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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
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SECRET ROSE. ROSA ALCHEM-
v. THE TABLES OF THE LAW. THE
ORATION OF THE MAGI. JOHN
ERMAN AND DHOYA & BEING THE
VENTH VOLUME OF THE COL-
CT ED WORKS IN VERSE & PROSE
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS £ IM-
INTED AT THE SHAKESPEARE
HEAD PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII
THE SECRET ROSE. ROSA ALCHEM- ICA. THE TABLES OF THE LAW. THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. JOHN SHERMAN AND DHOYA £ BEING THE SEVENTH VOLUME OF THE COL- LECTED WORKS IN VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS Jfc IM- PRINTED AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE SECRET ROSE:
DEDICATION ...... 3
TO THE SECRET ROSE ..... 5
THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST . . J
OUT OF THE ROSE ..... 2O
THE WISDOM OF THE KING . . . • 31
THE HEART OF THE SPRING. ... 42
THE CURSE OF THE FIRES AND OF THE
SHADOWS . . . . . 51
THE OLD MEN OF THE TWILIGHT. . . 6l
WHERE THERE IS NOTHING, THERE IS GOD . 69 OF COSTELLO THE PROUD, OF OONA THE DAUGHTER OF DERMOTT AND OF THE
BITTER TONGUE ..... 78
ROSA ALCHEMICA .... 103
THE TABLES OF THE LAW . . 141
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 165
EARLY STORIES.
JOHN SHERMAN . . . . .183
DHOYA 283
THE SECRET ROSE
B
As for living, our servants will do that for us. — Villiers de Ulsle 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. — Leonardo da Vinci.
My Dear A.E. — / dedicate this book to you because, whether you think it well or ill written, you will sympa- thize 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 subject, 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 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 feelings 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 pre- served with some less excellent things a gift of vision, which has died out among more hurried and more successful 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. TEATS.
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 '; awe II beyond the stir And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep Among pale eyelids heavy with the sleep Men have named beauty. Tour 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 jlowe red red Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead; And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown And sorrow away, and calling bard 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 numberless
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, for the birds were fluttering about them; and he thought how, as like 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 behead-
THE SECRET ROSE
The ing, it would be bad enough. But to have the Crucifixion ^jr(js pecking your eyes and the wolves eating
OutcaL y°ur feet! * would tnat 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 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 feed 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
THE SECRET ROSE
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 high- way 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 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 straightway, for the water was bitter and ill-smelling. 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
The
Crucifixion
of the
Outcast.
io THE SECRET ROSE
The door of the guest-house, but the lay brother, Crucifixion bemg weu accustomed to such outcries, had Outcast locked it on the outside; 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 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-smelling 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, persecu- tors 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 cowardice and with deceit ! '
' Gleeman,' said the lay brother, ' I also make
THE SECRET ROSE n
rhymes; I make many while I sit in my niche The by the door, and I sorrow to hear the bards Cr railing upon the friars. Brother, I would sleep, Outcast and therefore I make known to you that it is the head of 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 singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grand- father 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
12 THE SECRET ROSE
The crumpled it in his hands, and the circular Crucifixion brown patch of hair in the middle of his bald
Outcast l°°ked 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. clf we do not some- what,' 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 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
THE SECRET ROSE
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 may 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, 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 Bridget, 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
The
Crucifixion
of the
Outcast.
i4 THE SECRET ROSE
The is under Cruachmaa, and Red Aodh of Cnoc-
Crucifixion na_sidhe, and Cleena of the Wave, and Aoibhell
Outcast. °f ^e 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 nightcap 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 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,
THE SECRET ROSE 15
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 Outcast.
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 there- fore am I called the Swift, 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 cruci- fied, 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, 'O 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
i6
THE SECRET ROSE
The straight young trees were growing, and they Crucifixion ma(je hjm cu^ one down and fashion it to the Outcast. rignt 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, 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 press- ing 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-
THE SECRET ROSE
breasted Deirdre, and how she endured many sorrows, and 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 jour- ney, 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.
The gleeman took a loaf and some strips of cold fried bacon out of his wallet and laid
The
Crucifixion
of the
Outcast.
1 8 THE SECRET ROSE
The them upon the ground. c I will give a tithe jcifixion to tjie pOOI.5' sayS he) anc[ he cut a tenth part
Outcast. fr°m tne l°af anc* t^ie Dacon- '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, c I am myself the poorest, for I have travelled the bare road, and by the edges of the sea ; and the tattered doublet of particoloured 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-breasted Deirdre, and more lovely than a bursting dawn to them that are lost in the darkness. There- fore, I award the tithe to myself; but yet, because I am done with all things, I give it unto you.'
THE SECRET ROSE
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 mean- while 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 stared 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 themselves on the edge of a neighbouring coppice, 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 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 ? '
The
Crucifixion
of 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 glimmered 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 west, he said, CO Divine Rose of Intellectual Flame, let
THE SECRET ROSE 21
the gates of thy peace be opened to me at Out of the
last ! ' And suddenly a loud squealing began e<
in the woods some hundreds of yards further
up the mountain side. He stopped his horse
to listen, and heard behind him a sound effect
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 an- swered: '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- 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
22 THE SECRET ROSE
Out of the turn out and risk their lives for two, or for two Rose> 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.
'Are the wood-thieves treacherous and im- pious ? '
'They are treacherous in all their dealings,' 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,
THE SECRET ROSE 23
they doubled back upon their previous course, Out of the and began to ascend the wooded slope of the mountains. 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. Pre- sently the path became still more abrupt, and they knew by the ending of the cloven foot- prints that the thieves were carrying the pigs. Now and then a long mark in the clay 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 con- fused 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
24 THE SECRET ROSE
Out of the were now all visible standing up among the Rose' 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 smote 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 mountain, 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 bade them 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 he had beaten off, had fear not made them be- gone out of sight in a great hurry.
An hour passed, and they did not return ; and now the knight could stand on guard no
THE SECRET ROSE 25
longer, but had to lie down upon the grass. A Out of the
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, 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: CO great knight, I have been
bid come and ask you for the crowns you
promised for the heads : five crowns a head.
They bid me 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 forget it, and promised to beat me if I
did.'
The knight raised himself upon his elbow, and opening a bag that hung to his belt, counted out the five crowns for each head. There were thirty heads in all.
CO 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
26 THE SECRET ROSE
Out of the the wounds: but he did it clumsily, like one 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 them- selves, 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 wolves are made their god- fathers, and their right arms are not christened at all?'
' If you will not take these crowns, my good
THE SECRET ROSE 27
lad, I have nothing for you, I fear, unless you Out of the 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. CI want you to tell me why you fought like the champions 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,' replied 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 fire- light, and the lad stuck the cock's feathers in the earth in front of him, and moved them about as though he made them actors in the play.
' I live in a land far from this, and was one of the Knights of Saint 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 Most High. At last there came
28 THE SECRET ROSE
Out of the to us a knight of Palestine, to whom the truth Rose. Q£ trutns naci 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 passionate 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 it 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 corruption, and that none of those who had 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 crimson 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
THE SECRET ROSE 29
spoke to us by the knight, and we gathered Out of the
about him and bade him 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
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,
for some among us said that if one fasted for a
love of the holiness of saints and then died, the
death would be acceptable. 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
30 THE SECRET ROSE
Out of the cause where the few contended against the Rose. 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 grew fainter and fainter. Then his eyes closed, and his lips 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 understand much of it, and it is hard to remember so long a story.'
And, taking the knight's sword, he began 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 the Island of Woods had died in childbirth, and her child was put to nurse with a woman who lived in a hut of mud and wicker, within the border of the wood. One night the woman sat rocking the cradle, and pondering over 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 nearest neighbours were in the dun of the High-King 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 back against the wall, unable to take her eyes
32 THE SECRET ROSE
The from the woman, for she saw by the gleaming Wisdom of Qf the fireiight that the feathers of the grey hawk were upon her head instead of hair. But the child slept, and the fire danced, for the one was too ignorant 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 troubled, 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 skin'; and then another spoke: 'Sisters, I knew him because his heart fluttered like a bird under a net of silver cords'; and then another took up the word: 'Sisters, I knew him because his heart sang like a bird that is happy in a silver cage.'
THE SECRET ROSE 33
And after that they sang together, those who The
were nearest rocking the cradle with long ,ls°mo • i i j r j i • • 6 the King.
wrinkled ringers ; and their voices were now tender and caressing, now like the wind blow- ing 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 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 dun
D
34 THE SECRET ROSE
The of the High-King, and cried out in the midst Wisdom of Qf 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 huntsmen, 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 him- self before long, for no one had seen so wise a child, and tales of his endless questions about the household of the gods and the making of the world went hither and thither among the wicker 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 with- out 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 moment, for miracles were a little thing in those days, but for an ancient law of Eri that none who had any blemish of body could
THE SECRET ROSE 35
sit upon the throne ; and as a grey hawk was The a wild thin? of the air which had never sat at Wisdom of
lilt- i c i tn6 King.
the board, or listened to the songs or the poets in the light of the fire, 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 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 common mind, to reign in his stead.
