The Story of Ulla, and other tales

Front matter

AND OTHER TALES BY EDWIN LESTER ARNOLD AUTHOR OF "PHRA THE PHŒNICIAN, etc. etc. LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1895 All rights reserved Printed hy Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. At the Ballantyne Press CONTENTS PAGE THE STORY OF UI.LA I THE VENGEANCE OF DUNGARVAN .... 47 A DREADFUL NIGHT 98 RUTHERFORD THE TWICE-BORN Il8 A STRANGER WOMAN 1 36 A NARROW ESCAPE 175 THAT BABE OF MEG'S 1 94 A FAIR PURITAN 2l8 MEG OF THE BRAIDS 247 MARGARET SPENS THIS is the story of Ulla the Viking, Ulla the priest ! This is the story of Ulla the proud, and Ulla the humble. This is the story each sentence of which falls on the heart of the writer heavy as the hollow moan of breakers on some desolate midnight shore. And the heart of Ulla is that shore, and the pulse of the storm that is over — the storm of the life and the loving — comes distant and sad as he writes, with a melancholy cadence, through the hush of the evening of living.

I am that Viking, I am that priest ; and here in my lonely home by the edge of the northern sea I sit by the dim shine of my lamp, while the night wind sighs without ; and across these lean thin hands, these palsied knotted fingers that tremble like the white aspen leaves, lies a fair braid of yellow hair. Long, long it seems since that braid was cut from the head that wore it, long long months of pain and days of regretting have passed A since that strand was cut from its wearer : the salt sea has dimmed it, time has touched its lustre, and the dark stain of blood is upon it, yet as I, the monk Ulla, raise that fair thing again and again to my lips and press it where nought but the sign of the new faith should be pressed, — press it trembling and silently to these cold lips, something of the old love shoots through my shrunken veins, something of the strong passion that once nerved them tingles into those withered fingers that smooth that gleam ing toy so tenderly, and a white mist rises to my dull eyes, and my head droops forward, and the little cell seems widening out as wide as life itself; and sad as the sound of the wind amongst pine trees, desolate as the beat of the tireless pulse of the sea upon the rim of the night, comes to my lonely heart the echo of long ago.

It was in the time of my master, Halfdan the Black, and I was a Norway jar], and lived by the white edge of the sea in Baldersund. I was young then, I was scarcely twenty, and had herds, and men, and farms all the way up the wild coast as far as fair Hitteren ; and a longship lay in the creek by my homestead ; and boarhounds lay on the rushes by my wild ingle-nook, and my bows and spears lay on the tressels, and a hundred jolly fellows drank from my flowing horns, and carved my meats each day, and were proud to call me lord and leader. Three times as many stocked my yellow harvests, and filled my barns. And I was strong and tall and big of limb, and although I was so young I had already been twice abroad, and had harried across the wide sea in distant Fareyjar and down south to Ljodhus. I had sipped the glorious wine of battle, and watched the red flame of burning thorpe and tower leap up to heaven from my footsteps.

Chapter I John

Hackett, of Dungarvan, made a mistake that sunny afternoon in 1630, when he bore into the green courtyard of the O'Driscoll's castle, which looks down upon the pleasant Irish south coast town of Baltimore, the news of her lover's death to Margaret O'Driscoll. Like many another cunning rogue, he made a mistake on the threshold of the black game he was playing, having in it the germ of a disappointment which brought about his ultimate defeat, and drove him to the elaboration of a plot conceived by a mind cruel and bloody, and carried out in its maturity with remorseless determination. Hackett himself was an angular, lantern-jawed man of fifty, with a clean-shaved, wrinkled face; an eagle nose, twinkling black eyes set close together, dark grizzled hair that hung down in uneven strands upon his shoulders, and, backed by the wide black hat he always wore, made his naturally pale face seem many shades paler still.

