, the gentle in
the violent, which has been the tragedy of
woman from the beginning. Costello led
her among the dancers, and they were soon
drawn into the rhythm of the Pavane,
that stately dance which, with the Sara-
band, the Gallead, and the Morrice dances,
had driven out, among all but the most
Irish of the gentry, the quicker rhythms
of the verse-interwoven, pantomimic
dances of earlier days ; and while they
danced there came over them the weariness
with the world, the melancholy, the pity
one for the other, the vague anger against
common hopes and fears, which is the exul-
tation of love. And when a dance ended
and the pipers laid down the pipes and
lifted the noggins, they stood a little
from the others waiting pensively and
silently for the dance to begin again and
the fire in their hearts to leap up and to

PROUD COSTELLO 173

wrap them anew; and so they danced
Pavane and Saraband and Gallead and
Morrice the night long, and many stood
still to watch them, and the peasants came
about the door and peered in, as though
they understood that they would gather
their children's children about them long
hence, and tell how they had seen Costello
dance with MacDermot's daughter Una,
and become by the telling themselves a
portion of ancient romance ; but through
all the dancing and piping MacNamara
went hither and thither talking loudly and
making foolish jokes that all might seem
well, and old MacDermot grew redder
and redder, and looked oftener and oftener
at the doorway to see if the candles there
grew yellow in the dawn.

At last he saw that the moment to end
had come, and, in a pause after a dance,
cried out that his daughter would now
drink the cup of betrothal ; then Una
came over to where he was, and the guests
stood round in a half-circle, Costello close
to the wall to the right, and the piper, the
labourer, the farmer, the half-witted man

174 THE SECRET ROSE

and the two farm lads close behind him.
The old man took out of a niche in the wall
the silver cup from which her mother
and her mother's mother had drunk the
toasts of their betrothals, and poured
Poteen out of a porcelain jug and handed
the cup to his daughter with the cus-
tomary words, 'Drink to him whom you
love the best.'

She held the cup to her lips for a moment,
and then said in a clear soft voice : ' I
drink to my true love, Tumaus Costello.'

And then the cup rolled over and over on
the ground, ringing like a bell, for the old
man had struck her in the face and the
cup had fallen, and there was a deep
silence.

There were many of MacNamara's
people among the servants now come out of
the alcove, and one of them, a story-teller
and poet, who had a plate and chair in
MacNamara's kitchen, drew a French
knife out of his girdle and seemed as though
he would strike at Costello, but in a
moment had been hurled to the ground,
his shoulder sending the cup rolling and

PROUD COSTELLO 175

ringing again. The click of steel had
followed quickly, had not there come a
muttering and shouting from the peasants
about the door and from those crowding
up behind them ; for all knew that these
were no children of Queen's Irish, but of the
wild Irish about Lough Gara and Lough
Cara, Kellys, Dockerys, Drurys, O'Re-
gans, Mahons, and Lavins, who had left
the right arms of their children unchris-
tened that they might give the better blows,
and were even said to have named the
wolves godfathers to their children.

Costello's hand rested upon the handle
of his sword, and his knuckles had grown
white, but now he drew his hand away,
and, followed by those who were with him,
went towards the door, the dancers giving
way before him, the most angrily and
slowly, and with glances at the muttering
and shouting peasants, but some gladly
and quickly, because the glory of his fame
was over him. He passed through the
fierce and friendly peasant faces, and came
where his horse and the ponies were tied
to bushes; and mounted and made his

176 THE SECRET ROSE

bodyguard mount also and ride into the
narrow boreen. When they had gone a
little way, Duallach, who rode last, turned
towards the house where a little group of
MacDermots and MacNamaras stood next
to a bigger group of countrymen, and
cried : 'MacDermot, you deserve to be as
you are this hour, for your hand was
always niggardly to piper and fiddler and
to poor travelling people.' He had not
done before the three old MacDermots
from the Ox Mountains had run towards
their horses, and old MacDermot himself
had caught the bridle of a pony belong-
ing to the MacNamaras and was calling
to the others to follow him ; and many
blows and many deaths had been had not
the countrymen caught up still blazing
sticks from the ashes of the fires and
thrown them among the horses with loud
cries, making all plunge and rear, and some
break from those who held them, the whites
of their eyes gleaming in the dawn.

For the next few weeks Costello had no
lack of news of Una, for now a woman
selling eggs, and now a man or a woman

PROUD COSTELLO 177

going to the Holy Well, would tell him
how his love had fallen ill the day after
St. John's Eve, and how she was a little
better or a little worse ; and the country
people still remember how when night had
fallen he would bid Duallach of the Pipes
tell out, 'The Son of Apple,' 'The Beauty
of the World,' 'The King of Ireland's
Son,' or some like tale; and while the
world of the legends was a-building, would
abandon himself to the dreams of his
sorrow.

Costello cared only for the love sorrows,
and no matter where the stories wandered,
Una alone endured their shadowy hard-
ships ; for it was she and no king's daughter
who was hidden in the steel tower under
the water with the folds of the Worm of
Nine Eyes round and about her prison ;
and it was she who won by seven years of
service the right to deliver from hell all
she could carry, and carried away multi-
tudes clinging with worn fingers to the
hem of her dress ; and it was she who en-
dured dumbness for a year because of the
little thorn of enchantment the fairies had

178 THE SECRET ROSE

thrust into her tongue ; and it was a lock
of her hair, coiled in a little carved box,
which gave so great a light that men
threshed by it from sundown to sunrise,
and awoke so great a wonder that kings
spent years in wandering or fell before
unknown armies in seeking to discover her
hiding-place. There was no beauty in
the world but hers, no tragedy in the
world but hers ; for he was of those ascetics
of passion who keep their hearts pure for
love or for hatred as other men for God,
for Mary and for the Saints.

One day a serving-man rode up to Cos-
tello, who was helping his two lads to reap
a meadow, and gave him a letter, and rode
away ; and the letter contained these words
in English : 'Tumaus Costello, my daugh-
ter is very ill. She will die unless you come
to her. I therefore command you come
to her whose peace you stole by treachery.'

Costello threw down his scythe, and sent
one of the lads for Duallach, who had be-
come woven into his mind with Una, and
himself saddled his horse and Duallach's
pony.

PROUD COSTELLO 179

When they came to MacDermot's house
it was late afternoon, and Lough Gara
lay down below them, blue, and deserted ;
and though they had seen, when at a dis-
tance, dark figures moving about the
door, the house appeared not less deserted
than the Lough. The door stood half
open, and Costello knocked upon it again
and again, but there was no answer.