When the child was seven years old the poets and the men of law were called together 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 committed by their forefathers, they knew that he would learn the truth when he began to wander into the country round about. After much con- sideration they decreed a new law commanding every one upon pain of death to mingle arti-
36 THE SECRET ROSE
The ficially the feathers of the grey hawk into his
Wisdom of jia{r. anc[ they sent men with nets and slings
mg< 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.
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 distinctions 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, alas, when they returned to their own lands his words seemed far off, and what they could remember too strange and subtle to help them to live out their hasty days. 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 and their labour,
THE SECRET ROSE 37
they returned to their own lands to find what The they had loved less lovable and their arm lighter Wisdom of
i i r i 1 i 11 i i- 1 the King.
in the battle, for he had taught them how little a hair divides the false and true; others, again, who had served no cause, but wrought in peace the welfare of their own households, when he had expounded the meaning of their purpose, 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 words that became like a fire in their hearts, and 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 concerning the common things of life; disputes about the mear of a terri- tory, or about the straying of cattle, or about the penalty of blood; he would turn to those nearest him for advice; 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 consuming solitude.
3 8 THE SECRET ROSE
The Among those who came to look at him and
Wisdom of to listen to him Was the daughter of a little ng' king who lived a great way off; and when he saw her he loved, for she was beautiful, with a strange and pale 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 considered the mystery of the hawk feathers she was troubled with a great horror. He called her to him when the assembly was over and told her of her beauty, and praised her simply and frankly as though she were a fable of the bards; and he asked her humbly 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 warrior who could carry her over a mountain in his arms. Day by day the king gave her gifts; cups with ears of gold and findrinny wrought by the craftsmen of distant lands; cloth from over sea, which, though woven with curious figures, seemed to her less beautiful than the bright cloth of her own country; 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 world and begin
THE SECRET ROSE 39
their labour anew; how the kind and mirthful The
Men of Dea drove out the huge and gloomy 'es^° and misshapen People from Under the Sea; and a multitude of things that even the Sidhe have forgotten, either because they happened so long ago or because they 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 dun who had yellow hair, and was skilled in wrestling and in the training of horses; 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 blossom,' 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 beau- tiful 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 casts no shadow of terror and darkness upon my heart.' Then the king remembered many things that he had forgotten without
40 THE SECRET ROSE
The understanding them, doubtful words of his
°f P°etS and his men °f laW' doubts that he had reasoned away, his own continual solitude; 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 then turned away towards the dun without a word. He strode into the hall of assembly, and having gathered his poets and his men of law about him, stood upon the dai's and spoke in a loud, clear voice: 'Men of law, why did you make me sin against the laws of Eri? 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 kin- dred.' He then came down among them, and drew out of the hair 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
THE SECRET ROSE 41
him, for his eyes gleamed like the eyes of the The birds of prey; and no man saw him again or . °m
i i • • o 11- 11 i r , the King.
heard his voice, borne believed that he round 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 meditating upon the rocky shore of the flat and hazel- covered isle which fills the widest part of the 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 a blue cap, and had about his neck a rosary of blue beads. 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 luxuriancy met and mingled with the narrowing circle of the fern.
THE SECRET ROSE 43
Beyond the lilies and the roses the ferns were The
so deep that a child walking among them He*rtofthe • * « i • 1 1 c • i 111 Spring.
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 with your rod of quicken wood 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, for your hand seemed more heavy upon my shoulder and your feet less steady under you to-day 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 in an eager, impulsive way, as though his heart were in the words and thoughts of the moment; and the old man answered slowly and delibe- rately, as though his heart were in distant days and distant deeds.
' 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 faithfully these five years and more, and even with affection, 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
44 THE SECRET ROSE
The triumph of my hopes is at hand, it is the more Heart of the neec[ful 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 against the rain, and strong, lest the wind blow it among the trees ; and it is for me to take the heavy books from the shelves, and to lift from its corner the great painted roll with the names of the Sidhe, and to possess the while an incurious and reverent heart, for right well I know that 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 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.
THE SECRET ROSE 45
And I fear the tall white-armed ladies who The come out of the air, and move slowly hither Heartof the
11-1 • 1 -11 opnng.
and thither, crowning themselves with the
roses or with the lilies, and shaking about 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, but, Aengus, son of Forbis, I fear all these beings, I fear the people of the Sidhe, and I fear 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 of the earth. But I must tell you why I have fasted and laboured when others would sink into the sleep of age, for without 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
46 THE SECRET ROSE
The evil eye and from the love-weaving enchant- Heartof the ments of witches, and by earls' and knights' and squires' ladies for keeping the people of the Sidhe from making 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 gold and silver pieces enough 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 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 — nay, 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 trembles 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
THE SECRET ROSE 47
Ireland and asked the fairy men, and the cow- The doctors, if they knew when this moment was; e<?rto 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 Fairies to my side; and now at last one of the Fairies has told me that the moment is at hand. One, who wore a red cap and whose lips were white with the froth of the new milk, whispered it into my ear. To- morrow, a little 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 kingdom 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.'
48 THE SECRET ROSE
The « Will you be quite young then ? ' said the
Heart of the ^
4 1 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 Forbis in his room, and had lighted 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 western 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 mid- night 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 them shone like pale opal. The roses he was gathering were like glowing rubies, and the lilies had the dull lustre of pearl. Everything had taken upon itself the look of something imperishable, ex- cept a glow-worm, whose faint flame burnt on steadily among the shadows, moving slowly
THE SECRET ROSE 49
hither and thither, the only thing that seemed The alive, the only thing that seemed perishable as Heart.of the mortal hope. The boy gathered a great arm- ful of roses and lilies, and thrusting 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 man- hood with his chosen wife at his side, and the laughter of children in his ears. At dawn he rose, and went down to the edge of the lake, taking the hour-glass with him. He put some bread and a flask of wine in 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 sunlight was falling in flickering circles on floor and walls and table,
5o THE SECRET ROSE
The and everything: was full of soft green shadows.
TT f th*> i • r
" 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 leathern 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 told his beads and said his prayers like another, and not to have spent his days in seek- ing amongst the Immortal Powers what he could have found in his own deeds and days had he willed. Ah, yes, it were better 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 which stood over the Gara Lough at Sligo. As the door fell with a crash they saw a little knot of friars gathered about the altar, their white habits glimmering in the steady light of the holy candles. All the monks were kneeling except the abbot, who stood upon the altar steps with a great brazen crucifix in his hand. 'Shoot them!' cried Sir Frederick Hamilton, but none stirred, for all were new converts, and feared the crucifix and the holy candles. 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 a fantastic dance among the corbels and the memorial tablets. For a little while all was silent, and then five troopers who were the
52 THE SECRET ROSE
The Curse body-guard of Sir Frederick Hamilton lifted °f ^f^h65 tneir muskets, and shot down five of the friars. Shadows. The noise and the smoke drove away the mystery of the pale altar lights, and the other troopers took courage and began to strike. In a moment the friars lay about the altar steps, their white habits stained with blood. 'Set fire to the house ! ' cried Sir Frederick Hamilton, and at his word one went out, and came in again carrying a heap of dry straw, and piled it against the western wall, and, having done this, fell back, for the fear of the crucifix and of the holy candles was still in his heart. Seeing this, the five troopers who were Sir Frederick Hamilton's body-guard darted forward, and taking each a holy candle set the straw in a blaze. The red tongues of fire rushed up and flickered from corbel to corbel and from tablet to tablet, 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 towards the door in the southern wall, and watched those yellow dancers springing hither and thither.
For a time the altar stood safe and apart in the midst of its white light ; the eyes of the troopers turned upon it. The abbot whom
THE SECRET ROSE 53
they had thought dead had risen to his feet The Curse and now stood before it with the crucifix lifted of *,hefF!res in both hands high above his head. Suddenly Shadows. he cried with a loud voice, 'Woe unto all who smite those who dwell within the Light of the Lord, for they shall wander among the un- governable shadows, and follow the ungovern- able fires ! ' And having so cried he fell on his face dead, and the brazen 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 burn- ing houses. Behind them shone the painted windows of the Abbey filled with saints and martyrs, awakened, as from a sacred trance, into an angry and animated life. The eyes of the troopers were dazzled, and for a while could see nothing but the flaming faces of saints and martyrs. Presently, however, they • saw a man covered with dust who came run- ning towards them. 'Two messengers,' he cried, 'have been sent by the defeated Irish to raise against you the 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 between Ben Bulben and Cashel-na-Gael.' Sir Frederick Hamilton called to him the
54 THE SECRET ROSE
The Curse five troopers who had first fired upon the
of *hefF!res monks and said, 'Mount quickly, and ride
Shadows, 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 com- plete darkness. They rode at a rapid trot, now chatting together, now watching some stray weasel or rabbit scuttling away in the darkness. Gradually, as the gloom and silence of the woods oppressed them, they drew closer together, and began to talk rapidly ; they were old com- rades 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 rash- ness. 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 SECRET ROSE 55
the others, not talking at all. Suddenly the The Curse young man stopped, and they saw that his oftheF'res horse was trembling. ' I saw something,' he shadows, 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 re- membering 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 the branches, wetting their hair and their shoulders. In a little 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 fellowship 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.