Added to the uncouthness of his appearance, he had a secret way about him, a stealthiness of approach that was infinitely dispossessing. On the mountain roads he kept the shady side, and walked or rode his grey pony through the short ling with such instinctive secrecy that children playing amongst the brambles screamed and fled as the black horseman on the silent steed passed without a warning sound through their midst, the hill sheep scrambled in a startled herd across the pastures when Hackett was afoot, and in the town honest folk stopped their chatter and drew back to their doors, as, without a footfall or a whisper they could swear, without a smile or a look to right or left, his long loose cloak held close against his breast, and his keen, hard eyes aglimmer in that pale lean face of his, the stern Dungarvan agent came from the shadows, and, surly and morose, passed on down the street as secret and impenetrable as ever.

The bright Celtic nature shrank from that grim reserve. That he was severe and rapacious they knew to their bitter cost, and from their fear grew darker fancies. He had been abroad, he had strange languages and dreadful arts it was thought. He had trafficked with the Moor in an age when the cheek of Christendom blanched to hear even the mention of that name, and now and then they said he wrote long missives in unknown character, and far out at sea where he went, forsooth ! to fish, he met prowling southern vessels, and held long conclave with their captains. Many a black tale was whispered by the evening fires, to which the factor's name came in at the ending. Now some one would tell how, years ago, strong John Croome had flouted Hackett in the public streets ; had spit upon and derided him — as, God wot, he had well deserved — and then, dropping his voice until all the listening folk bent down over the glimmer of the low red peat in mid-floor to hear, the narrator would whisper how that same John Croome was found two days after in a peat-hole, dead — stabbed deep into the back ; " and in the gaping wound just such a fletcher's knife as old Mort, of Dungarvan, makes and sells, and Hackett always carried."

Another time another would vow the agent's luck was such that surely devils rattled Hackett's dice for him, throwing to his favour — fair or foul ! Did D they not remember old Mike Ranstead — how he had the smartest yawl in the bay, and the longest nets, and the best team of horses, and the tallest sons, and the comeliest wife ? And did they not recall how he ended a long grudge against Hackett by flogging him one day in the tavern parlour? Oh yes ; his auditor remembered. And then the teller would take a pull at his wide brown mug, and seem to question of the good Tudor ale within whether they had forgotten how Mike's ships had sunk thereafter; how his nets, storm-broke, were lost adrift ; " how his horses took the murrain ; how his wife sickened and died, and two of his sons were killed fighting in Flanders ?

" And wives and gossips in the ingle-nook would shake their heads over the distaff and the loom, and say modest maids fled home when Hackett went afield ; whisper of the blight his shadow had brought to many a hearth and household ; whisper and sigh to recall how poor Kathleen Ardtornish died, and beautiful, vain Jennie Capard, and proud, false-played Margaret Kerwan — a dusky-hearted traitor, if one ever breathed. So the tales spread, widening and gathering strange detail as they passed from lip to lip ; and, little caring for good or bad report, the dreaded factor ruled with a rod of iron, while the sullen, submissive hate of those he ground down in their poverty, smouldered under the surface of their sullen helplessness. And then, one day, when bitter tongues had had nothing new to wag about for many months, the gossips were set talking again, for it was told that Hackett coveted Mar garet O'Driscoll, the daughter of the petty thane whose ruined keep looked down from its rocky mound upon the townlet.

A sweet and winsome girl she was, ruddy, and white, and active, with a step as light and springy as the green turf of her own hill-sides, and kind, bright Irish eyes, prone to melt with pity or flash at affront or slight with the spirit of her ancient but fallen line, and a mouth rosy and flexible, and a wealth of soft, dark hair, and a skin whiter than the froth upon the mill-stream, and, to back her comeliness, a heart as gentle, and brave, and faithful as ever beat under the cross folds of an island shawl. And was this sweet wild Irish flower to fall to Black Hackett ? It was with a thrill of some thing like horror the townsmen heard that that win some girl had come under his evil notice, and they watched and waited, the women with keen vindic tiveness noting his every movement, and the men scowling from street corner and tavern window on the Dungarvan bully, who, by fair means or by foul, would rob " the master " of his daughter, and the town of its sweetest maiden.