'There is no one here,' said Duallach,
'for MacDermot is too proud to welcome
Proud Costello,' and he threw the door
open, and they saw a ragged, dirty, very
old woman, who sat upon the floor leaning
against the wall. Costello knew that it
was Bridget Delaney, a deaf and dumb
beggar ; and she, when she saw him, stood
up and made a sign to him to follow, and
led him and his companion up a stair and
down a long corridor to a closed door.
She pushed the door open and went a
little way off and sat down as before;
Duallach sat upon the ground also, but
close to the door, and Costello went and
gazed upon Una sleeping upon a bed. He
sat upon a chair beside her and waited,

180 THE SECRET ROSE

and a long time passed and still she slept,
and then Duallach motioned to him
through the door to wake her, but he
hushed his very breath, that she might
sleep on. Presently he turned to Duallach
and said : ' It is not right that I stay here
where there are none of her kindred, for
the common people are always ready to
blame the beautiful.' And then they went
down and stood at the door of the house
and waited, but the evening wore on and
no one came.

'It was a foolish man that called you
Proud Costello,' Duallach said at last ;
'had he seen you waiting and waiting
where they left none but a beggar to wel-
come you, it is Humble Costello he would
have called you.'

Then Costello mounted and Duallach
mounted, but when they had ridden a little
way Costello tightened the reins and made
his horse stand still. Many minutes
passed, and then Duallach cried : ' It is
no wonder that you fear to offend Mac-
Dermot of the Sheep, for he has many
brothers and friends, and though he is

PROUD COSTELLO 181

old, he is a strong and stirring man, and
he is of the Queen's Irish, and the enemies
of the Gael are upon his side.'

And Costello answered flushing and look-
ing towards the house : ' I swear by the
Mother of God that I will never return
there again if they do not send after me
before I pass the ford in the Brown River,'
and he rode on, but so very slowly that
the sun went down and the bats began to
fly over the bogs. When he came to the
river he lingered awhile upon the edge,
but presently rode out into the middle
and stopped his horse in a shallow. Dual-
lach, however, crossed over and waited
on a further bank above a deeper place.
After a good while Duallach cried out
again, and this time very bitterly: 'It
was a fool who begot you and a fool who
bore you, and they are fools who say you
come of an old and noble stock, for you
come of whey-faced beggars who travelled
from door to door, bowing to serving-men.'

With bent head, Costello rode through
the river and stood beside him, and would
have spoken had not hoofs clattered on

182 THE SECRET ROSE

the further bank and a horseman splashed
towards them. It was a serving-man of
MacDermot's, and he said, speaking
breathlessly like one who had ridden hard :
'Tumaus Costello, I come to bring you
again to MacDermot's house. When you
had gone, his daughter Una awoke and
called your name, for you had been in
her dreams. Bridget Delaney the Dummy
saw her lips move, and came where we
were hiding in the wood above the house
and took MacDermot by the coat and
brought him to his daughter. He saw the
trouble upon her, and bid me ride his own
horse to bring you the quicker.'

Then Costello turned towards the piper
Duallach Daly, and taking him about the
waist lifted him out of the saddle and
threw him against a big stone that was in
the river, so that he fell lifeless into a deep
place, and the waters swept over the
tongue which had been made bitter, it
may be, that there might be a story in
men's ears in after time. Then plunging
his spurs into the horse, he rode away
furiously toward the north-west, along the

PWUD COSTELLO 183

edge of the river, and did not pause until
he came to another and smoother ford, and
saw the rising moon mirrored in the water.
He paused for a moment irresolute, and
then rode into the ford and on over the
Ox Mountains, and down towards the sea ;
his eyes almost continually resting upon
the moon. But now his horse, long dark
with sweat and breathing hard, for he
kept spurring it, fell heavily, throwing
him on the roadside. He tried to make it
stand up, and failing in this, went on
alone towards the moonlight ; and came
to the sea and saw a schooner lying there
at anchor. Now that he could go no
further because of the sea, he found that
he was very tired and the night very cold,
and went into a shebeen close to the shore
and threw himself down upon a bench.
The room was full of Spanish and Irish
sailors who had just smuggled a cargo of
wine, and were waiting a favourable wind
to set out again. A Spaniard offered
him a drink in bad Gaelic. He drank it
greedily and began talking wildly and
rapidly.

184 THE SECRET ROSE

For some three weeks the wind blew
inshore or with too great violence, and the
sailors stayed drinking and talking and
playing cards, and Costello stayed with
them, sleeping upon a bench in the shebeen,
and drinking and talking and playing more
than any. He soon lost what little money
he had, and then his long cloak and his spurs
and even his boots. At last a gentle wind
blew towards Spain, and the crew rowed out
to their schooner, and in a little while the
sails had dropped under the horizon.
Then Costello turned homeward, his life
gaping before him, and walked all day,
coming in the early evening to the road
that went from near Lough Gara to the
southern edge of Lough Cay. Here he
overtook a crowd of peasants and farmers,
who were walking very slowly after two
priests and a group of well-dressed persons,
certain of whom were carrying a coffin.
He stopped an old man and asked whose
burying it was and whose people they
were, and the old man answered : ' It
is the burjdng of Una, MacDermot's
daughter, and we are the MacNamaras

PROVD COSTELLO 185

and the MacDermots and their follow-
ing, and you are Tumaus Costello who
murdered her.'

Costello went on towards the head of
the procession, passing men who looked
angrily at him, and only vaguely under-
stood what he had heard, for now that he
had lost the understanding that belongs to
good health, it seemed impossible that so
much gentleness and beauty could pass
away. Presently he stopped and asked
again whose burying it was, and a man
answered : ' We are carrying MacDer-
mot's daughter Una, whom you murdered,
to be buried in the island of the Holy
Trinity,' and the man picked up a stone
and threw it at Costello, striking him on
the cheek and making the blood flow out
over his face. Costello went on scarcely
feeling the blow, and coming to those
about the coffin, shouldered his way into
the midst of them, and lajing his hand
upon the coffin, asked in a loud voice :
' Who is in this coffin ? '

The Three Old MacDermots from the
Ox Mountains caught up stones and told

186 THE SECRET ROSE

those about them to do the same ; and he
was driven from the road, covered with
wounds, and but for the priests would
have been killed.