56 THE SECRET ROSE
The Curse Jn the midst of the water stood a tall old of *he !"* woman with grey hair flowing over a grey Shadows, 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 looking at it, an eddy of the river turned the face towards them, and each of the five troopers recognized 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 a crown of silver on his head, and there are rubies in the crown.' Then the oldest of the troopers, he who had been most often wounded, drew his sword and cried: ' 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 purpose. They tried again and again, and went plunging hither and thither, the horses foaming and
THE SECRET ROSE 57
rearing. 'Let us,' said the old trooper, 'ride The Curse
back a little into the wood, and strike the of*he Fires
river higher up.' They rode in under the shadows.
boughs, the ground-ivy crackling under the
hoofs, and the branches striking against their
steel caps. 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 moonlight 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
seemed to be dancing a grotesque dance among
the 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 remembered the
belief that tells how the dead in purgatory are
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 dance of the white moon-fires more and more rapid. Gradually they began
5 8 THE SECRET ROSE
The Curse to be aware of a sound of distant music. It of the Fires was ^e sound of a bagpipe, and they rode
and of the , . . , . f * c J ,
Shadows towards it with great joy. 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 cried, looking up a moment; 'she was washing! she was washing!' 'I am afraid of him,' said the young trooper, 'I fear he is one of the Sidhe.' 'No,' said the old trooper, 'he is a man, 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 before one of them and be their guide, for they had lost their way. The piper turned, and pointed to a neighbouring tree, and they saw an old white horse ready bitted, bridled, and saddled. He
THE SECRET ROSE 59
slung the pipe across his back, and, taking the The Curse torch in his hand, got upon the horse, and of the Fires started off before them, as hard as he could go. Shadows.
The wood grew thinner and thinner, and the ground began to slope up toward the mountain. The moon had already set, and the little white flames of the stars had come out everywhere. 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. But before and above them were the little white flames. The guide drew rein suddenly, and pointing up- wards 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, and as if below them, rattle of hoofs ; but now the ground began to slope more and more, and the speed grew more headlong moment by moment. They tried to pull up, but in vain, for the horses seemed to
60 THE SECRET ROSE
The Curse have gone mad. The guide had thrown the
C i "C**
the * ires re«ns Qn tQ ^ necjc Qf ^ ^ white horse,
and or the . ... , ., ,
Shadows. anc* was waving his arms and singing a wild
Gaelic song. Suddenly they saw the thin gleam of a river, at an immense 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 cen- tury. It also was a watchhouse, for a certain old Michael Bruen, who had been a smuggler in his day, and was still the father and grand- father of smugglers, lived there, and when, after nightfall, a tall 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 communion with mankind, for he was very old, and had no thought for anything but for the making of his soul, at the foot of the Spanish crucifix of carved oak that hung by his chimney, or bent double over the rosary of stone beads brought
62 THE SECRET ROSE
The Old to him in a cargo of silks and laces out of
Men of the France< Qne night he had watched hour after Twilight.
hour, because 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, seeing that the dawn was whitening the east, and that the schooner 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 kept his cupboard empty, he took down his rusty shot-gun, of which the barrel was tied on with a piece of string, and followed them towards the pools.
When he came close enough to hear the sighing of the rushes in the outermost pool, the morning was grey over the world, so that the tall rushes, the still waters, the vague clouds, the thin mist lying among the sand-heaps, seemed carved out of an enormous pearl. In a little he came upon the herons, of whom
THE SECRET ROSE 63
there were a great number, standing with lifted The Old legs in the shallow water; and crouching down vJ,en° f behind a bank of rushes, looked to the priming of his gun, and bent 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 infi- nitely 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 that enemy of all enchantment brought the old man 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 said a
64 THE SECRET ROSE
The Old Paternoster and an A ve Maria^ and muttered half Men of the ajoucj: 'Some enemy of God and of my patron is standing upon the smooth place and fishing in the blessed water,' and then aimed very care- fully 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 with clamour 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 black and green 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,' replied 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.'
'I will listen to you,' he answered, 'but I will not let you touch my blessed beads,' and sitting on the grass a little way from the dying man, he reloaded his gun and laid it across his knees and composed himself to listen.
THE SECRET ROSE 65
4 1 know not how many generations ago we, The Old who are now herons, were the men of learning \l?n ° 5 ' of the 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 passing fire. The Druids and the poets told us, many and many a time, of a new Druid Patrick; and most among them were fierce against him, while a few thought his doc- trine merely the doctrine of the gods set out in new symbols, and were for giving him welcome ; but we yawned in the midst of their tale. 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 enchantment under their arms, travelling towards the forest to contend against his com- ing, nor when they returned after nightfall with torn robes 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 strange Druid preaching the com- mandments of his god. The crowds passed, and one, who had laid down his knife to yawn and stretch himself, heard a voice speaking far off,
F
66 THE SECRET ROSE
The Old and knew that the Druid Patrick was preaching Men of the wjtnjn the king's house ; but our hearts were deaf, and we carved and disputed and read, and laughed a thin laughter 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 robe; like a great lily and a heavy poppy; and we knew the Druid Patrick and our King Leaghaire. We laid down the slender knives and bowed before the king, but when the black and green robes had ceased to rustle, it was not the loud rough voice of King Leaghaire that spoke to us, but a strange voice in which there was a rapture as of one speaking from behind a battlement of Druid flame: "I preached the commandments of the Maker of the world," it said; "within the king's house and from the centre of the earth to the windows of Heaven there was a great silence, so that the eagle floated with unmoving wings in the white air, and the fish with unmoving fins in the dim water, while the linnets and the wrens and the sparrows stilled their ever-trembling tongues in the heavy boughs, and the clouds were like white marble, and the rivers became their motionless mirrors, and the shrimps in the far- off sea-pools were still, enduring eternity in patience, although it was hard." And as he
THE SECRET ROSE 67
named these things, it was like a king num- The Old Bering his people. "But your slender knives went click, click! upon the oaken staves, and, all else being silent, the sound shook the angels with anger. O, little roots, nipped by the winter, who do not awake although the summer pass above you with innumerable feet. O, men who have no part in love, who have no part in song, who have no part in wisdom, but dwell with the shadows of memory 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 lay upon you a curse, and change you to an example for ever and ever; you shall become grey herons and stand pondering in grey pools and flit over the world in that hour when it is most full of sighs, having forgotten the flame of the stars and not yet found the flame of the sun; and you shall preach to the other herons until they also are like you, and are an example for ever and ever ; and your deaths shall come to you by chance and un- foreseen, that no fire of certainty may visit your hearts."
The voice of the old man of learning became still, but the voteen bent over his gun with his eyes upon the ground, trying in vain to under- stand something of this tale ; and he had so
68 THE SECRET ROSE
The Old bent, it may be for a long time, had not a tug
Men of the at j^ rosary made him start out of his 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 still. He bent down and began to consider the black and green clothes, for his fear had begun to pass away when he came to understand that he had something the man of learning wanted and pleaded for, 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 cloak under it, were warm and without holes, Saint Patrick would take the enchantment out of them and leave them fit for human use. But the black and green clothes fell away wherever his fingers touched them, and while this was a new wonder, 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.
THE little wicker houses at Tullagh, where the Brothers were accustomed to pray, or bend over many handicrafts, when twilight had driven them from the fields, were empty, for the hard- ness of the winter had brought the brother- hood together in the little wooden house under the shadow of the wooden chapel; and Abbot Malathgeneus, Brother Dove, Brother Bald Fox, Brother Peter, Brother Patrick, Brother Bittern, Brother Fair-brows, and many too young to have won names in the great battle, sat about the fire with ruddy faces, one mending lines to lay in the river for eels, one fashioning a snare for birds, one mending the broken handle of a spade, one writing in a large book, and one shaping a jewelled box to hold the book; and among the rushes at their feet lay the scholars, who would one day be Brothers, and whose school-house it was, and for the succour of whose tender years the great fire was supposed
7o THE SECRET ROSE
Where there to leap and flicker. One of these, a child of is nothing, e[gfa or njne 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 disappearing in the smoke with mild eyes, like the eyes of a beast of the field. He turned presently to the Brother who wrote in the big book, and whose duty was to teach the children, and said, 'Brother Dove, to what are the stars fastened ? ' The Brother, rejoicing to see 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 of the substance on which the breath of God moved in the beginning.'
