CHAPTER II
NORAH'S GOOD-BYE
The scene had shifted back from the royal city of Potsdam to the littlecoast town in Connemara. John Castellan was sitting on a corner of hisbig writing-table swinging his legs to and fro, and looking a littleuncomfortable. Leaning against the wall opposite the windows, with herhands folded behind her back, was a girl of about nineteen, an almostperfect incarnation of the Irish girl at her best. Tall, black-haired,black-browed, grey-eyed, perfectly-shaped, and with that indescribablecharm of feature which neither the pen nor the camera can do justiceto--Norah Castellan was facing him, her eyes gleaming and almost blackwith anger, and her whole body instinct with intense vitality.
"And so Ireland hasn't troubles enough of her own, John, that you mustbring new ones upon her, and what for? To realise a dream that was neveranything else but a dream, and to satisfy a revenge that is threehundred years old! If that theory of yours about re-incarnation is true,you may have been a Spaniard once, but remember that you're an Irishmannow; and you're no good Irishman if you sell yourself to theseforeigners to do a thing like that, and it's your sister that's tellingyou."
"And it's your brother, Norah," he replied, his black brows meetingalmost in a straight line across his forehead, "who tells you thatIreland is going to have her independence; that the shackles of theSaxon shall be shaken off once and for ever, even if all Europe blazesup with war in the doing of it. I have the power and I will use it.Spaniard or Irishman, what does it matter? I hate England and everythingEnglish."
"Hate England, John!" said the girl. "Are you quite sure that it isn'tan Englishman that you hate?"
"Well, and what if I do? I hate all Englishmen, and I'm the firstIrishman who has ever had the power to put his hatred into acts insteadof words--and you, an Irish girl, with six generations of Irish blood inyour veins, you, to talk to me like this. What are you thinking about,Norah? Is that what you call patriotism?"
"Patriotism!" she echoed, unclasping her hands, and holding her righthand out towards him. "I'm as Irish as you are, and as Spanish, too, forthe matter of that, for the same blood is in the veins of both of us.You're a scholar and a genius, and all the rest of it, I grant you; buthaven't you learned history enough to know that Ireland never wasindependent, and never could be? What brought the English here first?Four miserable provinces that called themselves kingdoms, and allfighting against each other, and the king of one of them stole the wifeof the king of another of them, and that's how the English came.
"I love Ireland as well as you do, John, but Ireland is not worthsetting the world swimming in blood for. You're lighting a match-box toset the world ablaze with. It isn't Ireland only, remember. There areIrish all over the world, millions of them, and remember how the Irishfought in the African War. I don't mean Lynch and his traitors, but theDublin boys. Who were the first in and the last out--Irishmen, but theyhad the sense to know that they were British first and Irish afterwards.I tell you, you shall be shot for what you've done, and if I wasn't thedaughter of your father and mother, I'd inform against you now."
"And if you did, Norah, you would do very little good to the Saxoncause," replied her brother, pointing with his thumb out of one of thewindows. "You see that yacht in the bay there. Everything is on board ofher. If you went out into the street now, gave me in charge of theconstabulary, to those two men in front of the hotel there, it wouldmake no difference. There's nothing to be proved, no, not even if myown sister tried to swear my life and liberty away. It would only bethat the Germans and the Russians, and the Austrians, and the rest ofthem would work out my ideas instead of me working them out, and itmight be that they would make a worse use of them. You've half an hourto give me up, if you like."
And then he began to collect the papers that were scattered about thebig drawing-table, sorting them out and folding them up and then takingother papers and plans from the drawers and packing them into a littleblack dispatch box.
"But, John, John," she said, crossing the room, and putting her hand onhis shoulder. "Don't tell me that you're going to plunge the world inwar just for this. Think of what it means--the tens of thousands oflives that will be lost, the thousands of homes that will be madedesolate, the women who will be crying for their husbands, and thechildren for their fathers, the dead men buried in graves that willnever have a name on them, and the wounded, broken men coming back totheir homes that they will never be able to keep up again, not only hereand in England, but all over Europe and perhaps in America as well!Genius you may be; but what are you that you should bring calamity likethis upon humanity?"
"I'm an Irishman, and I hate England, and that's enough," he repliedsullenly, as he went on packing his papers.
"You hate that Englishman worse than you hate England, John."
"And I wouldn't wonder if you loved that Englishman more than you lovedIreland, Norah," he replied, with a snarl in his voice.
"And if I did," she said, with blazing eyes and flaming cheeks, "isn'tEngland nearer to Ireland than America?"
"Geographically, perhaps, but in sentiment--"
"Sentiment! Yes, when you have finished with this bloody business ofyours that you have begun on, go you through Ireland and England andEurope, and ask the widows and the fatherless, and the girls who kissedtheir lovers 'good-bye,' and never saw them again, what they think ofthat sentiment! But it's no use arguing with you now; there's yourGerman yacht. You're no brother of mine. You've made me sorry that wehad the same father and mother."