When the procession had passed on,
Costello began to follow again, and saw
from a distance the coffin laid upon a
large boat, and those about it get into
other boats, and the boats move slowly
over the water to Insula Trinitatis; and
after a time he saw the boats return and
their passengers mingle with the crowd
upon the bank, and all scatter by many
roads and boreens. It seemed to him that
Una was somewhere on the island smiling
gently, and when all had gone he swam
in the way the boats had been rowed and
found the new-made grave beside the
ruined Abbey, and threw himself upon it,
calhng to Una to come to him.

He lay there all that night and through
the day after, from time to time calling
her to come to him, but when the third
night came he had forgotten, worn out
with hunger and sorrow, that her body
lay in the earth beneath ; but only knew

PROUD COSTELLO 187

she was somewhere near and would not
come to him.

Just before dawn, the hour when the
peasants hear his ghostly voice crying out,
he called loudly: 'If you do not come to
me, Una, I will go and never return to the
island of the Holy Trinity,' and before
his voice had died away a cold and whirling
wind had swept over the island and he saw
many figures rushing past, women of the
Sidhe with crowns of silver and dim float-
ing drapery ; and then Una, but no longer
smiling, for she passed him swiftly and
angrily, and as she passed struck him
upon the face crying : ' Then go and never
return.'

He would have followed, and was calling
out her name, when the whole company
went up into the air, and, rushing together
in the shape of a great silvery rose, faded
into the ashen dawn.

Costello got up from the grave, under-
standing nothing but that he had made his
sweetheart angry and that she wished him
to go, and wading out into the lake, began
to swim. He swam on, but his limbs

188 THE SECRET ROSE

seemed too weary to keep him afloat, and
when he had gone a Httle way he sank
without a struggle.

The next day a fisherman found him
among the reeds upon the lake shore, lying
upon the white lake sand, and carried him
to his own house. And the very poor
lamented over him and sang the keen, and
when the time had come, laid him in the
Abbey on Insula Trinitatis with only the
ruined altar between him and MacDer-
mot's daughter, and planted above them
two ash-trees that in after days wove
their branches together and mingled their
trembling leaves.

ROSA ALCHEMICA

O blessed and happy he, who knowing the
mysteries of the gods, sanctifies his fife, and
purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in the
mountains with holy purifications. — Euripides.

ROSA ALCHEMICA

It is now more than ten years since I
met, for the last time, Michael Robartes,
and for the first time and the last time his
friends and fellow students ; and wit-
nessed his and their tragic end, and
endured those strange experiences, which
have changed me so that my writings have
grown less popular and less intelligible,
and driven me almost to the verge of
taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had
just published Rosa Alchemica, a little
work on the Alchemists, somewhat in the
manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had
received many letters from believers in
the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they
called my timidity, for they could not
believe so evident sympathy but the sym-
pathy of the artist, which is half pity,
for everything which has moved men's
191

192 ROSA ALCHEMICA

hearts in any age. I had discovered,
early in my researches, that their doctrine
was no merely chemical phantasy, but a
philosophy they applied to the world, to
the elements and to man himself; and
that they sought to fashion gold out of
common metals merely as part of an
universal transmutation of all things into
some divine and imperishable substance ;
and this enabled me to make my little
book a fanciful reverie over the trans-
mutation of life into art, and a cry
of measureless desire for a world made
wholly of essences.

I was sitting dreaming of what I had
written, in my house in one of the old
parts of Dublin ; a house my ancestors
had made almost famous through their
part in the politics of the city and their
friendships with the famous men of their
generations ; and was feeling an unwonted
happiness at having at last accomplished a
long-cherished design, and made my rooms
an expression of this favourite doctrine.
The portraits, of more historical than artis-
tic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full

ROSA ALCHEMIC A 193

of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell
over the doors, and shut out all history and
activity untouched with beauty and peace ;
and now when I looked at my Crevelli
and pondered on the rose in the hand of
the Virgin, wherein the form was so
delicate and precise that it seemed more
like a thought than a flower, or at the
grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Fran-
cesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy
without his slavery to rule and custom;
when I pondered over the antique bronze
gods and goddesses, which I had mort-
gaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's
dehght in various beauty and without
his terror at sleepless destiny and his
labour with many sacrifices ; and I had
only to go to my bookshelf, where every
book was bound in leather, stamped with
intricate ornament, and of a carefully
chosen colour : Shakespeare in the orange
of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull
red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey
of his formal calm ; and I could experience
what I would of human passions without
their bitterness and without satiety. I

194 ROSA ALCHEMIC A

had gathered about me all gods because
I beheved in none, and experienced
every pleasure because I gave myself to
none, but held myself apart, individual,
indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel:
I looked in the triumph of this imagination
at the birds of Hera, glowing in the fire-
light as though they were wrought of
jewels ; and to my mind, for which sym-
bolism was a necessity, they seemed the
doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all
that was not of as affluent a beauty as
their own ; and for a moment I thought
as I had thought in so many other moments,
that it was possible to rob life of every
bitterness except the bitterness of death;
and then a thought which had followed
this thought, time after time, filled me
with a passionate sorrow. All those forms :
that Madonna with her brooding purity,
those rapturous faces singing in the morn-
ing light, those bronze divinities with their
passionless dignity, those wild shapes
rushing from despair to despair, belonged
to a divine world wherein I had no part ;
and every experience^ however profound.

ROSA ALCHEMICA 195

every perception, however exquisite, would
bring me the bitter dream of a limitless
energy I could never know, and even in my
most perfect moment I would be two
selves, the one watching with heavy
eyes the other's moment of content. I
had heaped about me the gold born in
the crucibles of others ; but the supreme
dream of the alchemist, the transmutation
of the weary heart into a weariless spirit,
was as far from me as, I doubted not, it
had been from him also. I turned to my
last purchase, a set of alchemical apparatus
which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had
assured me, once belonged to Raymond
Lully, and as I joined the alembic to the
athanor and laid the lavacrum maris at
their side, I understood the alchemical
doctrine, that all beings, divided from
the great deep where spirits wander, one
and yet a multitude, are weary; and
sympathized, in the pride of my connois-
seurship, with the consuming thirst for
destruction which made the alchemist veil
under his symbols of lions and dragons,
of eagles and ravens, of dew and of nitre, a

196 ROSA ALCHEMICA

search for an essence which would dissolve
all mortal things. I repeated to myself the
ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in which
he compares the fire of the last day to the
fire of the alchemist, and the world to
the alchemist's furnace, and would have us
know that all must be dissolved before
the divine substance, material gold or
immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dis-
solved indeed the mortal world and lived
amid immortal essences, but had obtained
no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of
these things, I drew aside the curtains and
looked out into the darkness, and it seemed
to my troubled fancy that all those little
points of light filling the sky were the fur-
naces of innumerable divine alchemists,
who labour continually, turning lead into
gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into
souls, the darkness into God ; and at
their perfect labour my mortality grew
heavy, and I cried out, as so many dream-
ers and men of letters in our age have
cried, for the birth of that elaborate spirit-
ual beauty which could alone uplift souls
weighted with so many dreams.