' What is beyond that ? ' said the child.
'There is nothing beyond that; there is God.'
And then the child's eyes strayed to the jewelled box, where one great ruby was gleam- ing in the light of the fire, and he said, 'Why
THE SECRET ROSE 71
has Brother Peter put a great ruby on the side Where there Of the box?' is nothing
, t i i r i t f ^ i there is (jod.
'The ruby is a symbol or the love or God.
' Why is the ruby a symbol of the love of God?' J
'Because it is red, like fire, and fire burns up everything, and where there is nothing, there is God.'
The child sank into silence, but presently sat up and said, 'There is somebody outside.'
'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 some- body rapped three times, but with no great loudness.
' 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 back the heavy wooden bolt, and all the faces, most of
72 THE SECRET ROSE
Where there them a little pale, turned towards the slowly- is nothing Openina door.
there is God. r,TT , , , , , ,
'He has beads and a cross, he cannot be a man-wolf,' said the child, as a man with the snow heavy on his long, ragged beard, and on the matted hair, that fell over his shoulders and nearly to his waist, and dropping from the tattered cloak that but half-covered his withered brown body, came in and looked from face to face with mild, ecstatic eyes.' Standing some way from the fire, and with eyes that had rested at last upon the Abbot Malathgeneus, he cried out, ' O blessed abbot, let me come to the fire and warm myself and dry the snow from my beard and my hair and my cloak ; that I may not die of the cold of the mountains and anger the Lord with a wilful martyrdom.'
c Come to the fire,' said the abbot, 'and warm yourself, and eat the food the boy Olioll will bring you. It is sad indeed 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 a little and his limbs had ceased to shiver with the cold, he spoke again.
THE SECRET ROSE 73
4 O blessed abbot, have pity on the poor, have Where there
pity on a beggar who has trodden the bare 1s no'hl"g' r •71 . there is God.
world this many a year, and give me some
labour to do, the hardest there is, for I am the poorest of God's poor.'
Then the Brothers discussed together what work they could put him to, and at first to little purpose, for there was no labour that had not found its labourer in that busy community; 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 for so heavy a labour; and so the beggar was put to the quern from the morrow.
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 gloom, too, had passed from that happy community, for Olioll, who had always been stupid and un- teachable, 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 on the morrow or be sent into a lower class among little boys who would make a joke
74 THE SECRET ROSE
Where there of him. He had gone out in tears, and when is nothing ke came (-kg next day although his stupidity, there is God. r -11 111-
born or a mind that would listen to every
wandering sound and brood upon every wander- ing light, 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 to the Virgin, and took it for a great proof of the love she bore him ; but when many far more fervid prayers had failed to add a single wheatsheaf to the harvest, he began to think 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 bid him come to him the moment he hit the truth ; and the next day, which was a Sun- day, he stood in the path when the abbot and the Brothers were coming from vespers, with their white habits upon them, and took the abbot by the habit and said, 'The beggar is of the greatest of saints and of the workers of miracle. I followed Olioll but now, and by his slow steps and his bent head I saw that the weariness of his stupidity was over him, and when he came to the little wood by the quern- house I knew by the path broken in the under-
THE SECRET ROSE 75
wood and by the foot-marks in the muddy Where there
places that he had gone that way many times. !_s no "g\ TI-JLI-J LI 1 i 11 i_ij there is God.
1 hid behind a bush where the path doubled
upon itself 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. Olioll 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, that the nine orders of angels may glorify Thy name " ; and then a light broke out of the air and wrapped Aodh, and I smelt the breath of roses. I stirred a little in my wonder, 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
76 THE SECRET ROSE
Where there penance. It was my pity moved me"; but I is nothing, wag afrajj ancj j ran away, and did not stop
there is God. . .. , . y,
running until 1 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 brotherhoods, but that it was such and such a one; and the talk was as near to quarrel- ing as might be in that gentle community, for each would 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 brother- hood ; but he is Aengus the Lover of God, and the first of those who have gone to live in the wild places and among the wild beasts. Ten years ago he felt the burden of many labours in a brotherhood under the Hill of Patrick and 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 little pride clung to a soul from which all else had been driven. Nine years ago he dressed himself in rags, and from that day none has seen him, unless, indeed, it be true that he has been seen living among the wolves on the mountains and eating the grass
THE SECRET ROSE 77
of the fields. Let us go to him and bow down Where there
before him ; for at last, after long seeking, he
has found the nothing that is God ; and bid
him lead us in the pathway he has trodden.
They passed in their white habits along the
beaten path in the wood, the acolytes swinging
their censers before them, and the abbot, with
his crozier studded with precious stones, in
the midst of the incense; and came before the
quern-house and knelt down and began to pray,
awaiting the moment when the child would
wake, and the Saint cease from his watch and
come to look at the sun going down into the
unknown darkness, as his way was.
OF COSTELLO THE PROUD, OF OONA THE DAUGHTER OF DERMOTT AND OF THE BITTER 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 Elizabeth and James, now going out of fashion in England, 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 the greatness of his indolent body had a commingling of pride and strength which belonged to 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 bag- pipes hanging from his shoulders, and the
THE SECRET ROSE 79
rough-haired garron under him, to be seen OfCostcllo distinctly in the grey dusk. So soon as he had tfhQProu(!' come within earshot, he began crying: 'Is it daughter of sleeping you are, Tumaus Costello, when better Dermott men break their hearts on the great white and of the roads? Get up out of that, proud Tumaus, for ~ '
* r i * ongue>
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 Dermott's daughter, Winny.' The great ringers 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 unless I am paid for my shaking.'
Costello fumbled at the bag in which he carried his money, and it was some time before it would open, for the hand that had overcome many men shook with fear and hope. ' Here is all the money in my bag,' he said, dropping
8o THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello a stream of French and Spanish money into
t e rou , ^ jian(j of the piper, who bit the coins before of Oona the
daughter of he would answer. Dermott 'That is right, that is a fair price, but I will
and of the not Speak till I have good protection, for if
Bi«er ,1 rT ,u • 5i j •
Tongue t"e Dermotts Aay 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 on the great sycamore, 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.
' 1 will make you my piper and my body- servant,' said Costello, 'and no man dare lay hands upon the man, or the goat, or the horse, or the dog that is Tumaus Costello's.'
'And I will only tell my message,' said the other, flinging the saddle on the ground, 'in the corner of the chimney with a noggin in my hand, and a jug of the Brew of the Little Pot beside me, for though I am ragged and empty, my forebears were well clothed and full until their house was burnt and their cattle harried seven centuries ago by the Dillons, whom I shall yet see on the hob of hell, and they screeching'; and while he spoke the little eyes gleamed and the thin hands clenched.
THE SECRET ROSE 81
Costello led him into the great rush-strewn Of Costello
C7 i --v
hall, where were none of the comforts which
' .or Oona the
had begun to grow common among the gentry, daughter of
but a feudal gauntness and bareness, and pointed Dermott to the bench in the great chimney; and when and of the
he had sat down, rilled up a horn noggin and ~, ltter
11 -11- 1 °ngue-
set it on the bench beside him, and set a great
black jack of leather beside the noggin, and lit a torch that slanted out from a ring in the wall, his hands trembling the while; and then turned towards him and said : ' Will Dermott's daughter come to me, Duallach, son of Daly?'
'Dermott's daughter will not come to you, for her father has set women to watch her, but she bid me tell you that this day sennight will be the eve of St. John and the night of her betrothal to Namara of the Lake, and she would have you there that, when they bid her drink to him she loves best, as the way is, she may drink to you, Tumaus Costello, and let all know where her heart is, and how little of gladness is in her marriage; and I myself bid you go with good men about you, for I saw the horse-thieves with my own eyes, and they dancing the "Blue Pigeon" in the air.' And then he held the now empty noggin towards Costello, his hand closing round it like the claw of a bird, and cried: 'Fill my noggin again,
G
82
THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello
the Proud,
of Oona the
daughter of
Dermott
and of the
Bitter Tongue.
