Читать книгу Doreen, The Story of a Singer - Ada Ellen Bayly - Страница 6

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"'God of justice!' I sighed, 'send your spirit down

On these lords so cruel and proud,

And soften their hearts, and relax their frown,

Or else,' I cried aloud—

'Vouchsafe thy strength to the peasant's hand

To drive them at length from off the land!'"—Thomas Davis.

They had rowed a quarter of a mile before any one spoke; at last John Desmond broke the silence.

"When does the next train leave Kilbeggan?" he asked.

"There is one at nine" said Max, with a startled look. "But you are surely not going?"

"I can't stay here to bring your mother into all this trouble, and your cousin," said Desmond, hoarsely. "Were it not for them I would wait and give myself up. 'Tis an hour's drive to the station, but that will leave me time to get my things together. I can say that I am hastily summoned home, owing to family trouble."

"Will not your leaving possibly lead to suspicion?" said Max.

"I think not," said the tutor. "And if it does, there is not a shred of evidence against me. Old Larry and his wife will not break that oath, and you—of course I can trust you."

"Of course," said the boy. "I give you my word that I will not tell."

Yet even as he spoke, he felt the awful burden that had been thrust upon him, and his heart sank as he reflected that all through life he must carry with him this terrible secret.

"There is that child," said Desmond. "What are we to do about her?"

"Leave her to me," said Max, with an inexpressible dislike to the thought of extorting a promise from their light-hearted little playfellow. Must she, too, be burdened with this horrible secret? It would be harder, infinitely harder, for her to bear!

"Somehow her lips must be closed, at any rate for the present," said Desmond. "Sooner or later 'tis bound to leak out through her—she has a ready tongue as a child, and will have it, you may be sure, as a woman. The fear that may restrain her now will have no power a few years hence. But somehow you must get her to swear secrecy, or I am undone."

Doreen had not heard the whole of this speech; they were nearing the landing-place, and she was intent on her steering; but a word or two had reached her, and she knew that before long she, too, would be asked to swear as Larry and Norah had done. The thought weighed upon her. But she was left unmolested for some little time.

Desmond was so much exhausted that he proposed trying to hire a car at the nearest inn, and Doreen herself was not sorry to lose the ride across the mountains. They gave the pony in charge to the landlord of the forlorn little hostelry not far from the lake, and with a fresh horse and a crazy and springless outside car made their way back to Castle Karey, by the more circuitous but easier high-road. A blight, however, seemed to have fallen upon all they saw, and Doreen shuddered as they drove through the narrow, rocky pass, with its threatening crags and its rugged gray and purple boulders, from which, ever and anon, it seemed to her that the agent's face looked fiercely forth. As they drew nearer home, the dreadful longing to rush straight to her mother and tell her everything, grew almost overpowering. But at the first of the gates leading into the Castle grounds Max Hereford paused.

"I promised once to show you the grotto," he said, feeling much as if he were trapping the poor little girl to her doom. "We will come now, while Mr. Desmond goes on to the Lodge and settles with the driver."

Desmond glanced at them in an abstracted way as they got down. Then, without a word, he drove on. The tears started to Doreen's eyes; she longed so very much to go with him, to sob out all her terror and misery on her mother's knee; if she could but do that, surely the horrible face would cease to haunt her?

With unwilling feet she walked beside Max through the wood; the winding path was cut through the undergrowth of nut trees which had clustered about some fine old oaks, and at any other time it would have been to her the most fascinating place. Even now the beauty and the quiet, sheltered peace of the wood relieved her heavy heart, it made such a welcome contrast to the gloomy pass and the desolate Lough Lee, and the horrible scene which had taken place there. Presently an exclamation of delight escaped her, for in the heart of the wood they came upon a place which seemed to her like fairyland. Tiny paths and rustic steps led up the steep banks, gray boulders and quaintly shaped tree stumps and mysterious caves and arches formed the background, and on every side rose the most beautiful ferns she had ever seen,—graceful "ladies," sturdy male fern, dark-leaved holly fern, delicate oak and beech, feathery parsley, long, drooping hart's-tongues, and fringes of Killarney fern. At the far end of this fernery stood a miniature tower in gray stone, a summer house known as the "Keep." She had longed to see it; yet as Max took her in, she shivered, for the place, only lighted by two ivy-shaded windows, seemed dark and depressing; the horrible recollections that had for a minute been banished from her mind by the beauty of the fernery, came trooping back with double force.