As she spoke, she went to the door, opened it and, before he couldreply, slammed it behind her, and went to her room to seek and find awoman's usual relief from extreme mental tension.
John Castellan went on packing his papers, his face grey, and hisfeatures hard-set. He loved his beautiful sister, but he thought that heloved his country more. When he had finished he went and knocked at herdoor, and said:
"Norah, I'm going. Won't you say 'good-bye?'"
The door was swung open, and she faced him, her face wet with tears, hereyes glistening, and her lips twitching.
"Yes, good-bye, John," she said. "Go to your German friends; but, whenall the horrors that you are going to bring upon this country throughtheir help come to pass, remember you have no sister left in Ireland.You've sold yourself, and I have no brother who is a traitor. Good-bye!"
The door swung to and she locked it. John Castellan hesitated for amoment or two, and then with a slow shake of his head he went away downthe stairs out into the street, and along to the little jetty where theGerman yacht's boat was waiting to take him on board.
Norah had thrown herself on her bed in her locked room shedding thefirst but not the last tear that John Castellan's decision was destinedto draw from women's eyes.
About half an hour later the encircling hills of the bay echoed theshriek of a siren. She got up, looked out of the window, and saw thewhite shape of the German yacht moving out towards the fringe of islandswhich guard the outward bay.
"And there he goes!" she said in a voice that was almost choked withsobs, "there he goes, my own brother, it may be taking the fate of theworld with him--yes, and on a German ship, too. He that knows everyisland and creek and cove and harbour from Cape Wrath to Cape Clear--hethat's got all those inventions in his head, too, and the son of my ownfather and mother, sold his country to the foreigner, thinking thosedirty Germans will keep their word with him.
"Not they, John, not they. The saints forgive me for thinking it, butfor Ireland's sake I hope that ship will never reach Germany. If itdoes, we'll see the German Eagle floating over Dublin Castle beforeyou'll be able to haul up the Green Flag. Well, well, there it is; it'sdone now, I suppose, and there's no help for it. God forgive you, John,I don't think man ever will!"
As she said this the white yacht turned the southern point of the innerbay, and disappeared to the southward. Norah bathed her face, brushedout her hair, and coiled it up again; then she put on her hat andjacket, and went out to do a little shopping.
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nbsp; It is perhaps a merciful provision of Providence that in this human lifeof ours the course of the greatest events shall be interrupted by themost trivial necessities of existence. Were it not for that theinevitable might become the unendurable.
The plain fact was that Norah Castellan had some friends andacquaintances coming to supper that evening. Her brother had left at afew hours' notice from his foreign masters, as she called them, andthere would have to be some explanation of his absence, especially as afriend of his, Arthur Lismore, the owner of the finest salmon streamsfor twenty miles round, and a man who was quite hopelessly in love withherself, was coming to brew the punch after the fashion of hisancestors, and so, of course, it was necessary that there should benothing wanting.
Moreover, she was beginning to feel the want of some hard physicalexercise, and an hour or so in that lovely air of Connemara, which, asthose who know, say, is as soft as silk and as bright as champagne. Soshe went out, and as she turned the corner round the head of the harbourto the left towards the waterfall, almost the first person she met wasArthur Lismore himself--a brown-faced, chestnut-haired, blue-eyed, younggiant of twenty-eight or so; as goodly a man as God ever put His ownseal upon.
His cap came off, his head bowed with that peculiar grace of deferencewhich no one has ever yet been able to copy from an Irishman, and hesaid in the strong, and yet curiously mellow tone which you only hear inthe west of Ireland:
"Good afternoon, Miss Norah. I've heard that you're to be left alone fora time, and that we won't see John to-night."
"Yes," she said, her eyes meeting his, "that is true. He went away inthat German yacht that left the bay less than an hour ago."
"A German yacht!" he echoed. "Well now, how stupid of me, I've beentrying to think all the afternoon what that flag was she carried whenshe came in."
"The German Imperial Yacht Club," she said, "that was the ensign she wasflying, and John has gone to Germany in her."
"To Germany! John gone to Germany! But what for? Surely now--"
"Yes, to Germany, to help the Emperor to set the world on fire."
"You're not saying that, Miss Norah?"
"I am," she said, more gravely than he had ever heard her speak. "MrLismore, it's a sick and sorry girl I am this afternoon. You were thefirst Irishman on the top of Waggon Hill, and you'll understand what Imean. If you have nothing better to do, perhaps you'll walk down to theFall with me, and I'll tell you."
"I could have nothing better to do, Norah, and it's yourself that knowsthat as well as I do," he replied. "I only wish the road was longer.And it's yourself that's sick and sorry, is it? If it wasn't John, I'dlike to get the reason out of any other man. That's Irish, but it'strue."
He turned, and they walked down the steeply sloping street for severalminutes in silence.
The World Peril of 1910 Page 3