for I would 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, a herd of goats, 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 hither and thither 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 the big wrestler's back ; how when somewhat older he dragged fierce horses through a ford in the Unchion for a wager ; how when he came to manhood he broke the steel horseshoe in Mayo ; how he drove many men before him through Rushy Meadow at Drum-an-air because of a malevo- lent song they had about his poverty ; and of many another deed of his strength and pride ;
THE SECRET ROSE 83
but he could find none who would trust them- Of Costello selves with any so passionate and poor in a quarrel l!L ' )U ' with careful and wealthy persons like Dermott daughter of of the Sheep and Namara of the Lake. Dermott
Then Costello went out himself, and after and of the listening to many excuses and in many places, xoneue brought in a big half-witted fellow, who fol- lowed him like a dog, 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 in the empty hall. They had brought with them their stout cudgels, and Costello gave them an old pistol apiece, and kept them all night drinking Spanish ale and shooting at a white turnip which he pinned against the wall with a skewer. Duallach of the Pipes sat on the bench in the chimney playing 'The Green Bunch of Rushes,' 'The Unchion Stream,' and 'The Princes of Breffeny ' on his old pipes, and railing now at the appearance of the shooters, now at their clumsy shooting, and now at Costello because he had no better servants. The labourer, the half-witted fellow, the farmer and the lads were all well accustomed to Dual- lach's railing, for it was as inseparable from wake or wedding as the squealing of his pipes,
84 THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello but they wondered at the forbearance of Cos-
^Oona^he tc^°' w^° se^om came eitner to wake or daughter of wedding, and if he had would scarce have been Dermott patient with a scolding piper, and of the Qn the next evening they set out for Cool-a- Ton Cue v*n> Costello riding a tolerable horse and carrying a sword, the others upon rough-haired garrons, and with their stout 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 on the turf, celebrating the bridal of life and fire. When they came to Dermott's house they saw before the door an unusually large group of the very 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 in their secret places. From the door and through the long loop-holes on either side came the pale 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,
THE SECRET ROSE 85
and went into the great hall where the dance Of Costello was. The labourer, the half-witted fellow, the 'I1* Proud>
r , , i T • i • i of Oona the
farmer and the two lads mixed with a group daughter of
of servants who were looking on from an alcove, Dermott and Duallach sat with the pipers on their and of the bench, but Costello made his way through the T v dancers to where Dermott of the Sheep stood with Namara of the Lake pouring Poteen out of a porcelain jug into horn noggins with silver rims.
'Tumaus Costello,' said the old man, 'you have done a good deed to forget what has been, and to fling away enmity and come to the betrothal of my daughter to Namara of the Lake.'
'I come,' answered Costello, 'because when in the time of Costello De Angalo my forebears overcame your forebears 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 Dermott for ever, and a Dermott 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 the son of Dermott flushing, 'no matter how strong your hands to wrestle and to swing the sword, it shall go badly with you,
86 THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello for some of my wife's clan have come out of
rh^Pr°Uu' Mayo, and my three brothers and their servants of Oona the 1 J j > i r\ * /r >
daughter of have come down from the Ox Mountains ; and
Dermott while he spoke he kept his hand inside his coat and of the as though upon the handle of a weapon. Bitter 'No,' answered Costello, 'I but come to
I ongue. .
dance a farewell dance with your daughter.'
Dermott drew his hand out of his coat and went over to a tall pale girl who was now standing but a little way off with her mild eyes fixed upon the ground.
'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 Cos- tello, 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 Saraband, the Gallead, and the Mor- rice 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 unutterable melancholy, the weariness with the world, the poignant and
THE SECRET ROSE 87
bitter pity for one another, the vague anger OfCostello
against common hopes and fears, which is the Proud, P , r ^ ATI or Oona the
the exultation or love. And when a dance daughter of
ended and the pipers laid down their pipes and Dermott lifted their horn noggins, they stood a little and of the from the others waiting pensively and silently T " for the dance to begin again and the fire in their hearts to leap up and to wrap them anew; and so they danced and danced Pavane and Saraband and Gallead and Morrice through 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 Dermott's daughter Oona, and become by the telling themselves a portion of ancient romance; but through all the dancing and piping Namara of the Lake went hither and thither talking loudly and making foolish jokes that all might seem well with him, and old Dermott of the Sheep 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 from where the horn noggins stood that his
88
THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello
the Proud,
of Oona the
daughter of
Dermott
and of the
Bitter
Tongue.
daughter would now drink the cup of betrothal; then Oona 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 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 customary 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 : c 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 Namara's people among the servants now come out of the alcove, and one of them, a story-teller and poet, a last remnant of the bardic order, who had a chair and a platter in Namara's kitchen, drew a French knife out of his girdle and made as though he would strike at Costello, but in a moment a blow had hurled him to the ground.
THE SECRET ROSE 89
his shoulder sending the cup rolling and ring- Of Costello ing again. The click of steel had followed ?° Proud'
° . ° , , . .of Oona the
quickly, had not there come a muttering and daughter of
shouting from the peasants about the door and Dermott from those crowding up behind them; and all and of the knew that these were no children of Queen's ^ \ Irish or friendly Namaras and Dermotts, but of the wild Irish about Lough Gara and Lough Cara, who rowed their skin coracles, and had masses of hair over their eyes, and left the right arms of their children unchristened that they might give the stouter blows, and swore only by St. Atty and sun and moon, and wor- shipped beauty and strength more than St. Atty or sun and moon.
Costello's hand had rested upon the handle of his sword and his knuckles had grown white, but now he drew it away, and, followed by those who were with him, strode 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 good horse and the rough-haired garrons were tied to bushes; and mounted and bade his ungainly bodyguard mount also and
90 THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello ride into the narrow boreen. When they had the Proud, g0ne a jinle w Duallach, who rode last,
or (Jons, tne . 111 i 1-1
daughter of turned towards the house where a little group
Dermott of Dermotts and Namaras stood next to a more
and of the numerous group of countrymen, and cried:
~ l 'Dermott, you deserve to be as you are
Tongue. \ J
this hour, a lantern without a candle, a purse without a penny, a sheep without wool, for your hand was ever niggardly to piper and fiddler and story-teller and to poor travelling people.' He had not done before the three old Dermotts from the Ox Mountains had run towards their horses, and old Dermott himself had caught the bridle of a garron of the Na- maras and was calling to the others to follow him; and many blows and many deaths had been had not the countrymen caught up still glowing sticks from the ashes of the fires and hurled 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 gleam- ing in the dawn.
For the next few weeks Costello had no lack of news of Oona, for now a woman selling eggs or fowls, and now a man or a woman on pil- grimage to the Well of the Rocks, would tell him how his love had fallen ill the day after St. John's Eve, and how she was a little better
THE SECRET ROSE 91
or a little worse, 'as it might be ; and though Of Costello
he looked to his horses and his cows and goats * 5L rou '
0 or Oona the
as usual, the common and uncomely, the dust daughter of
upon the roads, the songs of men returning Dermott
from fairs and wakes, men playing cards in the and of the
corners of fields on Sundays and Saints' Days,
the rumours of battles and changes in the great
world, the deliberate purposes of those about
him, troubled him with an inexplicable trouble;
and the country people still remember how
when night had fallen he would bid Duallach
of the Pipes tell, to the chirping of the crickets,
'The Son of Apple,' 'The Beauty of the
World,' 'The King of Ireland's Son,' or some
other of those traditional tales which were as
much a piper's business as 'The Green Bunch
of Rushes,' 'The Unchion Stream,' or 'The
Chiefs of BrefFeny'; and while the boundless
and phantasmal world of the legends was a-
building, would abandon himself to the dreams
of his sorrow.
Duallach would often pause to tell how some clan of the wild Irish had descended from an incomparable King of the Blue Belt, or Warrior of the Ozier Wattle, or to tell with many curses how all the strangers and most of the Queen's Irish were the seed of the misshapen and horned People from Under the Sea or of the servile
92 THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello and creeping Ferbolg; but Costello cared only the Proud, for the iove sorrows, and no matter whither l^hteVof the stories wandered, whether to the Isle of the Dermott Red Lough, where the blessed are, or to the and of the malign country of the Hag of the East, Oona J*1"6 alone endured their shadowy hardships; for it was she and no king's daughter of old 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 mul- titudes clinging with worn fingers to the hem of her dress; and it was she who endured dumb- ness for a year because of the little thorn of enchantment the fairies had 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; for there was no beauty in the world but hers, no tragedy in the world but hers: and when at last the voice of the piper, grown gentle with the wisdom of old romance, was silent, and his rheumatic steps had toiled upstairs and to bed, and Costello had dipped his ringers into the little delf font of holy water
THE SECRET ROSE
93
and begun to pray to Mary of the Seven OfCostello
Bitter Tongue.
Sorrows, the blue eyes and star-covered dress tr !L
e i . •', . i r j i r i • °' Oona the
or the painting in the chapel taded rrom his daughter of imagination, and the brown eyes and homespun Dermott dress of Dermott's daughter Winny came in and of the their stead; for there was no tenderness in the world but hers. 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, and who, when the hour of their visitation arrives, come to the Divine Essence by the bitter tumult, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the desolate Rood ordained for immortal passions in mortal hearts.
One day a serving-man rode up to Costello, who was helping his two lads to reap a meadow, and gave him a letter, and rode away without a word; and the letter contained these words in English : 'Tumaus Costello, my daughter is very ill. The wise woman from Knock-na-Sidhe has seen her, and says she will die unless you come to her. I therefore bid you come to her, whose peace you stole by treachery. — DERMOTT, THE SON OF DERMOTT.'