ROSA ALCHEMICA 197

II

My reverie was broken by a loud knock-
ing at the door, and I wondered the more
at this because I had no visitors, and had
bid my servants do all things silently,
lest they broke the dream of my inner life.
Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go
to the door myself, and, taking one of the
silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece,
began to descend the stairs. The servants
appeared to be out, for though the sound
poured through every corner and crevice
of the house there was no stir in the lower
rooms. I remembered that because my
needs were so few, my part in life so little,
they had begun to come and go as they
would, often leaving me alone for hours.
The emptiness and silence of a world from
which I had driven everything but dreams
suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shud-
dered as I drew the bolt. I found before
me Michael Robartes, whom I had not
seen for years, and whose wild red hair,
fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and
rough clothes, made him look now, just as
they used to do fifteen years before, some-

198 ROSA ALCHEMICA

thing between a debauchee, a saint, and a
peasant. He had recently come to Ireland,
he said, and wished to see me on a matter
of importance : indeed, the only matter
of importance for him and for me. His
voice brought up before me our student
years in Paris, and remembering the
magnetic power he had once possessed over
me, a little fear mingled with much
annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion,
as I led the way up the wide staircase,
where Swift had passed joking and raihng,
and Curran telling stories and quoting
Greek, in simpler days, before men's minds,
subtilized and complicated by the romantic
movement in art and literature, began to
tremble on the verge of some unimagined
revelation. I felt that my hand shook,
and saw that the light of the candle
wavered and quivered more than it need
have upon the Maenads on the old French
panels, making them look like the first
beings slowly shaping in the formless and
void darkness. When the door had closed,
and the peacock curtain, glimmering like
many-coloured flame, fell between us and

ROSA ALCHEMICA 199

the world, I felt, in a way I could not
understand, that some singular and un-
expected thing was about to happen. I
went over to the mantlepiece, and finding
that a little chainless bronze censer, set,
upon the outside, with pieces of painted
china by Orazio Fontana, which I had
filled with antique amulets, had fallen
upon its side and poured out its contents,
I began to gather the amulets into the bowl,
partly to collect my thoughts and partly
with that habitual reverence which seemed
to me the due of things so long connected
with secret hopes and fears. 'I see,' said
Michael Robartes, 'that you are still
fond of incense, and I can show you an
incense more precious than any you have
ever seen,' and as he spoke he took the
censer out of my hand and put the amulets
in a little heap between the athanor and
the alembic. I sat down, and he sat down
at the side of the fire, and sat there for
a while looking into the fire, and holding
the censer in his hand. 'I have come to
ask you something/ he said, 'and the
incense will fill the room, and our thoughts,

200 ROSA ALCHEMICA

with its sweet odour while we are talking.
I got it from an old man in Syria, who
said it was made from flowers, of one kind
with the flowers that laid their heavy purple
petals upon the hands and upon the hair
and upon the feet of Christ in the Garden
of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their
heavy breath, until he cried against the
cross and his destiny. ' He shook some dust
into the censer out of a small silk bag, and
set the censer upon the floor and lit the
dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke,
that spread out over the ceiling, and
flowed downwards again until it was like
Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as
incense often does, with a faint sleepiness,
so that I started when he said, ' I have come
to ask you that question which I asked
you in Paris, and which you left Paris
rather than answer.'

He had turned his eyes towards me, and
I saw them glitter in the firelight, and
through the incense, as I replied : ' You
mean, will I become an initiate of your
Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would
not consent in Paris, when I was full of

ROSA ALCHEMICA 201

unsatisfied desire, and now that I have at
last fashioned my Ufe according to my
desire, am I Hkely to consent ? '

'You have changed greatly since then,'
he answered. *I have read your books,
and now I see you among all these images,
and I understand you better than you do
yourself, for I have been with many and
many dreamers at the same cross-ways.
You have shut away the world and
gathered the gods about you, and if you
do not throw yourself at their feet, you
will be always full of lassitude, and of
wavering purpose, for a man must forget
he is miserable in the bustle and noise of
the multitude in this world and in time;
or seek a mystical union with the multitude
who govern this world and time.' And
then he murmured something I could not
hear, and as though to someone I could
not see.

For a moment the room appeared to
darken, as it used to do when he was about
to perform some singular experiment,
and in the darkness the peacocks upon
the doors seemed to glow with a more

202 ROSA ALCHEMICA

intense colour. I cast off the illusion,
which was, I believe, merely caused by
memory, and by the twiUght of incense,
for I would not acknowledge that he could
overcome my now mature intellect; and
I said : ' Even if I grant that I need a
spiritual belief and some form of worship,
why should I go to Eleusis and not to
Calvary?' He leaned forward and began
speaking with a slightly rhythmical in-
tonation, and as he spoke I had to struggle
again with the shadow, as of some older
night than the night of the sun, which
began to dim the light of the candles and
to blot out the httle gleams upon the
corner of picture-frames and on the bronze
divinities, and to turn the blue of the
incense to a heavy purple; while it left
the peacocks to glimmer and glow as
though each separate colour were a living
spirit. I had fallen into a profound
dream-like reverie in which I heard him
speaking as at a distance. 'And yet
there is no one who communes with only
one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a
man Hves in imagination and in a refined

ROSA ALCHEMICA 203

understanding, the more gods does he
meet with and talk with, and the more
does he come under the power of Roland,
who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles
the last trumpet of the body's will and
pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them
perishing away, and sighed; and of
Faust, who looked for them up and down
the world and could not find them; and
under the power of all those countless
divinities who have taken upon them-
selves spiritual bodies in the minds of
the modern poets and romance writers,
and under the power of the old divinities,
who since the Renaissance have won every-
thing of their ancient worship except the
sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance
of garlands and the smoke of incense.
The many think humanity made these
divinities, and that it can unmake them
again ; but we who have seen them pass
in rattling harness, and in soft robes,
and heard them speak with articulate
voices while we lay in deathlike trance,
know that they are always making and
unmaking humanity, which is indeed but
the trembling of their lips.'