A wiser man than Hackett would have seen how deep and sullen the hate was growing against him, and hidden the iron hand of tyranny in a velvet glove. But tyrants rarely discern in time, and Hackett took a moody pleasure in the scowls. He smiled his sour, in sipid smile to note how well the people hated him, and pressed his suit, until one day he thought the time was ripe, and then put the matter boldly to O'Driscoll's self with all his cunning verbiage. And that bulky Irish princeling of many ancestors and little gear would not even hear him out — he laughed in Hackett's wrinkled face, and told him it was not to be. He would not hear of it though Hackett brought half the country-side for dower — there were twenty worthy reasons against it, each one final, and the least of them all was that the maid was promised by her own accord to young John O'Hara of Bandon a year ago !

Then deep and fiercely Hackett swore he would not take no for an answer, and there, on that day twelve months hence, he would come again for the maid, and she should follow him, willy-nilly, and thus flung out in a furious passion, and rode away over the hills, so that the Baltimore gossips, who knew all this an hour after it had happened, fondly thought they were truly rid of him. But in a couple of days he came riding back again, a little more jaundiced about the face, perhaps ; a little sterner about the thin, close-set lips, but otherwise in good mood, and made his peace with the lady and her father, shaking hands with young O'Hara, and then presently in a month's time — wonder on wonder ! — it became known that Margaret's happy lover was going southward on a voyage with rich merchandise, and it was Hackett who was to fit out and start O'Hara for that fortune, which should enable him to claim the fair Irish maiden's hand, on his returning.

He fledged that fortunate youth in gallant style, and sent him forth with something so like generosity, that in the months that followed, a glimmer of goodwill began to dawn amongst the townsmen for their taxman ; and some said if O'Hara came safely home, and Hackett stood by his present mood — why then he was a better man than they had taken him for. But others still shook their heads, and, muttering of wolf and lambs, waited grimly. And then when half a year had gone by, one afternoon Hackett rode up the cobbled village street of white walls and deep-thatched roofs, where the swallows built amid the gabled fronts, taking his way to the O'Driscoll's keep, and there, his cunning face streaked with traitor grief, told him and the white-faced, broken-hearted girl at his side, that news had come to Dungarvan, telling how O'Hara's ship had been taken three months before by Moorish pirates and robbed and burnt, and all her company — saving one man who had escaped and brought the tidings — were killed, or, what was much the same, captives to the Moslem.

Bitter again burnt up the anger and hatred of the people against that lean purveyor of sorrows, and Baltimore, with a keen suspicion Hackett knew more of this matter than he chose to show, scowled afresh to hear his horsehoofs in her street, and cursed his black shadow. But little that mattered to him. The factor saw the hatred of men and women, and laughed at it in his mirthless way, and, his small eyes ashine with secret triumph and his pale lips set hard, turned all the bitter skill he had in usury or extortion on them, and while he racked and bullied he renewed his wooing of shrinking, tearful Margaret O'Driscoll, at first insidiously, then, as he thought he prospered, more boldly, and never conquering the girl's open dis like — an aversion deepened by recollection of the fact that it was he who had sent her lover on his fatal quest, it was he who had brought home the luckless news — still hovered about, a grey epitome of her grief, and dogged her footsteps, and strove to dry her tears with his hateful comforting.

So things ripened to the final catastrophe. A few weeks after, and one forenoon, down in the grassy castle-yard of O'Driscoll's keep, en circled by its ragged fringe of crumbling stone walls, and backed by the loopholed front of the main tower, were collected a surging crowd of peasants and fishermen, bare-armed, bare-headed, bare-footed most of them, all shouting and crying angrily in the native tongue, and pointing the finger of hatred against one man, who stood in the centre of the rough circle, with arms folded across his breast, head sunk down upon his shoulders, grey eyes agleam, and teeth uncovered in an angry snarl like a gaunt dog that the red hill-wolves have bayed between the rocks. It was Hackett, and over against him were two or three men of better dress than the others, but, like them, blue-eyed and ruddy-haired ; while be hind them, again, away in the shadow of the tower, where a patch of sapphire sea showed through a gap in the crumbling rampart, and the ranks of yellow wall-flower were dancing their golden heads in the windy sunshine — back there stood Margaret O'Driscoll, weeping on the shoulder of an ancient nurse, who strove in vain to dry the hot, gusty tears that kept welling into the averted face of the Irish girl.