Costello threw down his scythe, and sent one of the lads for Duallach, who had become woven into his mind with Oona, and himself saddled his great horse and Duallach's garron.
When they came to Dermott's house it was
94 THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello late afternoon, and Lough Gara lay down below rhAPr°Uu' them, blue, mirror-like, and deserted ; and
of Oona the ' , .
daughter of though they had seen, when at a distance,
Dermott dark figures moving about the door, the house
and of the appeared not less deserted than the Lough.
Ton "e ^ door stood half open, and Costello knocked
upon it again and again, so that a number of
lake gulls flew up out of the grass and circled
screaming over his head, but there was no
answer.
'There is no one here,' said Duallach, 'for Dermott of the Sheep is too proud to welcome Costello the Proud,' 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 com- panion 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 Winny sleeping upon a bed. He sat upon a chair beside her and waited, and a long time passed and still she slept on, and then Duallach motioned to him through the door to wake
THE SECRET ROSE
95
and of the
Bitter Tongue.
her, but he hushed his very breath, that she OfCostello might sleep on, for his heart was full of that un- trh!:Prou<J>
11- 1-1 i i r i- i °f Oona the
governable pity which makes the fading heart daughter of
of the lover a shadow of the divine heart. Dermott
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 cried at last; 'had he seen you waiting and waiting where they left none but a beggar to welcome 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 Dermott of the Sheep, for he has many brothers and friends, and though he is old, he is a strong man and ready with his hands, and he is of the Queen's Irish, and the enemies of the Gael are upon his side.'
And Costello answered flushing and looking towards the house : ' I swear by the Mother of
96 THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello God that I will never return there again if they
rh^ProiMu do not send after me before I pass the ford in of Oona the t _ . , , . , r .
daughter of tne Brown River, and he rode on, but so very
Dermott slowly that the sun went down and the bats and of the began to fly over the bogs. When he came to
T v ere the river he lingered awhile upon the bank among the flowers of the flag, but presently rode out into the middle and stopped his horse in a foaming shallow. Duallach, 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 of all 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 gentles and to serving-men.'
With bent head, Costello rode through the river and stood beside him, and would have spoken had not hoofs clattered on the further bank and a horseman splashed towards them. It was a serving-man of Dermott's, and he said, speaking breathlessly like one who had ridden hard : ' Tumaus Costello, I come to bid you again to Dermott's house. When you had gone, his daughter Winny awoke and called your name, for you had been in her dreams. Bridget
THE SECRET ROSE 97
Delaney the Dummy saw her lips move and Of Costello the trouble upon her, and came where we were * 5L rou '
i • i- • i ii 11 i of Oona the
hiding in the wood above the house and took daughter of Dermott of the Sheep by the coat and brought Dermott him to his daughter. He saw the trouble upon and of the 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 hurled him against a grey rock that rose up out of the river, so that he fell lifeless into the deep place, and the waters swept over the tongue which God had made bitter, 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 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 Moun- tains, and down towards the sea ; his eyes almost continually resting upon the moon which glimmered in the dimness like a great white rose hung on the lattice of some bound- less and phantasmal world. But now his horse, long dark with sweat and breathing hard, for
H
98 THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello he kept spurring it to an extreme speed, fell rh^Prout' heavily, hurling him into the grass at the road-
of Oona the . , ^' . & .
daughter of S1de. He tried to make it stand up, and failing
Dermott in this, went on alone towards the moonlight;
and of the ancj came to the sea and saw a schooner lying
Ton GUC tnere 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 ale, 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.
For some three weeks the wind blew in- shore 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 horse, which some one had brought from the mountain boreen, to a Spaniard, who sold it to a farmer from the mountains, and then his long cloak and his spurs and his boots of soft leather. At last a gentle wind blew towards Spain, and the crew
THE SECRET ROSE 99
i
rowed out to their schooner, singing Gaelic OfCostello and Spanish songs, and lifted the anchor, and f
"
r
, i ., i i • -11 j of Oona the
in a little while the white sails had dropped daughter of under the horizon. Then Costello turned home- Dermott ward, his life gaping before him, and walked and 0<r thc 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 over- took a great 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 burying of Oona, Der- mott's daughter, and we are the Namaras and the Dermotts and their following, and you are Tumaus Costello who murdered her.'
Costello went on towards the head of the procession, passing men who looked at him with fierce eyes, and only vaguely understand- ing what he had heard, for now that he had lost the understanding that belongs to good health, it seemed impossible that a gentleness and a beauty which had been so long the world's heart could pass away. Presently he stopped and asked ag*ain whose burying it was, and a man answered : ' We are carrying Der-
ioo THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello mott's daughter Winny whom you murdered,
the Proud to be buried in the island of the Hol Trinity,' of Oona the . , 11-11 i
daughter of an<^ tne man stooped and picked up a stone and
Dermott cast it at Costello, striking him on the cheek and of the anc[ making the blood flow out over his face.
~ ltter Costello went on scarcely feeling the blow, and 1 ongue. ' °. '
coming to those about the coffin, shouldered his way into the midst of them, and laying his hand upon the coffin, asked in a loud voice : 4 Who is in this coffin ? '
The three old Dermotts from the Ox Mountains caught up stones and bid those about them do the same ; and he was driven from the road, covered with wounds, and but for the priests would surely have been killed.
When the procession had passed on, Cos- tello 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 disperse by many roads and boreens. It seemed to him that Winny was somewhere on the island smiling gently as of old, and when all had gone he swam in the way the boats had been rowed and found the new-made grave beside the ruined
THE SECRET ROSE 101
Abbey of the Holy Trinity, and threw himself Of Costello upon it, calling to Oona to come to him. Above trh!LProu<J'
i 11 j j 11 of Oona the
him the square ivy leaves trembled, and all daughter of about him white moths moved over white Dermott
flowers, and sweet odours drifted through the and of the
Bitter
dim ain Tongue.
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 she was somewhere near and would not come to him.
Just before dawn, the hour when the peasants hear his ghostly voice crying out, his pride awoke and he called loudly: 'Winny, daughter of Dermott of the Sheep, if you do not come to me 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 rush- ing past, women of the Sidhe with crowns of silver and dim floating drapery; and then Oona, but no longer smiling gently, 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
IO2
THE SECRET ROSE
Of Costello
the Proud,
of Oona the
daughter of
Dermott
and of the
Bitter Tongue.
her name, when the whole glimmering company rose 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, understand- ing nothing but that he had made his beloved angry and that she wished him to go, and wading out into the lake, began to swim. He swam on and on, but his limbs were too weary to keep him afloat, and her anger was heavy about him, and when he had gone a little way he sank without a struggle, like a man passing into sleep and dreams.
The next day a poor fisherman found him among the reeds upon the lake shore, lying upon the white lake sand with his arms flung out as though he lay upon a rood, 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 Dermott'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 life, 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 witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured those strange experi- ences, which have changed me so that my writings have grown less popular and less in- telligible, 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 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
io6 ROSA ALCHEM1CA
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 transmutation 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 ex- pression of this favourite doctrine. The por- traits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone ; and tapestry, full 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 Francesca, I knew
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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 mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight 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 experi- ence what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed 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 imagina- tion at the birds of Hera, glowing in the fire- light as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism 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
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every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, rilled me with a pas- sionate sorrow. All those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturous faces singing in the morning 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, every perception, however exquisite, would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never know, and even in my most per- fect 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 be- longed to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the alembic to the athanor and laid the lavacrum marts at their side, I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from the great deep where spirits wander, one and yet a multi-
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tude, are weary; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, 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 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 dissolved indeed the mortal world and lived amid im- mortal 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 furnaces 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 dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.
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My reverie was broken by a loud knocking 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 empti- ness and silence of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams suddenly over- whelmed me, and I shuddered 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, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had recently come to Ireland, he said, and
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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 railing, 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 Masnads 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, glim- mering like many-coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not understand, that some singular and unexpected 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
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its side and poured out its contents, I began to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to col- lect my thoughts and partly with that habitual reverence which seemed to me the due of things so long connected with secret hopes and fears. 4 1 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 awhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his hand. CI have come to ask you something,' he said, and the incense will fill the room, and our thoughts, 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
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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, c 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 Al- chemical Rose? I would not consent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now that I have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likely 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 under- stand 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
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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 intense colour. I cast off the illu- sion, which Was, I believe, merely caused by memory, and by the twilight 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 little 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. c And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more
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a man lives in imagination and in a refined 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 themselves 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 everything of their an- cient 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 in- deed but the trembling of their lips.'
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
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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 Beatrice, 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 who 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 Aphrodite under a twilight falling from the 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
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far as he can make his mind reflect everything with indifferent precision like 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 alembic fell from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and 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 corrup- tion.' The glittering feathers had now covered me completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years, and was conquered 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
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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, 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 rhythmical words, in dream- ing 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 Loneliness which all the multi- tudes 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 sud- denly fallen from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity,
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through a night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the wailing 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 waiting. '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.'
