Changeling, and Other Stories
"'Stand aside, Vicente,' was all she said. And there was something in
her eyes that made me give way. She went on.
"Excellency, I loved Madame, as did every one here. And she liked me.
And I was your man. I followed her down the path. I caught up to her
at the bridge. It was blue dark, like twilight. The bridge was
quivering. I caught the edge of her cape.
"'What are you going to do, señora?'
"'Stand aside, Vicente.'
"'You are crazy, señora!' I cried out.
"'No, Vicente, I am wise.'
"'You must n't, señora!'
"'I must, Vicente.'
"'Let me, señora,' I pleaded.
"'Vicente,' she said, 'you 've done your work on the bridge. Now I
must do mine.'
"I could n't stop her, Excellency. Something in the face, in the
eyes--I don't know--I dropped on my knees. She moved over the bridge.
"Excellency, from the time she was on it the bridge stopped quivering,
the wind hushed. I saw her drop her cloak as she stood in the center.
I saw her step forward, sure, unafraid. And for an instant I saw her,
like a blossom in the wind....
"And so, Excellency, the bridge stands, will always stand...."
X
So there it was, all finished, all done, and for the last time Lovat
looked at it, saw the green mountains, the tumbling river, the white
span of the bridge. But the bridge and he were finished now. His work
was done.
The little Latin-American official touched his elbow deferentially.
"Excellency, the train!"
"Yes, the train," Lovat repeated mechanically. His companion looked at
him with grave sympathy. Only three months ago Lovat was a young and
happy bridegroom. To-day the builder was a grave gray-haired man.
Yes, the bridge was done, Lovat knew. A little while ago it was just
the product of his hand and genius and will, a thing of himself. But
now it was a fulfilled entity, with its own duties, its own uses, its
own destiny. Over it went trains joining country to country and sea to
sea. Over it went the loping Latin people. Over it went the little
patient burros, pannier-laden. In confidence all went over it.
"It will stand." Lovat knew. "It will always stand."
But there was no high note of proud achievement in his thought. It
would not stand because of skill in building or strength in masonry.
But because there guarded it one whose pleading sacrificial fingers
would unclench the angry hand of God. Flood and thunder and immense
winds would spare it because of that guardian like a white flame, to
whose unselfishness selfish nature must do reverence.
The official ventured to recall him:
"Excellency!"
"Just one more moment!"
He had a vision of her for the moment, and his throat quivered and his
eyes were uncertain. He saw her in her white, billowing gown, with her
dark head and face like a flower. Two brown shy little children were
standing fearful of the bridge, and she knelt to them. "Come,
darlings," he could hear the deep remembered voice. She led them
confidently across his bridge, and as she led them she smiled to him.
Well, he must go. There was other work to be done, other bridges to
build, until the time the Master of the Masons told him to rest. He
must be about his work.
"All our life is work," he said to himself as he boarded the train.
"All our love is comradeship."
Well, there was work to be done, and there was comradeship. She would
always be with him now, being dead....
IN PRAISE OF LADY MARGERY KYTELER
I
All those things I dreamed about, and I thousands of miles away, are
there still: the house, half farm-house and half castle, at one end an
ancient military tower, at the other a thatched cottage; all the
trees--the ash, the elms, the chestnut with the dark-green foliage and
the prickly bulb containing the polished mahogany fruit, the
rowan-trees with the gallant red berries, bitter as death, the copper
beech with the foliage of lace and the fuzzy brown nuts, the apple- and
pear-trees, and the trees of cherries that the birds do be ever after.
The lawns that were once shaven so closely are now rectangles of high
sweet grass where the bees are seeking. And the tennis-courts, where
once was the laughter of young girls--those, too, are knee-high in
grass, swaying in the soft Irish wind. And here and there is a gallant
yew-tree, blackly green. Roses still cling to the wall, and around all
the walls are riots of flowers.
The low greenhouses are still there, under whose glass roofs grew great
purple grapes, and where row on row of exotic flowers grew and delicate
ferns whose names are unknown to me, so much closer are men and horses
to me than flowers and ferns. Ivy is on the walls, soft-looking as
velvet, and the winds and rains have been kind to the lodge and the
stables. The walls are still white and a little moss is on the slates
of them, and a soft and gentle grass is between the cobbled stones.
And the deep well is there. And everywhere are birds and bees. The
bees are wild now, who once lived in skips of yellow straw, and their
nests are in the long grass, and there, too, is the meadowlark, and
under the eaves the swallows flit. And here the robin is safe with his
impudent eye, and the blackbird of the yellow bill. And everywhere the
throaty murmur of the wood-pigeons, the thrum of their wings.
Eh! There it is all still, at the foot of the soft and purple
mountains--the Sugarloaves, the Big Sugarloaf and the Little, and the
hill called Kitty Gallagher's, and the Scalp with its slender tower and
the sweet shoulder of Three Rock Mountain. And below--one could pitch
a stone nearly--is Dublin, the abiding city. There the Liffey,
rippling gently to the sea. And one can almost see St. Patrick's,
where great Swift was Dean, and Trinity, where poor Goldsmith and
fearless Burke were students. The broad streets, the princely squares.