"Do you think Mr. Desmond will get into trouble?" she asked.

"He most certainly will," said Max, "unless we all four keep silence. Will you promise never to tell what you know?"

"I would not hurt him for the world," said Doreen, "but please do let me tell my mother."

"'Tis already known to too many people," said Max; "if more are to be told, it will be quite impossible to keep the matter secret."

"If I might just tell mother," pleaded Doreen, "it would be so much less hard to bear."

"Yes, yes, I can understand that," he said, faltering a little as the blue eyes searched his face wistfully. "Yet she is not strong, and the telling her, though a relief to you, could do no real good,—could, in fact, only trouble her very much."

Doreen's face fell. "I had forgotten that," she said. "Then may I not tell my father when I see him? He would never betray Mr. Desmond. Do let me just tell him!"

"But surely that would be very unwise," said Max. "The disappearance of this agent will be talked of all over the country, and your father—a Fenian just released from prison—would be far safer if he knew absolutely nothing about the matter and could swear that he was ignorant."

"We must not let him run any risk," she said gravely. "I must just bear it alone."

Great tears gathered in her eyes, and Max, cut to the heart by the child's grief, and the thought of the dreadful burden that he was putting upon her, caught her hand in his and held it tenderly. But this proved fatal; for there are times when the mere touch of a hand will open the floodgates of emotion as no words could do. Doreen broke into a passionate fit of weeping.

"Oh," she sobbed, "I don't think I can ever be happy any more!"

"Don't cry, dear," he said, drawing her towards him. "You and I are in the same case, but perhaps in time the memory of to-day will fade and grow less horrible. After all, we have done no wrong. It is our misfortune, not our fault."

The sense of his companionship in her trouble began to comfort her, but it was her practical good sense that checked her tears.

"I mustn't cry," she said, "or mother will guess something by my red eyes. I can't think how Ellen Montgomery managed; she cried between two and three hundred times in the 'Wide, Wide World,' for I counted up once, but she always seems to have looked natural and pretty; it never says that her eyes were as red as ferrets'."

Max smiled. It was cheering to him to think that Doreen's sunny nature would triumph even over this dark shadow that had crossed her path.

"You will swear to keep silence?" he said presently.

"I swear it," said Doreen, "by the cross of Christ."

"I also swear to keep silence," said Max, still keeping her hand in his as he repeated the words of the oath. Then he stooped down and kissed her, and felt her childish lips softly pressed to his cheek in a shy response.

Half an hour later Doreen, with a very wan little face, but a sturdy determination to keep her secret, opened the door of her mother's sitting-room.

"Why, my child, you are late," said Mrs. O'Ryan. "And how very tired you look! It has been too long an excursion for you."

"Oh no, mother," said Doreen. "I am a little tired and hungry; but it wasn't such a very long way, and we came back on a car."

"Tell them to bring in tea at once," said her mother. And Doreen, glad to escape, ran away, and having taken off her cloak and hat, studied herself critically in the looking-glass, then, with a dissatisfied exclamation, plunged her face into a basin of cold water and vigorously scrubbed her white cheeks with a rough towel. The worst of it was that tears would keep stealing up into her eyes, even now, in a fashion hitherto unknown to her. Indeed, though she little dreamt it, years were to elapse before her nerves quite recovered from the severe shock of that afternoon.

"Doreen has so much spirit" reflected her mother, "she would go till she dropped. But the child is certainly over-tired. I must put a stop to these very long expeditions."

She had no idea that her simple questions about Lough Lee and the doings of that afternoon were taxing her little daughter's powers more than any number of additional miles could have done. No suspicion of any grave trouble was roused by Doreen's replies, and the two settled down to their usual game of cribbage, when the tea things were removed, as composedly as though Foxell's body was not lying at the bottom of the lake.