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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,
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crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; 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 personalities, 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 madness, 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 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,
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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 pre- occupied 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 westward ; and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards the east, that we were approaching the western coast. Then immediately I saw the sea be- tween 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
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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 perfection 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 de- serted pier, and said it was the Temple 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 indefinite 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 un- known armies, and shuddered at unimaginable fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.
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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 not know why I shuddered. We had passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, '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, the Dagda, with his over-
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flowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in poppy-juice lest it rush forth hot for battle, Aengus, with the three birds on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic children of Dana, 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, and fight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they cannot build their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories, and perhaps even that 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 tem- pered 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
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remained of the winter daylight. He then left me, promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searching among the book- shelves, 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, who was a drunkard and yet con- trolled 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 consequence ; but I did notice a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of William Blake, and pro- bably because of the multitudes that thronged his illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew.' I noted also many poets and prose
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writers of every age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the greatest have been everywhere, and who cast 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 hand- some, 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 was a book bound in vellum, and having upon the
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vellum and in very delicate 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 sym- bolical pictures and illuminations, after the manner of the Splendor Soils.
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, 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
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bid them found the Order of the Alchemical Rose, she passed from among them, and when they would have followed was nowhere 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, dealing at the outset and at considerable length with the independent reality of our thoughts, which was, it declared, the doctrine 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 hither working good or evil, until the moment of its death has come; and gave many examples, received, it said, from many gods. Eros had taught them how to fashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper what they would into sleeping minds ; and Ate, forms from which demonic 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
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away all but the mightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly, the hound would be weakly also, and the demons pre- vail, and the hound soon die ; and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dove crowned with silver and bad 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 lamen- tations that all minds are continually giving birth to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on, you were to make them ugly, thrust- ing out a lip, with the thirsts of life, or break- ing 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 call 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,
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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 like 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 border, as though they were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book contained symbols 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 exceedingly 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
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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 which suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt,. but by its crimson colour a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into my hands alittle chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness 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 mysteri- ous glamour, made me fall again into a dream, in which I seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a little 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
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beauty ; the predominant colour of each divi- nity, 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 ex- ceedingly how these enthusiasts 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 answered: 'The perfect gold has come from the atbanor.' 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 glimmer- ing like rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one greyness, because, as Michael Robartes whispered, they had renounced their divinity,
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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 mul- titudinous 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 sound of hidden instruments which were perhaps of an antique pattern, for I have never heard the like ; and every moment the dance was more passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakened under our feet. After a little I had grown weary, and stood under a pillar watching the coming and going of those flame-like figures; until gradually I
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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 likeness of living beings of an extraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began to dance, and as they danced took a more and more definite shape, so that I was able to distinguish beauti- ful 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 utter- most desire as though they had found at length, after unreckonable wandering, the lost love of their youth. Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary figure with a veiled face, and carrying 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 himself, 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
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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, un- ending sympathy ; and if ignobly through vehement 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 crimson figures : 4 Into the dance ! there is none that can be spared out of the dance ; into 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 like 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 dark- ness 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 in- cense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and
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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 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 ceiling, 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
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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 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. Suddenly 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 succession, 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 sea- weed ; but when I came to the old part, I
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found it so slippery with green weed that I had to climb up on to the roadway. I looked towards the Temple of the Alchemical 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 little crowd hurried out of the door and began gathering large stones from where they were heaped up in readiness 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 follow- ing feet or the angry voices, for many voices of exultation and lamentation, which were for- gotten 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 seem to hear those voices of exultation and lamenta- tion, and when the indefinite world, which has but half lost its mastery over my heart and my
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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.
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' WILL you permit me, Aherne,' I said, 'to ask you a question, which I have wanted to ask you for years, and have not asked because we have grown nearly strangers ? Why did you refuse the berretta, and almost at the last moment ? When you and I lived together, you cared neither for wine, women, nor money, and had thoughts for nothing but theology and mysticism.' I had watched through dinner for a moment to put my question, and ventured now, because he had thrown off a little of the reserve and indifference which, ever since his last return from Italy, had taken the place of our once close friendship. He had just ques- tioned me, too, about certain private and almost sacred things, and my frankness had earned, I thought, a like frankness from him.
When I began to speak he was lifting to his lips a glass of that old wine which he could
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choose so well and valued so little ; and while I spoke, he set it slowly and meditatively upon the table and held it there, its deep red light dyeing his long delicate fingers. The impres- sion of his face and form, as they were then, is still vivid with me, and is inseparable from another and fanciful impression : the impres- sion of a man holding a flame in his naked hand. He was to me, at that moment, the supreme type of our race, which, when it has risen above, or is sunken below, the formalisms of half-education and the rationalisms of con- ventional affirmation and denial, turns away, unless my hopes for the world and for the Church have made me blind, from practicable desires and intuitions towards desires so unbounded that no human vessel can contain them, in- tuitions so immaterial that their sudden and far-off fire leaves heavy darkness about hand and foot. He had the nature, which is half monk, half soldier of fortune, and must needs turn action into dreaming, and dreaming into action ; and for such there is no order, no finality, no contentment in this world. When he and I had been students in Paris, we had belonged to a little group which devoted itself to speculations about alchemy and mysticism. More orthodox in most of his beliefs than
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Michael Robartes, he had surpassed him in a fanciful hatred of all life, and this hatred had found expression in the curious paradox — half borrowed from some fanatical monk, half in- vented by himself — that the beautiful arts were sent into the world to overthrow nations, and finally life herself, by sowing everywhere un- limited desires, like torches thrown into a burn- ing city. This idea was not at the time, I believe, more than a paradox, a plume of the pride of youth; and it was only after his return to Ireland that he endured the fermentation of belief which is coming upon our people with the reawakening of their imaginative life.
Presently he stood up, saying: cCome, and I will show you, for you at any rate will under- stand,' and taking candles from the table, he lit the way into the long paved passage that led to his private chapel. We passed between the portraits of the Jesuits and priests — some of no little fame — his family had given to the Church ; and engravings and photographs of pictures that had especially moved him ; and the few paintings his small fortune, eked out by an almost penurious abstinence from the things most men desire, had enabled him to buy in his travels. The pictures that I knew best, for they had hung there longest, whether
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reproductions or originals, were of the Sienese School, which he had studied for a long time, claiming that it alone of the schools of the world pictured not the world but what is revealed to saints in their dreams and visions. The Sienese alone among Italians, he would say, could not or would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure in swift movement or sustaining strength, or voluptuous flesh. They were so little interested in these things that there often seemed to be no human body at all under the robe of the saint, but they could represent by a bowed head, or uplifted face, man's rever- ence before Eternity as no others could, and they were at their happiest when mankind had dwindled to a little group silhouetted upon a golden abyss, as if they saw the world habitu- ally from far off. When I had praised some school that had dipped deeper into life, he would profess to discover a more intense emotion than life knew in those dark outlines. ' Put, even Francesca, who felt the supernatural as deeply,' he would say, 'beside the work of Siena, and one finds a faint impurity in his awe, a touch of ghostly terror, where love and humbleness had best been all.' He had often told me of his hope that by filling his mind with those holy pictures he would help
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himself to attain at last to vision and ecstasy, and of his disappointment at never getting more than dreams of a curious and broken beauty. But of late he had added pictures of a different kind, French symbolistic pictures which he had bought for a few pounds from little- known painters, English and French pictures of the School of the English Pre-Raphaelites ; and now he stood for a moment and said, 'I have changed my taste. I am fascinated a little against my will by these faces, where I find the pallor of souls trembling between the excitement of the flesh and the excitement of the spirit, and by landscapes that are created by heightening the obscurity and disorder of nature. These landscapes do not stir the imagi- nation to the energies of sanctity but as to orgaic dancing and prophetic frenzy.' I saw with some resentment new images where the old ones had often made that long gray, dim, empty, echoing passage become to my eyes a vestibule of Eternity.
Almost every detail of the chapel, which we entered by a narrow Gothic door, whose threshold had been worn smooth by the secret worshippers of the penal times, was vivid in my memory; for it was in this chapel that I had first, and when but a boy, been moved by
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the medievalism which is now, I think, the governing influence in my life. The only thing that seemed new was a square bronze box which stood upon the altar before the six unlighted candles and the ebony crucifix, and was like those made in ancient times of more precious substances to hold the sacred books. Aherne made me sit down on an oak bench, and having bowed very low before the crucifix, took the bronze box from the altar, and sat down beside me with the box upon his knees.
