Up and down, they went, over saddle-backed ridges and along stone-scattered slopes; racing across waste pastures, dark with companies of rushes, or gilded with shabby flaunting regiments of yellow rag-weed. Here the horses were able to cover the ground at the best pace of their legs, but there were many places where they could only crawl — between black, horse-and-man-devouring abysses of bog, places where the riders had to tail away, until they looked like a string of black ants, each man creeping at the heels of his neighbour, and which gave great satisfaction to the running horse-boys and unmounted kern, who bounded from tussock to tussock, active as goats.
The highlands of Kerry were all behind them now, so that they had no great heights to climb, only a few low hills, either bristling with oak and birch, between which streams had scratched long puckered ravines. The horses' hoofs crunched uncomfortably, and they must needs go slowly. That need was very great, and the sense of it was like a spur in Fitzmaurice's side, urging him to push on at a pace. The distance which he had made up his mind to cover that day was enormous. It was the only day, on which he could push on, without other delays than the ordinary obstacles of the country. By tomorrow, it would be necessary to go much more cautiously, for by tomorrow they would be getting well within the zone of danger. Kerry once left behind and the borders of Limerick crossed, that zone would be definitely entered upon. Secrecy, too, in an expedition of this kind, was everything. If they could not contrive to get past Limerick and Kilmallock unrecognised and unsuspected, they might almost as well never have started at all.
Sir James's information with regard to the movements of the enemy had so far been scandalously defective, and he had not even known that Sir Nicholas Malby had left Connacht until days after he had done so. By this time, Malby was already somewhere between the towns of Limerick and Kilmallock, which last was for garrison purposes the metropolis just then of the entire South of Ireland. With Malby were not only the soldiers he had brought with him from Connacht, but probably also the new levies, hastily got together in England and hurried down from Dublin to fill the gaps which sickness and hard work had made in the ordinary garrisons of the South and West. Sir William Drury — Lord Justice and acting Deputy of Ireland — was also known to be on the march. In a few days, the two commanders would have touched hands, and the difficulties for the rebels would be simply doubled.
It was everything, therefore, for Sir James to get behind Malby without loss of time. If Connacht took fire promptly, Malby must needs turn back, and the juncture in the South would be avoided for the present. Malby, too, he regarded as his own destined antagonist. That distinguished officer's fashion of pacifying his district, his peculiarly cold-headed, not to say cold-blooded arrangements had bred a singular loathing of him in the minds of men. Sir James thirsted to be at the sword's point with him. Since his arrival in Ireland, his own proceedings had so far all been confined to one obscure corner of the island. It was not for this that he had come from Spain. It was high time, he said to himself, that such hole-and-corner hostilities should cease; high time that the war should become a real war, openly waged and openly carried on. The congenial hopefulness of the man whispered, moreover, that he had only to show himself, and the country would rise to meet him.
They halted at midday, but only for half an hour, munching a hasty meal, with their hands on their bridle reins, then up and off again, keeping always steadily north-east. The promise of the morning had lasted right through the day. All day, the same indescribable serenity had brooded full and fair upon the dreamy landscape. All day long, the sky and earth seemed to be holding a conference together, a parliament of peace and goodwill to all below.
It was not until sunset time that a change came over the spirit of the skies. Then the mild wistfulness of the Earlier hours gave place suddenly to a dazzling radiance, a radiance which seemed to fill the whole air. Sir James responded to the touch and pointed to the sky with a wave of his hand and a gallant smile of greeting. It was a good hour for him, as well as a good omen, but it faded all too soon, and there were many hours of hard riding still before them. The horses were limping, with down-drooping necks, the riders were sitting with bent backs, the horse-boys, tireless though they were, had nearly all dropped behind, and only a few still clung desperately.
They were close now to the confines of the great forest — the forest emphatically of South Ireland, which from this point stretched away ahead of them for more than forty miles, untouched as yet by hatchet, intact in all its virgin savagery; the forest which was adored with such passion by its inhabitants, which was detested with equal passion and at least equal reason by their assailants; the forest which was destined within a short space of time to be cleared off completely.
