Because Shane had hated to see the fine boat drawn up, he had put _Righ nam Bradan_, the _Salmon King_, Alan Donn's great thirty-footer, into commission, and raced her at Ballycastle and Kingstown, losing both times. He had ascribed it to sailing luck, the dying of a breeze, the setting of a tide, a lucky tack of an opposing boat. But at Cowes he should have won. Everything was with him. He came in fifth.

"I can't understand," he told one of Alan's old crew.

"Man," the Antrim sailor told him bluntly, "ye have na' the gift."

"But, Feardoracha, I'm a sailor."

"Aye, Shane Campbell, you're that. For five times seven years you've sailed the seven seas. But for racing ye have na' the gift. Alan Donn had it. And 'twas Alan Donn had the gift for the golf, and the gift for the horses. Just the gift. You must not blame yourself, _Shane na fairrge_, there's few Alan Donns."

And thinking to himself in the lamp-lit room, Shane found what the old man meant. Beneath the bronzed face, the roaring manner of Alan Donn, there was a secret of alchemy. Rhythm, and concentration like white fire. To the most acute tick of the stars he could get a boat over the line with the gun. Something told him where breezes were. By will-power he forced out the knowledge of a better tack. As to horses, where was his equal at putting one over a jump? At the exact hair's-breadth of time, he had changed from human being to spirit. It was no longer Alan Donn and his horse when he dropped his hands on the neck. There was fusion. A centaur sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with matter.... And Alan Donn was dead six years ... and yet he lived....

He lived because he had been of great use. He was a standard, a great ideal. Children who had seen him would remember him forever, and seek to emulate the fire and strength of him, having him to measure by as the mariner has the star.... In foreign countries they would tell tales of him: There was once a great sportsman in the North of Ireland, Alan Donn Campbell by name....

His father, too, who had been dead so long--mortality had not conquered him. Once in Ballycastle Shane had seen a shawled girl look out to sea with great staring eyes and a wry mouth, and, half whispered, staccato, not quite sung, her fingers twisting her shawl, came a song from her white mouth:

_Tiocfaidh an samhradh agas fasfaidh an fear; Agas tiocfaidh an duilleabhar glas do bharr nan gcraobh.

Tiocfaidh mo chead gradhle banaghadh an lae, Agas bvailfidh se port ciuin le c.u.mhaidh 'mo dhiaidh._

The summer will come, and the little gra.s.s will grow; And there will come a green thickness to the tops of the trees.

And my hundred loves will arise with the dawning of the day, And he will strike a soft tune out of loneliness after me.

A queer st.i.tch came in Shane's heart--a song his father made! And following the st.i.tch came a surge of pride. Those songs of his father!

The light minor he had heard, and the others--the surge of _An Oig-bhean Ruaddh_, the Pretty Red Maiden:

"_Se, do bheatha is an tir seo"_.... A welcome before you into this country, O sea-gull more lovely than the queen, than the woman of the West, whom Naesi, son of Usnach, held in the harbor. I could destroy all Ireland, as far as the Southern sea, but in the end I would be destroyed myself, when my eyes would alight on the white swan with the golden crown....

Or the despairing cry of his poem _Ig Cathair nan g Ceo_: "In the City of the Fogs"--he meant London--

"_A athair nan gras tabhair spas o'n eag domh_--O Father of the Graces, give me a little respite from death. Let the ax not yet strike my forehead, the way a goat or a pig or a sheep is slain, until I make my humility and my last repentance."