4 You will perhaps have forgotten,' he said, ' most of what you have read about Joachim of Flora, for he is little more than a name to even the well read. He was an abbot in Cortale in the twelfth century, and is best known for his prophecy, in a book called Expositio in Apoca- lypsin, that the Kingdom of the Father was passed, the Kingdom of the Son passing, the Kingdom of the Spirit yet to come. The Kingdom of the Spirit was to be a complete triumph of the Spirit, the spiritualis intelligentia he called it, over the dead letter. He had many followers among the more extreme Franciscans, and these were accused of possessing a secret book of his called the Liber Inducens in Evan- gelium flLternum. Again and again groups of visionaries were accused of possessing this
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terrible book, in which the freedom of the Renaissance lay hidden, until at last Pope Alexander IV. had it found and cast into the flames. I have here the greatest treasure the world contains. I have a copy of that book; and see what great artists have made the robes in which it is wrapped. The greater portion of the book itself is illuminated in the Byzantine style, which so few care for to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of Eternity. Even if you do not care for so formal an art, you cannot help seeing that work where there is so much gold, and of that purple colour which has gold dissolved in it, was valued at a great price in its day. But it was only at the Renaissance the labour was spent upon it which has made it the priceless thing it is. The wooden boards of the cover show by the astrological allegories painted upon them, as by the style of painting itself, some craftsman of the school of Francesco Cossi of Ferrara, but the gold clasps and hinges are known to be the work of Benvenuto Cellini, who made likewise the bronze box and covered it with
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gods and demons, whose eyes are closed, to signify an absorption in the inner light.'
I took the book in my hands and began turning over the gilded, many-coloured pages, holding it close to the candle to discover the texture of the paper.
'Where did you get this amazing book?' I said. ' If genuine, and I cannot judge by this light, you have discovered one of the most precious things in the world.'
'It is certainly genuine,' he replied. 'When the original was destroyed, one copy alone remained, and was in the hands of a lute- player of Florence, and from him it passed to his son, and so from generation to generation until it came to the lute-player who was father to Benvenuto Cellini, and from Benvenuto Cellini to that Cardinal of Ferrara who released him from prison, and from him to a natural son, so from generation to generation, the story of its wandering passing on with it, until it came into the possession of the family of Aretino, and to Giulio Aretino, an artist and worker in metals, and student of the kabalistic heresies of Pico della Mirandola. He spent many nights with me at Rome, discussing philosophy; and at last I won his confidence so perfectly that he showed me this, his greatest treasure ; and,
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finding how much I valued it, and feeling that he himself was growing old and beyond the help of its teaching, he sold it to me for no great sum, considering its great preciousness.'
'What' is the doctrine?' I said. 'Some mediaeval straw-splitting about the nature of the Trinity, which is only useful to-day to show how many things are unimportant to us, which once shook the world ? '
'I could never make you understand,' he said, with a sigh, 'that nothing is unimportant in belief, but even you will admit that this book goes to the heart. Do you see the tables on which the commandments were written in Latin? ' I looked to the end of the room, oppo- site to the altar, and saw that the two marble tablets were gone, and that two large empty tablets of ivory, like large copies of the little tablets we set over our desks, had taken their place. 'It has swept the commandments of the Father away,' he went on, 'and displaced the commandments of the Son by the command- ments of the Holy Spirit. The first book is called Fractura Tabularum. In the first chapter it mentions the names of the great artists who made them graven things and the likeness of many things, and adored them and served them; and the second the names of the great wits who
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took the name of the Lord their God in vain; and that long third chapter, set with the emblems of sanctified faces, and having wings upon its borders, is the praise of breakers of the seventh day and wasters of the six days, who yet lived comely and pleasant days. Those two chapters tell of men and women who railed upon their parents, remembering that their god was older than the god of their parents ; and that which has the sword of Michael for an emblem commends the kings that wrought secret murder and so won for their people a peace that was amore somnoque grava ta et vestibus VfTStCQ/or&uSj heavy with love and sleep and many-coloured raiment ; and that with the pale star at the closing has the lives of the noble youths who loved the wives of others and were transformed into memories, which have transformed many poorer hearts into sweet flames ; and that with the winged head is the history of the robbers who lived upon the sea or in the desert, lives which it compares to the twittering of the string of a bow, nervi stridentis instar ; and those two last, that are fire and gold, are devoted to the satirists who bore false witness against their neighbours and yet illustrated eternal wrath, and to those that have coveted more than other men the house
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of God, and all things that are His, which no man has seen and handled, except in madness and in dreams.
'The second book is called Lex Secreta^ and describes the true inspiration of action, the only Eternal Evangel ; and ends with a vision, which he saw among the mountains of La Sila, of his disciples sitting throned in the blue deep of the air, and laughing aloud, with a laughter that was like the rustling of the wings of Time : Calls in cteruleis ridentes sedebant discipulimei super thronos: tails erat risus, qua Us temporis pennati susurrus. '
' 1 know little of Joachim of Flora,' I said, 'except that Dante set him in Paradise among the great doctors. If he held a heresy so sin- gular, I cannot understand how no rumours of it came to the ears of Dante; and Dante made no peace with the enemies of the Church.'
'Joachim of Flora acknowledged openly the authority of the Church, and even asked that all his published writings, and those to be pub- lished by his desire after his death, should be submitted to the censorship of the Pope. He considered that those whose work was to live and not to reveal were children and that the Pope was their Father; but he taught in secret that certain others, and in always increasing
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numbers, were elected, not to live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour; and that these have no father but the Holy Spirit. Just as poets and painters and musicians labour at their works, building them with lawless and lawful things alike, so long as they embody the beauty that is beyond the grave, these children of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments with eyes upon the shining substance on which Time has neaped the refuse of creation ; for the world only exists to be a tale in the ears of coming generations ; and terror and content, birth and death, love and hatred, and the fruit of the Tree, are but instruments for that supreme art which is to win us from life and gather us into eternity like doves into their dove-cots.
'I shall go away in a little while and travel into many lands, that I may know all accidents and destinies, and when I return, will write my secret law upon those ivory tablets, just as poets and romance writers have written the principles of their art in prefaces; and when I know what principle of life, discoverable at first by imagination and instinct, I am to express, I will gather my pupils that they may discover their law in the study of my law, as
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poets and painters discover their own art of expression by the study of some Master. I know nothing certain as yet but this — I am to become completely alive, that is, completely passionate, for beauty is only another name for perfect passion. I shall create a world where the whole lives of men shall be articulated and simplified as if seventy years were but one moment, or as they were the leaping of a fish or the opening of a flower.'
He was pacing up and down, and I listened to the fervour of his words and watched the excitement of his gestures with not a little concern. I had been accustomed to welcome the most singular speculations, and had always found them as harmless as the Persian cat who half closes her meditative eyes and stretches out her long claws before my fire. But now I would battle in the interests of orthodoxy, even of the commonplace : and yet could find no- thing better to say than : ' It is not necessary to judge everyone by the law, for we have also Christ's commandment of love.'
He turned and said, looking at me with shining eyes: 'Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neigh- bour as himself.'
4 At any rate, you cannot deny that to teach
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so dangerous a doctrine is to accept a terrible responsibility.'
'Leonardo da Vinci,' he replied, 'has this noble sentence: "The hope and desire of return- ing home to one's former state is like the moth's desire for the light ; and the man who with constant longing awaits each new month and new year, deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming, does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction." How, then, can the pathway which will lead us into the heart of God be other than danger- ous? why should you, who are no materialist, cherish the continuity and order of the world as those do who have only the world ? You do not value the writers who will express nothing unless their reason understands how it will make what is called the right more easy ; why, then, will you deny a like freedom to the supreme art, the art which is the foundation of all arts? Yes, I shall send out of this chapel saints, lovers, rebels and prophets: souls who will sur- round themselves with peace, as with a nest made with grass; and others over whom I shall weep. The dust shall fall for many years over this little box ; and then I shall open it ; and the tumults, which are, perhaps, the flames of the last day, shall come from under the lid.'
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I did not reason with him that night, because his excitement was great and I feared to make him angry; and when I called at his house a few days later, he was gone and his house was locked up and empty. I have deeply regretted my failure both to combat his heresy and to test the genuineness of his strange book. Since my conversion I have indeed done penance for an error which I was only able to measure after some years.
ii
I was walking along one of the Dublin quays, on the side nearest the river, about ten years after our conversation, stopping from time to time to turn over the books upon an old bookstall, and thinking, curiously enough, of the terrible destiny of Michael Robartes, and his brotherhood ; when I saw a tall and bent man walking slowly along the other side of the quay. I recognized, with a start, in a lifeless mask with dim eyes, the once resolute and delicate face of Owen Aherne. I crossed the quay quickly, but had not gone many yards before he turned away, as though he had seen me, and hurried down a side street; I followed, but only to lose him among the intricate streets on the north side of the river. During the next
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few weeks I inquired of everybody who had once known him, but he had made himself known to nobody ; and I knocked, without result, at the door of his old house ; and had nearly persuaded myself that I was mistaken, when I saw him again in a