By nine o'clock the child was in bed, but her sleep was uneasy and troubled by dreams. She woke shuddering with terror as the clock struck eleven. All was dark and still; they were an early household, and by this time every one would be asleep. She sat up in bed, staring out into the darkness; had it, after all, been only a dream,—that frightful scene of a man falling back with distorted face, and sinking into the water, yet rising again close beside her? Alas! it was a dreadful reality. She remembered everything distinctly now, and fell back again on the pillow in a paroxysm of the most agonizing fear she had ever known. It was not the mere memory that terrified her, nor even the fear that John Desmond might be arrested; it was a wild, unreasoning fancy that the murdered man was close beside her. Every moment she dreaded to see his face looming out of the darkness, and she lay like one paralyzed, hearing nothing but the throbbing of her heart, and not daring to close her eyes. Some would have found relief in drawing up the bedclothes and cowering down beneath them; but Doreen always preferred to face her fears. In the extremity of her misery she began to think whether she could summon up courage to rush to her mother's room, as she had sometimes done before in moments of panic. Then she remembered her oath, and the terror of breaking it drove out, for a moment, all other terrors.

"I must not go to mother," she said to herself. "She would certainly guess something. And yet, oh! how lovely it would be to creep into her bed and feel her arms round me! I should be asleep in two minutes, just as I was last time I was frightened in the night. But what if I talked in my sleep? What if I told the secret in my sleep? Oh! I shall never feel safe all my life! What shall I do! What shall I do!"

Again the horrible fancy that Foxell was close by made her teeth chatter, until at last, in desperation, she summoned up all her courage, and springing from the bed began to grope her way across the room in search of matches. The light was a wonderful relief, but there was not more than an inch of candle left. She set it on the mantelpiece and prayed that it might last till daylight, with sad misgivings that she was asking an impossibility.

"I will think of other things," she said valiantly, and began to study with extreme care a marvellously worked sampler in a black frame which hung upon the wall. Hitherto she had only pitied the unlucky child who had been made to work it; now she set herself to read the words, which ran as follows:—

"In the glad morn of blooming youth

The various threads I drew,

And, pleased, beheld the finished piece

Rise glowing to the view.

Thus when bright youth shall charm no more,

And age shall chill my blood,

May I review my life and say,

Behold, my works were good!

"Bridget O'Brien's work, finished in her tenth year, 1844."

"I shall never be like Bridget O'Brien, whoever she was," reflected Doreen, sadly. "I don't feel as if I should ever be able to say—'Behold, my works were good!' And there will always be this dreadful memory at the beginning. The sampler wouldn't have looked very nice if some one had spilt a great blot of ink on it just as Bridget O'Brien had worked the first corner. There! I am thinking of it again! I will crowd it out. Let me see; I'll count the things in this sampler. There are rose-bushes up there, and trees like the ones in Michael's Noah's ark. And next come some queer-looking birds, grinning at each other across those pagodas. Then there's a brown cottage with a scarlet roof, and two great birds balancing on the two small chimneys, and looking down on that very green lawn strewn about with red, white, and blue flowers. Then there's a pink bridge leading to a green hill, and on the top of the hill a blue and brown castle, and the Union Jack a great deal smaller than that enormous light blue bird with a dark blue head. Next there's a row of trees and flowers,—horrid to work, I'm sure. And down below there's a large brown house—poor Bridget, how she must have hated it! There are seven windows, a blue roof, a green door, and a yellow knocker. On the roof sit four big birds. To the right and left are apple trees and rose-bushes, flanked by four cows, a dog, and a stag, all worked in sky-blue."

The clock in the kitchen struck twelve. Doreen shivered a little, and wished she had never read the lines about—

"'Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to this world."

Suddenly she remembered that under her pillow there was a little Irish book of prayers, called "The Key of Heaven," which she was in the habit of taking to bed with her because it belonged to her father and seemed like a link with him. Perhaps there might be something in that to quiet her fears. She seldom opened it, but now in her terror she drew it out, and, in turning over the pages, was, not unnaturally, arrested by the words, "Litany for the Dead." Surely it would be well to pray for the man who had gone with such awful suddenness to his doom. She knelt up in bed, using such of the sentences as pleased her best.