204 ROSA ALCHEMICA

He had stood up and begun to walk to
and fro, and had become in my waking
dream a shuttle weaving an immense
purple web whose folds had begun to fill
the room. The room seemed to have
become inexplicably silent, as though all
but the web and the weaving were at an
end in the world. 'They have come to us ;
they have come to us,' the voice began
again; 'all that have ever been in your
reverie, all that you have met with in
books. There is Lear, his head still wet
with the thunder-storm, and he laughs
because you thought yourself an existence
who are but a shadow, and him a shadow
who is an eternal god ; and there is Bea-
trice, with her lips half parted in a smile,
as though all the stars were about to pass
away in a sigh of love; and there is the
mother of the God of humility, he who has
cast so great a spell over men that they
have tried to unpeople their hearts that he
might reign alone, but she holds in her
hand the rose whose every petal is a god ;
and there, O swiftly she comes ! is Aphro-
dite under a twilight falling from the

ROSA ALCHEMICA 205

wings of numberless sparrows, and about
her feet are the grey and white doves.'
In the midst of my dream I saw him hold
out his left arm and pass his right hand
over it as though he stroked the wings of
doves. I made a violent effort which
seemed almost to tear me in two, and said
with forced determination : ' You would
sweep me away into an indefinite world
which fills me with terror ; and yet a man
is a great man just in so far as he can make
his mind reflect everything with indifferent
precision Uke a mirror.' I seemed to be
perfectly master of myself, and went on,
but more rapidly: 'I command you to
leave me at once, for your ideas and
phantasies are but the illusions that creep
like maggots into civilizations when they
begin to decline, and into minds when they
begin to decay.' I had grown suddenly
angry, and seizing the alembic from the
table, was about to rise and strike him
with it, when the peacocks on the door
behind him appeared to grow immense;
and then the alemhic fell from my fingers
and I was drowned in a tide of green and

206 ROSA ALCHEMICA

blue and bronze feathers, and as I struggled
hopelessly I heard a distant voice saying :
'Our master Avicenna has written that
all life proceeds out of corruption.' The
glittering feathers had now covered me
completely, and I knew that I had strug-
gled for hundreds of years, and was con-
quered at last. I was sinking into the
depth when the green and blue and bronze
that seemed to fill the world became a
sea of flame and swept me away, and as I
was swirled along I heard a voice over my
head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two
pieces,' and another voice answer, 'The
mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a
more distant voice cry with an exultant
cry, 'The mirror is broken into numberless
pieces ' ; and then a multitude of pale
hands were reaching towards me, and
strange gentle faces bending above me,
and half wailing and half caressing voices
uttering words that were forgotten the
moment they were spoken. I was being
lifted out of the tide of flame, and felt
my memories, my hopes, my thoughts,
my will, everything I held to be myself.

ROSA ALCHEMICA 207

melting away; then I seemed to rise
through numberless companies of beings
who were, I understood, in some way
more certain than thought, each wrapped
in his eternal moment, in the perfect
lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of rhyth-
mical words, in dreaming with dim eyes
and half-closed eyelids. And then I passed
beyond these forms, which were so beautiful
they had almost ceased to be, and, having
endured strange moods, melancholy, as
it seemed, with the weight of many worlds,
I passed into that Death which is Beauty
herself, and into that Lonehness which all
the multitudes desire without ceasing.
All things that had ever lived seemed to
come and dwell in my heart, and I in
theirs; and I had never again known
mortality or tears, had I not suddenly
fallen from the certainty of vision into the
uncertainty of dream, and become a drop
of molten gold falhng with immense
rapidity, through a night elaborate with
stars, and all about me a melancholy
exultant waiUng. I fell and fell and fell,
and then the wailing was but the wailing

208 ROSA ALCHEMICA

of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke
to find myself leaning upon the table
and supporting my head with my hands.
I saw the alembic swaying from side to side
in the distant corner it had rolled to, and
Michael Robartes watching me and wait-
ing. 'I will go wherever you will,' I said,
'and do whatever you bid me, for I have
been with eternal things.' 'I knew,' he
replied, 'you must need answer as you have
answered, when I heard the storm begin.
You must come to a great distance, for
we were commanded to build our temple
between the pure multitude by the waves
and the impure multitude of men.'

Ill

I did not speak as we drove through
the deserted streets, for my mind was
curiously empty of familiar thoughts and
experiences ; it seemed to have been
plucked out of the definite world and cast
naked upon a shoreless sea. There were
moments when the vision appeared on
the point of returning, and I would half-
remember, with an ecstasy of joy or sorrow,

ROSA ALCHEMICA 209

crimes and heroisms, fortunes and mis-
fortunes ; or begin to contemplate, with
a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and
terrors, desires and ambitions, alien to my
orderly and careful life ; and then I would
awake shuddering at the thought that some
great imponderable being had swept
through my mind. It was indeed days
before this feeling passed perfectly away,
and even now, when I have sought refuge
in the only definite faith, I feel a great
tolerance for those people with incoherent
personaUties, who gather in the chapels
and meeting-places of certain obscure
sects, because I also have felt fixed habits
and principles dissolving before a power,
which was hysterica passio or sheer mad-
ness, if you will, but was so powerful in its
melancholy exultation that I tremble
lest it wake again and drive me from my
new-found peace.

When we came in the grey light to the
great half-empty terminus, it seemed to
me I was so changed that I was no more,
as man is, a moment shuddering at eternity,
but eternity weeping and laughing over a

210 ROSA ALCHEMICA

moment; and when we had started and
Michael Robartes had fallen asleep, as
he soon did, his sleeping face, in which
there was no sign of all that had so shaken
me and that now kept me wakeful, was
to my excited mind more like a mask
than a face. The fancy possessed me
that the man behind it had dissolved
away like salt in water, and that it laughed
and sighed, appealed and denounced at
the bidding of beings greater or less than
man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at
all : Michael Robartes is dead ; dead for
ten, for twenty years perhaps,' I kept
repeating to myself. I fell at last into a
feverish sleep, waking up from time to
time when we rushed past some little
town, its slated roofs shining with wet,
or still lake gleaming in the cold morning
light. I had been too preoccupied to ask
where we were going, or to notice what
tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but
I knew now from the direction of the sun
that we were going west-ward ; and pres-
ently I knew also, by the way in which
the trees had grown into the semblance

ROSA ALCHEMIC A 211

of tattered beggars flying with bent heads
towards the east, that we were approaching
the western coast. Then immediately
I saw the sea between the low hills upon the
left, its dull grey broken into white patches
and lines.