Supper that night was a very perfunctory affair. The men were literally too tired to care for food. Sleep, and sleep only, was all they craved. Horse and foot followers alike fell down upon the ground and lay there like logs, weariness, irresistible and deathlike, overcoming them, and sleep catching hold of them almost before their heads had touched the earth.
Sir James alone seemed impervious to fatigue. While the rest slept, he watched, his face turned to the forest, his eyes still keen and alive as they had been at the sunset hour. Once Hugh Gaynard — happening to awake in the night and to lift his head blinkingly from his bed of leaves — saw the leader standing not far from him upon the bank of the stream, distinguishable even in the darkness by his yellow doublet, his head raised and alert, as though he were trying to pierce the obscurity before him. The little stream babbled and repeated foolish rhythms to its pebbles at his feet. Sir James never changed his attitude, never relaxed for a moment from that air of alert and eager anticipation, the air of a man who at last sees his way, who has at last reached firm ground. This forest, it must be remembered, was in a sense his own; he had made it his and had written his name broadly across it. A good friend to him in the old time, it seemed only natural that it should prove a good friend to him now. “At last!” his expression seemed to say, “at last!” After endless disappointment, after all but unendurable hindrances and humiliations, the good time was coming, the promised time, the time for which he had waited so faithfully, the time which was to make amends for everything.
Chapter XVIII.
Next morning by the first streak of dawn, the riders had to drag themselves to their feet, find their weapons, feed themselves, gird the pads upon their wretched horses and be off again. Sir James was pitiless. A fire seemed to burn in his veins and to urge him forward at any cost, recklessly and almost like a man bereft of reason.
As it turned out, he would have done very much better had he listened to their remonstrances and put off the start for a few hours longer. A mist had come up with the dawn, choking the forest and rendering the narrow track all but indistinguishable. Even in broad daylight it was not the best of countries to ride over. Practically, all South Limerick was at that time one great forest, streaked with a few stray clearings here and there. The part they were then passing through was chiefly given over to wind-beaten oaks, low-crowned but wide-armed, which the ship-carpenters of Cork were in the habit of visiting yearly with trains of pack horses to carry off for their trade. There was thus a well-known riding track through it, which ought to have been discernible enough, but somehow in the dimness they managed to overlook it. To miss your path in such a wood meant a matter of many hours' delay, and Sir James could not afford delay. He tried to mend matters by making a new track for himself, but this proved hopeless. After struggling in vain for hours through the undergrowth, he was forced to turn back. By the time they once more hit upon the right track, it was already midday; the horses, tired when they started, were now utterly exhausted, the one Dr. Allen was riding being dead lame besides, having staked itself badly upon a stump.
What was to be done? The fate of the whole rising hung upon the next few hours. Fresh horses Sir James must by some means obtain.
Chance seemed suddenly to favour him. It was a blind
chance and a brutal one, as it turned out, but that he could not know. Passing through a somewhat thinner portion of the forest, a group of men were perceived to be at work ahead of them, upon a bit of arable land, which lay like a doormat in the middle of that all but untouched realm of forestry. Four or five garrons were also at work upon the doormat, yoked by their tails. The agricultural operation seemed to require an inordinate amount of discussion, judging by the chorus of guttural voices which filled the air. At sight of the party of riders, a lull set in. The tongues all stopped wagging, the unfortunate garrons were allowed to rest in the middle of the furrows, and every shock head was lifted to examine the new-comers.
Sir James rode up to the man nearest him — a big grizzled peasant, with a twist of red rags tied turban-fashion over the top of his tangled glibbe.
“Whose churls are you?” he inquired peremptorily in Irish.
The old fellow scratched his head, pushing his red turban back for the purpose, looked about him at the others for support, then back at the speaker. “Sir William Burke's of Clanwilliam,” he said at last.