And there Robert Emmet was hanged for treason against our Sovereign
Lord the King, His Crown and Majesty, and Lord Edward, the rebel
Geraldine, was stabbed. And there is Clontarf, where Brian the High
King fought the red Danes, fought and died, but fought and conquered.
And there Howth, where Iseult, the Dublin princess, sailed to marry
Mark in rugged Cornwall, sailed with Tristram....
Eh! There from Mount Kyteler one can see it all--the soft dreaming
mountains, the sad weeping city. And here where was once the laughter
of young women, the barking of dogs, the neighing of horses, the
shouting of lads--here is silence, but for the husky note of the
wood-pigeon, the little thunder of his wings, and the droning of the
seeking bees. All, all are dead, but here is no desolation. There is
the sweet gentleness of remembered twilights, and the copper beech
rustles, and the rowan nods, and the apple-trees murmur with their
antique boughs: "Is it yourself is in it, Ronnie? Is it yourself, long
lad? And it is long you've stayed away from us in foreign lands and
bitter seas. And it's Lady Margery you 're looking for? And Paddy the
Pipes? You mind him, do you so? And Jacky Sullivan--ah, the great
lad! Sure, they 've just left this minute, laughing fellow. Gone to
see the old earl, they have. Sure, you'll be following them, and
seeing them all soon. Over the mountains they went, a wee ways. You
'll see them all soon, very soon, a wheen of years...."
Not for long will be this sweet silence, this soft, dim loneliness.
Soon will be business of courts, justices sitting in wig and gown. And
Mount Kyteler will die, and its name be forgotten. Sad history will
pass and affairs proceed in their inexorable ordinance. And where once
great Norman fighters charged in mail, and Elizabethan nobles ruffled,
and the old red-faced earl swore when the gout was on him, and of late
Lady Margery moved over lawns and walks with her sweet, sad-faced
dignity, will be three or four little farms, their smoke blue against
the purple of Three Rock Mountain. And the lawns will turn to fields
of blue corn, and fat cattle will graze where once was a maze of
flowers.
And all the crops will prosper there. And the children that are born
of the farmer folk will be happy as the birds in the trees. There will
be no blight on the milk the cows give, and there will be great luck on
the stock of the kindly land. Always will there be prodigal bees and
the dancing of swallows.
There are houses and lands that are kindly, and places that are
sinister, fields that are surly, meadows that are sweetly generous.
Old things, if we watch them, have a very human quality, and that is
because they have been intimately connected with people who have these
qualities themselves. One influences one's surroundings so much.
Whirling sparks of personality fall from us and charge what we have
usually by us. On all the estate came such a current of sweetness that
even the thieving wood-pigeons grew generous, leaving the young trees
alone.
Will she ever come back here when Mount Kyteler is gone, and the little
whitewashed farmhouses are an outpost against the heather of Three Rock
Mountain? I think she will. She will have so much beauty to know, now
she is dead, that she will not begrudge the loss of the flower gardens
and the courts where tennis was played. Apple-trees and flowers will
be hers wherever she is, and perhaps the same ones--who can say no?
Yet I can see her come to visit the whitewashed houses in the hushed
summer twilight, when the daisies have tucked in their modest heads and
only the great foam of the hawthorn billows over the country-side. On
some warm little breeze from Three Rock Mountain she will come. And
horses in their stalls will know her, and the kine will turn their
heads to her, lowing gently, and the dogs will bark joyously, and some
little child on the floor will stand up suddenly and run forward, its
arms outstretched, bubbles of laughter beating from the tiny lips....
II
Now when the last Lord Kyteler died, there was very little fuss made.
Another poverty-stricken Irish peer gone. He had n't been rich enough
to own an estate large enough for tenants to squabble on. A few farms
here and there through the country, Mount Kyteler itself, not worth a
tremendous amount. He was the last lord of one of these very, very old
families who had been lost in the back-wash of Irish history. Once
Kytelers had fought in the Holy Land under Richard the Lion-Hearted and
had fought later under Irish viceroys against the O'Bernes and O'Tooles
and O'Moores of the Wicklow hills; and antiquarians remembered that
Dame Alice Kyteler was the most sinister witch of all Ireland, and was
burned at the stake in Kilkenny many centuries before. But it was a
matter of politics more than demonology, though undoubtedly Dame Alice
was second only to Gilles de Rais, murderer and Marshal of France, in
worship of evil idols and in sinister sacrifice....
It was one of these old names that should have died out, when the
medieval chivalry of Europe died, Knights Templar and sporting Norman
bishops and morbid medieval ladies. But it existed, as many things
exist in Ireland and are forgotten in Europe and never known in
America,--strange Christian customs, strange pagan beliefs,--and "It"
the most horrible of all horrible ghosts.
They were a poor family, as poor is understood in Ireland. That is,
they had money enough for all necessities and many luxuries. They had
money enough for food, for clothes, for a few good horses for
conveyance and hunting, and they could go to the viceregal court at
Dublin Castle and be decent figures there. But they could not keep
racehorses, which is really a great hardship if you are Irish, and they
could not afford to live in London as an Irish nobleman should live,
which should be as a very great nobleman indeed. They were as well off