When we left the train we had still, I
found, some way to go, and set out,
buttoning our coats about us, for the wind
was bitter and violent. Michael Robartes
was silent, seeming anxious to leave me
to my thoughts ; and as we walked between
the sea and the rocky side of a great
promontory, I realized with a new per-
fection what a shock had been given to
all my habits of thought and of feelings,
if indeed some mysterious change had not
taken place in the substance of my mind,
for the grey waves, plumed with scudding
foam, had grown part of a teeming,
fantastic inner life ; and when Michael
Robartes pointed to a square ancient-
looking house, with a much smaller and
newer building under its lee, set out on
the very end of a dilapidated and almost
deserted pier, and said it was the Temple

212 ROSA ALCHEMICA

of the Alchemical Rose, I was possessed
with the phantasy that the sea, which kept
covering it with showers of white foam,
was claiming it as part of some iadefinite
and passionate life, which had begun to
war upon our orderly and careful days,
and was about to plunge the world into a
night as obscure as that which followed
the downfall of the classical world. One
part of my mind mocked this phantastic
terror, but the other, the part that still
lay half plunged in vision, listened to the
clash of unknown armies, and shuddered
at unimaginable fanaticisms, that hung
in those grey leaping waves.

We had gone but a few paces along the
pier when we came upon an old man, who
was evidently a watchman, for he sat in
an overset barrel, close to a place where
masons had been lately working upon a
break in the pier, and had in front of him a
fire such as one sees slung under tinkers'
carts. I saw that he was also a voteen,
as the peasants say, for there was a rosary
hanging from a nail on the rim of the
barrel, and as I saw I shuddered, and I did

ROSA ALCHEMICA 213

not know why I shuddered. We had
passed him a few yards when I heard him
cry in GaeHc, 'Idolaters, idolaters, go
down to Hell with your witches and your
devils ; go down to Hell that the herrings
may come again into the bay ' ; and for
some moments I could hear him half
screaming and half muttering behind us.
'Are you not afraid,' I said, 'that these
wild fishing people may do some desperate
thing against you ? '

'I and mine,' he answered, 'are long
past human hurt or help, being incorporate
with immortal spirits, and when we die
it shall be the consummation of the supreme
work. A time will come for these people
also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to
Artemis, or some other fish to some new
divinity, unless indeed their own divinities
set up once more their temples of grey
stone. Their reign has never ceased, but
only waned in power a little, for the Sidhe
still pass in every wind, and dance and
play at hurley, but they cannot build their
temples again till there have been martyr-
doms and victories, and perhaps even that

214 ROSA ALCHEMICA

long-foretold battle in the Valley of the
Black Pig.'

Keeping close to the wall that went
about the pier on the seaward side, to
escape the driving foam and the wind,
which threatened every moment to lift
us off our feet, we made our way in silence
to the door of the square building.
Michael Robartes opened it with a key,
on which I saw the rust of many salt
winds, and led me along a bare passage
and up an uncarpeted stair to a little
room surrounded with bookshelves. A
meal would be brought, but only of fruit,
for I must submit to a tempered fast
before the ceremony, he explained, and
with it a book on the doctrine and method
of the Order, over which I was to spend
what remained of the winter daylight.
He then left me, promising to return an
hour before the ceremony. I began search-
ing among the bookshelves, and found one
of the most exhaustive alchemical libraries
I have ever seen. There were the works
of Morienus, who hid his immortal body
under a shirt of hair-cloth; of Avicenna,

ROSA ALCHEMIC A 215

who was a drunkard and yet controlled
numberless legions of spirits ; of Alfarabi,
who put so many spirits into his lute
that he could make men laugh, or weep,
or fall in deadly trance as he would ;
of Lully, who transformed himself into the
likeness of a red cock ; of Flamel, who with
his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many
hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to
live still in Arabia among the Dervishes ;
and of many of less fame. There were
very few mystics but alchemical mystics,
and because, I had little doubt, of the
devotion to one god of the greater number
and of the limited sense of beauty, which
Robartes would hold an inevitable conse-
quence; but I did notice a complete set
of facsimiles of the prophetical writings
of William Blake, and probably because
of the multitudes that thronged his illumi-
nation and were 'like the gay fishes on the
wave when the moon sucks up the dew.'
I noted also many poets and prose writers
of every age, but only those who were a
little weary of life, as indeed the greatest
have been everywhere, and who cast

216 ROSA ALCHEMICA

their imagination to us, as a something
they needed no longer now that they were
going up in their fiery chariots.

Presently I heard a tap at the door, and
a woman came in and laid a little fruit
upon the table. I judged that she had
once been handsome, but her cheeks were
hollowed by what I would have held, had
I seen her anywhere else, an excitement of
the flesh and a thirst for pleasure, instead
of which it doubtless was an excitement
of the imagination and a thirst for beauty.
I asked her some question concerning the
ceremony, but getting no answer except
a shake of the head, saw that I must await
initiation in silence. When I had eaten,
she came again, and having laid a curiously
wrought bronze box on the table, lighted
the candles, and took away the plates
and the remnants. So soon as I was
alone, I turned to the box, and found that
the peacocks of Hera spread out their
tails over the sides and lid, against a
background, on which were wrought great
stars, as though to affirm that the heavens
were a part of their glory. In the box

ROSA ALCHEMIC A 217

was a book bound in vellum, and having
upon the vellum and in very deUcate
colours, and in gold, the alchemical rose
with many spears thrusting against it,
but in vain, as was shown by the shattered
points of those nearest to the petals. The
book was written upon vellum, and in
beautiful clear letters, interspersed with
symbohcal pictures and illuminations, after
the manner of the Splendor Solis.

The first chapter described how six
students, of Celtic descent, gave themselves
separately to the study of alchemy, and
solved, one the mystery of the Pelican,
another the mystery of the green Dragon,
another the mystery of the Eagle, another
that of Salt and Mercury. What seemed a
succession of accidents, but was, the book
declared, the contrivance of preternatural
powers, brought them together in the
garden of an inn in the South of France,
and while they talked together the thought
came to them that alchemy was the gradual
distillation of the contents of the soul,
until they were ready to put off the mortal
and put on the immortal. An owl passed.

