A vast sunlit landscape under a smiling April sky—a landscape beyond the uses of mere painters with their tubes and brushes and camp-stools, where leagues of mountain ranges melted away into the shimmering haze of distance, and where the myriad armlets of the blue Atlantic in view, winding themselves about their lovers, the headlands, and placidly nursing their children, the islands, marked as on a map the coastwise journeys of a month—stretched itself out before the gaze of young Bernard O’Mahony, of Houghton County, Michigan—and was scarcely thanked for its pains.
The young man had completed four-fifths of the ascent of Mount Gabriel, from the Dunmanus side, and sat now on a moss-capped boulder, nominally meditating upon the splendors of the panorama spread out before him, but in truth thinking deeply of other things. He had not brought a gun, this time, but had in his hand a small, brand-new hammer, with which, from time to time, to point the shifting phases of his reverie, he idly tapped the upturned sole of the foot resting on his knee.
From this coign of vantage he could make out the white walls and thatches of at least a dozen hamlets, scattered over the space of thrice as many miles. Such of these as stood inland he did not observe a second time. There were others, more distant, which lay close to the bay, and these he studied intently as he mused, his eyes roaming along the coast-line from one to another in baffled perplexity. There was nothing obscure, about them, so far as his vision went. Everything—the innumerable croft-walls dividing the wretched land below him into holdings; the dark umber patches where the bog had been cut; the serried layers of gray rock sloping transversely down the mountain-side, each with its crown of canary-blossomed furze; the wide stretches of desolate plain beyond, where no human habitation could be seen, yet where he knew thousands of poor creatures lived, all the same, in moss-hidden hovels in the nooks of the rocks; the pale sheen on the sea still further away, as it slept in the sunlight at the feet of the cliffs—everything was as sharp and distinct as the picture in a telescope.
But all this did not help him to guess where the young woman in the broad, black hat lived.
Bernard had thought a great deal about this young woman during the forty-eight hours which had elapsed since she stood up in the boat and waved her hand to him in farewell. In a guarded way he had made some inquiries at Goleen, where he was for the moment domiciled, but only to learn that people on the east side of the peninsula are conscious of no interest whatever in the people reputed to live on the west side. They are six or eight Irish miles apart, and there is high land between them. No one in Goleen could tell him anything about a beautiful dark young woman with a broad, black hat. He felt that they did not even properly imagine to themselves what he meant. In Goleen the young women are not beautiful, and they wear shawls on their heads, not hats.
Then he had conceived the idea of investigating the west shore for himself. On the map in his guide-book this seemed a simple enough undertaking, but now, as he let his gaze wander again along the vast expanse of ragged and twisted coast-line, he saw that it would mean the work of many days.
And then—then he saw something else—a vision which fairly took his breath away.
Along the furze-hedge road which wound its way up the mountain-side from Dunmanus and the south, two human figures were moving toward him, slowly, and still at a considerable distance. One of these figures was that of a woman, and—yes, it was a woman!—and she wore, a hat—as like as could be to that broad-brimmed, black hat he had been dreaming of. Bernard permitted himself no doubts. He was of the age of miracles. Of course it was she!
Without a moment’s hesitation he slid down off his rocky perch and seated himself behind a clump of furze. It would be time enough to disclose his presence—if, indeed he did at all—when she had come up to him.
No such temptation to secrecy besets us. We may freely hasten down the mountain-side to where Kate, walking slowly and pausing from time to time to look back upon the broadening sweep of land and sea below her, was making the ascent of Mount Gabriel.
Poor old Murphy had been left behind, much against his will, to nurse and bemoan his swollen ankle. The companion this time was a younger brother of the missing Malachy, a lumpish, silent “boy” of twenty-five or six, who slouched along a few paces behind his mistress and bore the luncheon basket. This young man was known to all Muirisc as John Pat, which was by way of distinguishing him from the other Johns who were not also Patricks. As it was now well on toward nine centuries since the good Brian Boru ordained that every Irishman should have a surname, the presumption is that John Pat did possess such a thing, but feudal Muirisc never dreamed of suggesting its common use. This surname had been heard at his baptism; it might be mentioned again upon the occasion of his marriage, though his wife would certainly be spoken of as Mrs. John Pat, and in the end, if he died at Muirisc, the surname would be painted in white letters on the black wooden cross set over his grave. For all the rest he was just John Pat.
And mediaeval Muirisc, too, could never have dreamed that his age and sex might be thought by outsiders to render him an unsuitable companion for Miss Kate in her wanderings over the countryside. In their eyes, and in his own, he was a mere boy, whose mission was to run errands, carry bundles or do whatever else the people of the castle bade him do; in return for which they, in one way or another, looked to it that he continued to live, and even on occasion, gave him an odd shilling or two.
“Look, now, John Pat,” said Kate, halting once more to look back; “there’s Dunbeacon and Dun-manus and Muirisc beyant, and, may be if it wasn’t so far, we could see the Three Castles, too; and whin we’re at the top, we should be able to see Rosbrin and the White Castle and the Black Castle and the strand over which Ballydesmond stood, on the other side, as well. ’Tis my belafe no other family in the world can stand and look down on sevin of their castles at one view.”
John Pat looked dutifully along the coast-line as her gesture commanded, and changed his basket into the other hand, but offered no comment.
“And there, across the bay,” the girl went on, “is the land that’s marked on the Four Masters’ map for the O’Dalys. Ye were there many’ times, John Pat, after crabs and the like. Tell me, now, did ever you or anny one else hear of a castle built there be the O’Dalys?”
“Sorra a wan, Miss Katie.”
“There you have it! My word, the impidince of thim O’Dalys—strolling beggars, and hedge teachers, and singers of ballads be the wayside! ’Tis in the books, John Pat, that wance there was a king of Ireland named Hugh Dubh—Hugh the Black—and these bards so perplexed and brothered the soul out of him wid claims for money and fine clothes and the best places at the table, and kept the land in such a turmoil by rayson of the scurrilous verses they wrote about thim that gave thim less than their demands—that Hugh, glory be to him, swore not a man of ’em should remain in all Ireland. ‘Out ye go,’ says he. But thin they raised such a cry, that a wake, kindly man—St. Columbkill that was to be—tuk pity on ’em, and interceded wid the king, and so, worse luck, they kept their place. Ah, thin, if Hugh Dugh had had his way wid ’em ’t would be a different kind of Ireland we’d see this day!”
“Well, this Hugh Dove, as you call him”—spoke up a clear, fresh-toned male voice, which was not John Pat’s—“even he couldn’t have wanted a prettier Ireland than this is, right here in front of us!”
Kate, in vast surprise, turned at the very first sound of thi............