Shane wished to G.o.d he had known his father, that the man had been spared a little until he could have loved him.... He had the only picture of him left.... Great throat and pale, liquor-harried face, burning eyes, and black tossing hair.... The bald-headed bankers might shake their heads and say: He was no good ... he was a rake ... he drank ... his relations with women were not reputable.... And old maids purse their thin-blooded lips.... But when the little money of the bankers was scattered through the world, and even their little chapels had forgotten them, and the stiff bones of old maids were crumbling into an unnecessary dust, his father's songs would be sung in Ireland, in Man, in the Scottish Highlands, in the battered Hebrides. So long as sweet Gaelic was spoken and men's hearts surged with feeling, there would be a song of his father's to translate the effervescence into words of cadenced beauty.... He had an irreverent vision of G.o.d smiling and talking comfortably to his father while the bald-headed bankers cooled their fat heels and glared at one another outside the picket-gates of heaven.... The world had gained something with the last Gaelic bard....

And he had found out, too, that his other uncle, Robin More, had a great importance in a certain circle. In Dublin he met an old professor, a Jesuit priest, who seemed intensely excited that a nephew of Robin More Campbell's should be present.

"Do you know, by any chance, what your uncle was working on when he died?"

"I'm afraid I do not, sir."

"You know his ma.n.u.scripts."

"Just casually, sentimentally."

"You don't know much about your uncle's work, then?"

"Not very much."

"Did you know," the old priest said--and his urbanity disappeared; there was pique in his tones--"that your uncle was the man who definitely decided for us that the Highlanders of Scotland migrated from Ireland to Scotland? Did you know that?"

"No, sir, I did not."

"I don't suppose," the old man was sarcastic, "that seems important to you."

"To confess, Dr. Hegan, it does not. Is it?"

"My child," the old priest smiled--it was so queer to be called "my child" at forty-seven--"all knowledge is important. All details of knowledge. We come we know not whence, and we go we hope we know whither. Our history, our motives, our all, is vague. All we have is faith, a great broad river, but knowledge is the little piers ..."

They had all been significant: Alan Donn, his father, even Uncle Robin, whom he had thought only a bookworm in the fading sunshine. The world was better, more mature, for their having lived....

And he had nothing. Here he was, drawing on to fifty, close on forty-eight. And he had done, achieved nothing. He had no wife, no child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not--not even--not even a little song....

-- 3

And then he said to himself: "I am too sensitive. I have always been too sensitive. The stature of my family has dwarfed me in my own esteem.

Haven't I got as much right as others to the quiet of the glens?" And again he said: "I sit here and I think. And my thought grows into a maze. And I wander in it, as a man might wander through some old gardener's fancy, having stumbled on it inadvertently, and now being in it, now knowing the secret of exit." But a maze was nonexistent, did a person regard it so, and if one were to walk on nonchalantly a little turn would come, and he find himself in the wide sunshine and smiling flowers. And he said: "d.a.m.n the subtleties! A person is born, lives, dies. And what he does is a matter for himself alone." But some inner antagonist said: "You are wrong."

And he said: "Look at the people around me. What more right have they than I to this quiet Ulster dusk?" And the antagonist smiled: "Well, look."

First were the farmers and the fisherfolk. Well, they didn't count. They were natural to the soil, as gra.s.s was. They grew there, as the white bog flower grew. An inst.i.tution of G.o.d, like rain. And then there were the summer visitors, honest folk from the cities. Well, they had a right. They spent their winters and autumns and springs in mills and counting-houses, clearing away the commercial garbage of the world. And when the graciousness of summer came, they emerged, blind as moles, peak-faced. And before them stretched the Moyle, a blue miracle. The crisp heather, the thick rushes, the yellow of the b.u.t.tercups, the black bog waters. And when clouds came before the sun the mountains drew great purple cloths over them. And in the twilight the cricket chirruped. And at night the plover cried out against the vast silence of the moon. And the hearts of the selling people turned from thoughts of who owed them money and who was harrying them for money. And the tight souls opened, just a little perhaps, but even that--Poor garbage men of the world, who would begrudge them a little beauty?

Then there were the country people, the landlords, the owners of the soil. Red-faced, sportsmen, connoisseurs of cattle, a sort of super-farmer, they were as natural to the soil as the fisherfolk or the tillers. Their stock remained from ancient tides of battle, centuries before. The founders of the families had been Norman barons, Highland chiefs, English squires; but the blood had adapted itself, as a plant adapts itself in a strange country. And now they were Ulster squires.

