Part 34 (2/2)
”I'm not silly, Shane. I know. They hate us because we have something they have not. The starved Irish peasant is higher than the English peer. He has a song in his heart, a gay song or a sad song, and his eyes see wonders....”
”But, Granya, we are only a little people, and they all but rule the world.... You are wrong. They don't hate us.”
”Do you remember Haman, Shane; Haman who had everything:
”'And Haman told them of ... all the things wherein the king had promoted'; and he said: 'Yet all this availeth me nothing so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate.'”
”Shane, do you remember how Haman died?”
”Granya!”
She rose. Her hands stretched out to the Irish hills. Her voice took on the throbbing of drums:
”Oh! the Erne shall run red With redundance of blood, The earth shall rock beneath our tread, And flame wrap hill and wood, And gun-peal and slogan-cry Make many a glen serene, Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, My dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!”
”Poor Granya!” he said. He caught and kissed her hand.
She let her other fall on his shoulder for an instant.
”Good night, Shane!” she said abruptly. She moved swiftly toward the house through the yew-trees. In her pale dress against the moonlit turf, between the dark trees, she was like some old, heart-wringing ghost....
-- 10
He brought back from Tusa hErin that night a sense of dread. What in G.o.d's name had Granya done? To what committed herself? There were rumors abroad that the men of '67 were not dead yet.... In America, in the hills of Kerry, in Galway, there was plotting ... not glorious, but sinister plotting.... G.o.d! had they enmeshed her?
He had three times heard her sing the old Ulster ballad of General Munro:
Up came Munro's sister, she was well dressed in green, And his sword by her side that was once bright and keen.
And she said to the brave men who with her did go, ”Come, we'll have revenge for my brother Munro!”
He had looked on that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to it all.... She was often in Dublin these days.... Did they? Had they?...
If it had been the Jacobite times, or '98 or even '48, he would not have minded. The Irish might call these Irish rebellions, but in reality they were world affairs. James and the Prince of Orange were the clash of the ideal of courtliness and tradition worn to a thin blade and of the stubborn progress of pulsing thought. And '98 was the echo of the surge for liberty--the frenzy of France and the stubborn Yankee steel.... And '48 was another breathing of the world.... Even '67 he would not have minded. Sixty-seven was a gallant romantic rally, a dream of pikes amid green banners, and men drilling by moonlit rivers....
But to-day was different.... Revenge was in the air, and revenge was no wild justice, as an old writer had said. Revenge was an evil possession.... An exhausting, sinister mood.... The men who would fight this modern battle, if battle there was to be one, were dark scowling men.... The amenities of battle, the gallantry of flags meant nothing to them. They would shoot from behind ditches in the dark.... In America was talk of dynamite--an idealist using a burglar's trick.... There was no gallantry that way....
And besides, it wasn't an Irish war. It was a matter of agriculture....
A war of peasants against careless landlords, Irish themselves in the main, who had fled to England to avoid the suicidal monotony of Irish country life, and lost their money in the pot-houses and gambling-dens of London, and turned to their tenants for more, forgetting in the glamour of London the poverty of the Irish bogs.... It was contemptible to squeeze the peasants as a money-lender squeezes his victims, but the peasants' redress, the furtive musket and horrible dynamite, that was terrible. G.o.d, what a mess!... And had Granya been caught into that evil problem, a kingfisher among cormorants?
And if she had what was he going to do about it?
What could he do? What right had he to meddle with her destiny? Friendly they had become, close sweet friends--the thought of her was like the thought of the hills purple with heather,--but friends.h.i.+p and destiny are a sweet curling wave and a gaunt cliff. They were two different people, independent. Shane Campbell and the Woman of Tusa hErin.
-- 11
She had been distraught all the evening. Merry, feverishly merry at times, and again silent, her eyes far off, her mouth set. She rose suddenly from the piano she was playing, and looked at him. Standing, above the light of the candles, her face and head were like some dark soft flower.
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