"Be merciful, O Lord, and pardon their sins. From the shades of death, where the light of Thy countenance shineth not, deliver them, O Lord. By the multitude of Thy mercies, ever compassionate to human frailties, deliver them, O Lord.

"We sinners beseech thee to hear us.

"That the blessed view of Jesus may comfort them, and His unfading glory shine upon them. That the whole triumphant church may soon celebrate their deliverance, and the choirs of angels sing new hymns of joy on their never-ending happiness."

Then she lay down again and tried to sleep, but in vain. The clock struck one. The candle flared in its socket, then once more darkness reigned. "If only the light would have lasted till dawn!" she thought, as the horror of her loneliness began again to overwhelm her.

But her prayer was, nevertheless, answered; for it was in the darkness and terror of that night that her spirit awoke to the recognition of all that had hitherto been to her mere matter of belief. Mrs. Hereford had sighed to think of the difficult life which probably lay before the sweet-voiced little girl. Max was even now chafing at the thought of the burden which Desmond's rash act had brought upon one so young and innocent. They both forgot that with need comes power, and that to those of whom much is required, much is also given.

A whole night without sleep seems long to every one, but to a child it seems well-nigh endless. Doreen no sooner heard the landlady stirring in the room above, than she sprang up and dressed, glad to remember that it was the day on which the washing was done and that Mrs. Keoghn would be hard at work at her wash-tub before sunrise. She had a craving to get out into the open air, and astonished the good landlady by appearing at the kitchen door in her cloak and hat as the clock struck five.

"Sure, and whativer is it that you are afther, me dear?" she exclaimed.

"I was awake, and the morning is so fine that I mean to go up Kilrourk," said Doreen. "Please will Dan lend me the loan of his stick? The long one with the hooked handle."

"Sure, and it's proud he'll be if you'll use it," said Mrs. Keoghn, drying her hands on her apron. "And just you wait a bit, the while I cut you a little, small slice of bread; 'tis ill faring on an empty stomach."

Doreen thanked her, and running out at the back of the house, began slowly to make her way up the steep, grassy ascent, eating the bread as she walked. But the ground was wet with dew, and somehow the climb seemed toil-some; before she was a quarter of the way up she began to grow tired, and finding a plateau of smooth, short turf from which the gray rock cropped out here and there, she thought she would rest there, at any rate for the present. To the left there was a little group of oaks and arbutus, while a few hundred yards in advance, on the extreme verge of the rocky summit of this first spur of the mountain, stood a solitary fir tree, its gaunt trunk and storm-twisted branches glowing ruddily in the light of dawn. She lay down among the rocks at the foot of an arbutus tree, watching the tall fir with its dark green foliage standing out clearly against the strip of sky. Down below, among its verdant woods, she could see the gray turrets of Castle Karey, and the silvery brightness of the calm water, and the glorious peaks of the mountains rising like the wings of guardian angels on the further shore. Far away, in the opposite direction, there lay, as she well knew, the gloomy Lough Lee; the light was breaking there too. She turned away with a shudder at the thought, and looked instead at all the lovely things close at hand,—the green turf and the little yellow tormentilla twisting about in all directions, and the tall, brown grasses with their shimmering spikes waving in the breeze, and the soft feathery moss half veiling the gray rocks. Then she noticed that the dark holly-bush close by had been suddenly glorified, every shining leaf becoming a mirror for the sun, as it rose majestically above the crest of the mountain. The beauty of the country seemed to steal into her heart as it had never done before; for the first time she fully realized that the land was her own.

"If only I can be worthy of it!" she thought to herself. "If only I can serve it! Keeping this secret is dreadful. I wish I had lived in the times of the Rebellion, or in '48; there were lovely secrets to keep then, and real patriots to save and shelter. Yet Mr. Desmond was kind to poor Larry; he meant to help. How strange it seems that if only the agent had been just to old Larry, it never would have happened. Why are they so unwilling to be just to us Irish?"

But musing over that problem proved too much for the tired little brain. Doreen's head sank lower and lower, till in a few minutes she was sleeping, like Jacob, with a stone for a pillow, and, doubtless, with angels to guard her, though she was too weary to dream of them.