“God be thanked! I thought we must have struck Burke land” — this was in English to Dr. Allen. “Here, two of you men, take the best of yonder garrons and fit the pads on to them, ours can stay till we return. And you, fellow, tell your master that one whom he knows well has taken the beasts and will be surety for the value of them or for a hundred such as they.”
But the old peasant in the red turban showed no disposition to be satisfied with so vague an assurance.
“Then it is not to Sir William Burke I will go with any such errand, so I will not!” he exclaimed, plucking his crown of rags off as he spoke, flinging it down upon the ground and executing a sort of war dance upon it. “Is it the head of me you want knocked off? Then I will not have my head knocked off for you, or for any man, so I will not. It is neither to Sir William, nor to one of his sons I will go with such a word, not to the youngest and the mildest of them. It is not any man's life in Munster that would be safe.”
Sir James turned sharply away. “Make haste, men. Every moment is worth gold,” he said to his own followers.
But at the first hand laid upon the garrons, a roar arose from the field, as if every throat in Munster was being cut simultaneously. There was a rush upon the serving men, which stopped at sight of their pikes, lowered suggestively in the direction of the rags. None of the peasants were armed with anything but sticks, so that after the first rush, the riding pads were changed without further active interference. The yells, however, with which the operation was accompanied rose to the sky and seemed calculated to bring to the spot every human being within forty miles. Instead of dying off, they rose louder too, and louder. The small field seemed to swarm with peasants. Big, half-naked fellows came running up from all directions whooping and halloing like maniacs. The noise was deafening; the yells loud enough to awaken the very dead.
“On, in God's name!” Sir James said hurriedly. “Allen, do you mount yonder jade. 'Tis the least broken-kneed of the two.”
They rode hastily across the field, the peasants dispersing in all directions before them and hurrying off evidently to carry the news of the outrage to their masters. Unhappily, speed proved to be as little attainable as ever. The new garrons clearly were in league with their owners, for no spurring would induce either of them to go beyond a miserable jolting amble.
Sir James's point was now the ford at Clonkeen, then and for years to come the only means of getting across the Molkearn, in dry weather an amiable trout stream enough, but given in wet weather to developing into a yellow frothy torrent. The water was low, and they got across it safely, and up the rising ground beyond. The forest was much less dense here than before. They could see the country stretching out before them for a considerable distance. They passed the little church of Clonkeen, to which the barefooted friars still occasionally resorted from the Abbey of Abbington, a few miles up the river. It looked deserted and forlorn, but Sir James and Dr. Allen, despite their desperate haste, paused for a moment to say a prayer and cross themselves before the door.
Before them stretched now a long, low line of hills reaching nearly to the town of Limerick. To the east rose a steeper and more tree-covered one, while north-east again, between his fellows of the Slieve Phelim, the friendly face of the big Keeper showed faintly, his flanks laced with torrents.
The horses were maddening; centuries of tail-ploughing had clearly not improved the breed. The amble degenerated into a knock-kneed trot, the trot into a halting walk. In the middle of a small heath-covered clearing, the riders drew rein for a moment's consultation. Hardly had they done so, before a sound of galloping was carried down to them upon the wind. A party of horsemen came tearing up the track, most of them mounted galloglasses, armed with spears or axes. In front rode three men evidently of higher station than the rest — Burkes, all three of them, as Sir James perceived at a glance. The sons of old Sir William Burke, tall, broad-shouldered men, as all the Burkes of that house were, their height increased too by the immense leathern helmets crossed with iron bars. Two of the galloglasses carried calivers of the ordinary English military pattern. The whole troop having halted within gunshot of the Geraldines, at a word from one of the leaders these two deliberately lowered their weapons, blew upon the matches and prepared to fire.