218 ROSA ALCHEMICA

rustling among the vine-leaves overhead,
and then an old woman came, leaning
upon a stick, and, sitting close to them,
took up the thought where they had
dropped it. Having expounded the whole
principle of spiritual alchemy, and bid
them found the Order of the Alchemical
Rose, she passed from among them, and
when they would have followed was no-
where to be seen. They formed themselves
into an Order, holding their goods and
making their researches in common, and,
as they became perfect in the alchemical
doctrine, apparitions came and went among
them, and taught them more and more
marvellous mysteries. The book then
went on to expound so much of these as
the neophyte was permitted to know, deal-
ing at the outset and at considerable
length with the independent reality of our
thoughts, which was, it declared, the doc-
trine from which all true doctrines rose.
If you imagine, it said, the semblance of a
living being, it is at once possessed by a
wandering soul, and goes hither and thither
working good or evil, until the moment of

ROSA ALCHEMIC A 219

its death has come ; and gave many exam-
ples, received, it said, from many gods.
Eros had taught them how to fashion
forms in which a divine soul could dweU,
and whisper what they would into sleeping
minds; and Ate, forms from which de-
monic beings could pour madness, or
unquiet dreams, into sleeping blood ; and
Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a
hound at your bedside it would keep watch
there until you woke, and drive away all
but the mightiest demons, but that if your
imagination was weakly, the hound would
be weakly also, and the demons prevail,
and the hound soon die; and Aphrodite,
that if you made, by a strong imagining, a
dove crowned with silver and bade it flutter
over your head, its soft cooing would make
sweet dreams of immortal love gather and
brood over mortal sleep ; and all divinities
alike had revealed with many warnings
and lamentations that all minds are con-
tinually giving birth to such beings, and
sending them forth to work health or dis-
ease, joy or madness. If you would give
forms to the evil powers, it went on, you

220 ROSA ALCHEMICA

were to make them ugly, thrusting out a
Up, with the thirsts of Hfe, or breaking the
proportions of a body with the burdens of
life ; but the divine powers would only
appear in beautiful shapes, which are but,
as it were, shapes trembling out of existence,
folding up into a timeless ecstasy, drifting
with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy stillness.
The bodiless souls who descended into
these forms were what men called the
moods ; and worked all great changes in the
world ; for just as the magician or the
artist could call them when he would, so
they could call out of the mind of the
magician or the artist, or if they were
demons, out of the mind of the mad or the
ignoble, what shape they would, and
through its voice and its gestures pour
themselves out upon the world. In this
way all great events were accomplished ;
a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first
descending hke a faint sigh into men's
minds and then changing their thoughts
and their actions until hair that was yellow
had grown black, or hair that was black had
grown yellow, and empires moved their

ROSA ALCHEMICA 221

border, as though they were but drifts of
leaves. The rest of the book contained
sjonbols of form, and sound, and colour,
and their attribution to divinities and
demons, so that the initiate might fashion
a shape for any divinity or any demon,
and be as powerful as Avicenna among
those who live under the roots of tears and
of laughter.

IV

A couple of hours after sunset Michael
Robartes returned and told me that I
would have to learn the steps of an exceed-
ingly antique dance, because before my
initiation could be perfected I had to join
three times in a magical dance, for rhythm
was the wheel of Eternity, on which alone
the transient and accidental could be
broken, and the spirit set free. I found
that the steps, which were simple enough,
resembled certain antique Greek dances,
and having been a good dancer in my youth
and the master of many curious Gaelic
steps, I soon had them in my memory.
He then robed me and himself in a costume

222 ROSA ALCHEMICA

which suggested by its shape both Greece
and Egypt, but by its crimson colour a
more passionate Hfe than theirs ; and hav-
ing put into my hands a Uttle chainless
censer of bronze, wrought into the hkeness
of a rose, by some modern craftsman, he
told me to open a small door opposite to
the door by which I had entered. I put
my hand to the handle, but the moment I
did so the fumes of the incense, helped
perhaps by his mysterious glamour, made
me fall again into a dream, in which I
seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter
of a Uttle Eastern shop. Many persons,
with eyes so bright and still that I knew
them for more than human, came in and
tried me on their faces, but at last flung
me into a corner with a little laughter;
but all this passed in a moment, for when
I awoke my hand was still upon the handle.
I opened the door, and found myself in a
marvellous passage, along whose sides were
many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not
less beautiful than the mosaic in the
Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe
beauty; the predominant colour of each

ROSA ALCHEMICA 223

divinity, which was surely a symbolic
colour, being repeated in the lamps that
hung from the ceiling, a curiously-scented
lamp before every divinity. I passed on,
marvelling exceedingly how these enthu-
siasts could have created all this beauty in
so remote a place, and half persuaded to
believe in a material alchemy, by the sight
of so much hidden wealth ; the censer
filling the air, as I passed, with smoke of
ever-changing colour.

I stopped before a door, on whose bronze
panels were wrought great waves in whose
shadow were faint suggestions of terrible
faces. Those beyond it seemed to have
heard our steps, for a voice cried : ' Is the
work of the Incorruptible Fire at an end ? '
and immediately Michael Robartes an-
swered : 'The perfect gold has come from
the athanor.' The door swung open, and
we were in a great circular room, and
among men and women who were dancing
slowly in crimson robes. Upon the ceiling
was an immense rose wrought in mosaic;
and about the walls, also in mosaic, was a
battle of gods and angels, the gods gUmmer-

224 ROSA ALCHEMICA

ing like rubies and sapphires, and the
angels of the one greyness, because, as
Michael Robartes whispered, they had
renounced their divinity, and turned from
the unfolding of their separate hearts,
out of love for a God of humility and
sorrow. Pillars supported the roof and
made a kind of circular cloister, each
pillar being a column of confused shapes,
divinities, it seemed, of the wind, who rose
as in a whirling dance of more than human
vehemence, and playing upon pipes and
cymbals; and from among these shapes
were thrust out hands, and in these hands
were censers. I was bid place my censer
also in a hand and take my place and dance,
and as I turned from the pillars towards the
dancers, I saw that the floor was of a green
stone, and that a pale Christ on a pale
cross was wrought in the midst. I asked
Robartes the meaning of this, and was
told that they desired 'To trouble His
unity with their multitudinous feet.' The
dance wound in and out, tracing upon the
floor the shapes of petals that copied the
petals in the rose overhead, and to the