Smiling, shy, independent. They had a great feeling for a horse, and a powerful sense of fair play. They were very honest folk. A station had been set them and they lived in it, honestly, uncomplainingly, quite happily. But a meadow was a piece of land to them and a river a place where trout could be caught, and snow was a good thing, because it kept the ground warm. They were a folk whom Shane respected a great deal, and who respected him--but they weren't his folk.

Above all these of his neighbors towered three figures, and the first of these was the admiral.

He had a name. He had a t.i.tle, too--Baron Fraser of Onabega. But to everybody he was the admiral, and in speech plain "sir." A purple-faced and terrible old man, with bushy white eyebrows and eagle's eyes. Very tall, four inches over six feet, very erect for all his ninety years, with his presence there thundered the guns of Drake, there came to the mind the slash of old Benbow.... He had been a midshipman with Nelson at Cape Trafalgar.

Silent and fierce, about his head clouds of majesty, all his life had been spent with pursed lips and hooded eyes, keeping watch for England ... And never a great battle where he could prove himself the peer of Benbow and Drake and Nelson ... Never a dawn when the fleet rolled down to battle with polished guns and whipping flags ... And a day came when he was too old ... So here he was in the Antrim glens ...

A great life, his, a great and serviceable life, frustrated of glory ...

And well he deserved the quiet of Ulster, where he sat and wrote his long letters to archaeological papers, proving, he thought, that the Irish were a lost tribe of Israel and that the Ark of the Covenant was buried on Tara Hill ... And there were none to laugh at him ... All spirit he was; watchful, dogged, indomitable spirit with a little husk of body ... Soon, as he had directed, his old bearded sailormen would take his flag-covered casket out to sea in the night, and the guns would thunder: A British admiral sails by ...

And there was Simon Fowler in his little cottage, who was dying by inches from some tropical malady ... A small chunky man with white hair and wide blue eyes ... He had been a missionary in Africa, in China, in India--not the missionary of sentimental books, but a prophet whose calm voice, whose intrepid eyes, had gained him a hearing everywhere ...

"Put fear away," he had preached in Africa; "let darkness flee. I come to tell of the light of the world ... After me will come the sellers of gin and of guns. But I shall give you a great magic against them ...

Little children love one another ..." In China his fire had shamed philosophers: "I know your alms-giving. I know your benevolence. It is selfishness. Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Unless ye become as little children ..." And in the sensuous Indian lands, his voice rose in a great shout: "Subtle Greece is dead,"

he proclaimed, "and razed are the fanes of Ephesus. And the Unknown G.o.d slinks only through the midnight streets ..." "Blessed are the pure in heart ..." He had gone like a flame through the pagan places of the world, and here he was dying in the Antrim glens, with the quiet of Christ about him, the droning of G.o.d's little bees, and the lowing of the cattle of Bethlehem ... He was a great man. He had only one contempt: for hired clergymen.

There were three folk of heroic stature around him: the admiral, and Simon Fowler, and the woman of Tusa hErin.

-- 4

A very small townland is Tusa hErin, the smallest in Ireland, it is said. And a very strange name on it: Tusa hErin, the beginning of Ireland. Why it is so called, none know. Possibly because some Highlanders named it this on landing there. Probably because it was a division between the Scottish and Irish clans. So it was called when the Bruce fled to Ireland. So it is called to this day.

Twenty acres or so are in it--a wind and sea lashed little estate, a great gray house and a garden of yew-trees. For ten years it had been untenanted, until a Miss O'Malley had bought it, and opened the great oak doors, and let the sea-air blow through the windows of it, and clipped the garden of the yews. The country people knew little of her, except that she had a great reserve. To the glensmen she was _Bean Tusig Erin_, the woman of Tusa hErin.

"What kind of a person is she?" Shane asked.