Sir James, who at first sight of the party had waved his hand in friendly greeting, sat watching these latter proceedings with a gaze of stupefaction. “By the bones of St. Bridget, they mean attacking us!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Now, as I am a gentleman and an Irishman, this passes a jest! Theobald! Shaun! Dick! What fool's trick is this? Since when have the Burkes of Clanwilliam grown blind, that they need to be told that it is I, James Fitzmaurice of Desmond?”
The calivers were lowered, but the attitude of hostility was not abandoned. There was a touch of discipline, an air of precision and military formality amongst the group of followers drawn up in line behind their masters which caught Sir James's eye at once. He was not accustomed to see Burke galloglasses standing in such an exemplary fashion as that. The symptom was good in itself doubtless, but what did it mean?
The eldest and tallest of the brothers, Theobald Burke by name, had meanwhile ridden forward a few paces and was now scanning the group opposed to him with an air of curiosity.
“James Fitzmaurice? James Fitzmaurice of Desmond?” he said in a tone of astonishment.
“James Fitzmaurice of Desmond; no better, and no worse. 'Tis a name and a face too with which you, Cousin Theobald, were fairly familiar. 'Tis one whose owner, for that matter, ought by now to be some twenty miles west of this and would have been, had the ways been fairer and horseflesh somewhat less perverse than both have proved. No time have I therefore, good cousin, for bandying words with you. Listen while I make you a fair offer, and only one. Fall in behind me — you, your brothers, and your men — as you have often done before. Strike a good blow in the best cause and with the fairest hopes that Ireland has seen for fifty years back. If not, then stand away from my path and remain here till I return in a month's time with every spear in Connacht and Leinster at my back! 'Twill be a brave tale for the Burkes to tell how they alone sat at home during that time! That, however, is a matter for you and yours to settle!”
Theobald Burke's broad, stupid face had reddened slowly while he listened to all this. He had no love for James Fitzmaurice and never had had any. Latent hostility between the two houses apart, he had always disliked his authority and submitted to it sulkily. If for a good many years he and the other Burkes had ridden at his back, been his men and obeyed his behests, it had been from hate of the common enemy far more than for any love of the Geraldine. Now, it happened that of late this common enemy had come out in quite a new light. The commendable, if late-found loyalty of old Sir William, the peculiar graces and merits of his three stalwart sons had by no means escaped the notice of the Queen, nor yet of her representatives in Ireland. Let them only persevere i
n the path they had entered upon, let them avoid any fresh tampering with rebels — above all, with that arch-fiend and devil incarnate of treason, James Fitzmaurice of Desmond — and no man could say what advancement might not yet be theirs. Suddenly, on the top of these new-born hopes, to be confronted by that very James Fitzmaurice of Desmond in person, to be called upon by him in the tone of one who has a right to dispose of you, to be reminded of old ties and bound by the pressure of old obligations — it was extremely trying! Theobald Burke tightened his courage, for James Fitzmaurice's voice — Pope's mandate and official command altogether apart — was not an easy one for any Irishman of that day to say nay to. If not exceptionally brave, the young man was at least exceptionally obstinate. He was not going, he said to himself, to lose his life to please any Geraldines. He braced himself to resist the voice of the charmer.
“Then it is just what you always were, so you are, James Fitzmaurice!” he said in a sulky voice, half-smothered by his big helmet. “A promiser! Yes, by God! Just a promiser, no better! And I will tell you what else you are, James Fitzmaurice. It is a disturber of the world — yes, of the whole world, and of Ireland, and of Munster, that is what you are! Is it more trouble you want to bring upon us nowadays? Then it is enough trouble, God knows, you have brought upon us Burkes already. And why must you be taking our horses that are wanted to plough our own lands and not to be killed, and spurred, and destroyed, and dragged over the country to please other men? If it is more horses you are wanting, you can go back to Desmond and find Desmond horses for yourself, for it is no Burke horses you will have this day. So get down this minute from our horses and go away upon your own two feet, which is good travelling enough for any proud Geraldine, even the very best of them, so it is, God knows!”
Enchanting Cold Blood Page 38