ROSA ALCHEMICA 225

sound of hidden instruments which were
perhaps of an antique pattern, for I have
never heard the hke ; and every moment
the dance was more passionate, until all
the winds of the world seemed to have
awakened under our feet. After a Uttle
I had grown weary, and stood under a pillar
watching the coming and going of those
flame-hke figures; until gradually I sank
into a half-dream, from which I was
awakened by seeing the petals of the great
rose, which had no longer the look of mosaic,
falling slowly through the incense-heavy
air, and, as they fell, shaping into the like-
ness of living beings of an extraordinary
beauty. Still faint and cloud-hke, they
began to dance, and as they danced took a
more and more definite shape, so that I was
able to distinguish beautiful Grecian faces
and august Egyptian faces, and now and
again to name a divinity by the staff in his
hand or by a bird fluttering over his head ;
and soon every mortal foot danced by the
white foot of an immortal ; and in the
troubled eyes that looked into untroubled
shadowy eyes, I saw the brightness of

Q

226 ROSA ALCHEMICA

uttermost desire as though they had
found at length, after unreckonable wan-
dering, the lost love of their youth. Some-
times, but only for a moment, I saw a faint
solitary figure with a veiled face, and carry-
ing a faint torch, flit among the dancers,
but like a dream within a dream, like a
shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an
understanding born from a deeper foun-
tain than thought, that it was Eros him-
self, and that his face was veiled because no
man or woman from the beginning of the
world has ever known what love is, or
looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of
divinities is altogether a spirit, and hides
in passions not of his essence if he would
commune with a mortal heart. So that if
a man love nobly he knows love through
infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending
sympathy; and if ignobly through vehe-
ment jealousy, sudden hatred, and unap-
peasable desire ; but unveiled love he
never knows. While I thought these
things, a voice cried to me from the crim-
son figures : ' Into the dance ! there is none
that can be spared out of the dance ; into

ROSA ALCHEMICA 227

the dance ! into the dance ! that the gods
may make them bodies out of the substance
of our hearts ' ; and before I could answer,
a mysterious wave of passion, that seemed
hke the soul of the dance moving within
our souls, took hold of me, and I was swept,
neither consenting nor refusing, into the
midst. I was dancing with an immortal
august woman, who had black lilies in her
hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden
with a wisdom more profound than the
darkness that is between star and star, and
with a love like the love that breathed upon
the waters ; and as we danced on and on,
the incense drifted over us and round us,
covering us away as in the heart of the
world, and ages seemed to pass, and tem-
pests to awake and perish in the folds
of our robes and in her heavy hair.

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids
had never quivered, and that her lilies had
not dropped a black petal, or shaken from
their places, and understood with a great
horror that I danced with one who was
more or less than human, and who was
drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a

228 ROSA ALCHEMICA

wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness
passed over me.

I awoke suddenly as though something
had awakened me, and saw that I was lying
on a roughly painted floor, and that on the
ceiUng, which was at no great distance, was
a roughly painted rose, and about me on the
walls half -finished paintings. The pillars
and the censers had gone ; and near me a
score of sleepers lay wrapped in disordered
robes, their upturned faces looking to my
imagination like hollow masks ; and a chill
dawn was shining down upon them from a
long window I had not noticed before;
and outside the sea roared. I saw Michael
Robartes lying at a little distance and
beside him an overset bowl of wrought
bronze which looked as though it had once
held incense. As I sat thus, I heard a
sudden tumult of angry men and women's
voices mix with the roaring of the sea ; and
leaping to my feet, I went quickly to
Michael Robartes, and tried to shake him
out of his sleep. I then seized him by the

ROSA ALCHEMICA 229

shoulder and tried to lift him, but he fell
backwards, and sighed faintly; and the
voices became louder and angrier; and
there was a sound of heavy blows upon the
door, which opened on to the pier. Sud-
denly I heard a sound of rending wood, and
I knew it had begun to give, and I ran to
the door of the room. I pushed it open
and came out upon a passage whose bare
boards clattered under my feet, and found
in the passage another door which led into
an empty kitchen ; and as I passed through
the door I heard two crashes in quick succes-
sion, and knew by the sudden noise of feet
and the shouts that the door which opened
on to the pier had fallen inwards. I ran
from the kitchen and out into a small yard,
and from this down some steps which
descended the seaward and sloping side
of the pier, and from the steps clambered
along the water's edge, with the angry
voices ringing in my ears. This part of the
pier had been but lately refaced with blocks
of granite, so that it was almost clear of
seaweed ; but when I came to the old part,
I found it so slippery with green weed that

230 ROSA ALCHEMICA

I had to climb up on to the roadway. I
looked towards the Temple of the Alchemi-
cal Rose, where the fishermen and the
women were still shouting, but somewhat
more faintly, and saw that there was no
one about the door or upon the pier ; but
as I looked, a Uttle crowd hurried out of the
door and began gathering large stones
from where they were heaped up in readi-
ness for the next time a storm shattered
the pier, when they would be laid under
blocks of granite. While I stood watching
the crowd, an old man, who was, I think, the
voteen, pointed to me, and screamed out
something, and the crowd whitened, for all
the faces had turned towards me. I ran,
and it was well for me that pullers of the
oar are poorer men with their feet than with
their arms and their bodies ; and yet while
I ran I scarcely heard the following feet or
the angry voices, for many voices of exulta-
tion and lamentation, which were forgotten
as a dream is forgotten the moment they
were heard, seemed to be ringing in the air
over my head.

There are moments even now when I

ROSA ALCHEMICA 231

seem to hear those voices of exultation and
lamentation, and when the indefinite world,
which has but half lost its mastery over my
heart and my intellect, seems about to
claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the
rosary about my neck, and when I hear, or
seem to hear them, I press it to my heart
and say : ' He whose name is Legion is at
our doors deceiving our intellects with
subtlety and flattering our hearts with
beauty, and we have no trust but in Thee' ;
and then the war that rages within me at
other times is still, and I am at peace.

T

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The Cutting of an Agate

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CHITRA

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GIT ANJ ALI (Song Offerings) . A Collection of Prose Trans-
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(Copyright, 1913, by Frank Crane.) Reprinted by permission
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John Masefield is not unknown as a drama-
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