Presently the angry babel quieted for a minute, and then Brian Borgil, the nephew of the absent O'Driscoll, turned, flushed and scowling, from the prisoner in front of him to the tumultuous, motley crowd beyond, and asked of one stalwart kern, " You, Shawn, what has Black Hackett been doing now ? " and Shawn, nothing loath, stepped forward, and in hot, fluent Gaelic, with fierce, dramatic gestures and an accusing finger pointed at the culprit, told how he and another, as they worked unobserved on the peat hags, had seen thc man secretly follow fair Margaret down through the birches to the well in the glen, and how some time afterwards they had heard her cry for help, and throwing down their spades had gone to her rescue, and had met the maid " running like a hunted roe, with hair astream and face aflame and dress all torn, and a minute after — hot on the trail, like a stoat after a leveret — Black Hackett of Dungarvan ; and how they guessed the cause, and fell upon him, whereupon he pulled a pistol and shot Cogan of Rathsulla through the shoulder," and here the hapless Cogan interrupted with a yell of recollected pain and anger, and all the sympathetic folk about him yelled in tune, and shouted and waved their hands, and over the babble you could hear the invective of their long-stored anger at the flood bursting out in furious curses.

"To hell with him ! " some one cried. " Are our maids Dungarvan trulls that he should harry them, and our men dogs for him to draw upon?" "And it is not the first time he has brought shame upon us," screamed a shrill woman's voice amid the crowd, "who durst not go o' nights past the pool where Margaret Kerwan drowned her self, who starts and scowls to hear me cry on Jennie Capard, and the black-haired daughter of Ardtornish ? " "Who stabbed young Michael in the back on Dunkerron ? " shouted another. "Beast! Villain! Traitor agent!" yelled the excited peasants. " Hang him, Brian ! Throw him from the tower ! It is he brings tax and cess upon us ! It is he thieves widows' corn, and takes usury, and steals poor fishers' profits ! It is he stands in wait for maids at corners ! It is his black shadow on the white cottage wall that is grief in summer and sorrow in winter!

Kill him, Master! Kill him, strong son of Macgillah ! " And so the fierce, plaintive, picturesque testi mony of those rude witnesses in that rough court of justice rose in a turbulent medley up to the grey walls above. Then the judge spoke, his native wrath thinly hampered by his sense of feudal dignity — " Hound ! Is it not enough that you should fill your secret money-bags with the hard-won pence of these my kinsman's people ? is it not enough that you should hector and bully here who stand cap in hand, like the cringing slave you are, yonder before your masters and ours? Is it not enough that you should be a murrain to our cattle in spring, and disaster to our fleet in winter, and a curse to our streets ? Must you, too, be a shame and a sorrow to our hearths ? Look ! " and pouncing on the unhappy agent as the last reserves of his feudal equity gave out, the furious young Irishman dragged him through the howling crowd to the ragged edge of the battlement.

"Look at yonder red bar of rusty iron jutting from the wall," he cried. " It was on that my grandfather hung Hugh MacDermot for the half of your offences, and his father in turn hung Browell the Brave and twenty others. O'Moore of Lockee hung there ten months, and when the crows above had done with him, they cut him down to give the dogs below a chance. Say, people ! " cried Borgil, grasping the struggling agent by one strong hand and holding up the other, open palmed, to heaven, "say, is the measure ot bitterness full — is the black harvest ripe ? Have our maidens sighed and our widows wept enough, say ! Shall we do what no one else will do for us, and try if yonder bar will bear yet one more load ? Speak, speak ! " And, at first low, like the wailing of women, and then stronger, like the wind coming across the hollow ground, and then with one wild yell of hatred and anger the verdict of the suffer ing people was given, and Hackett of Dungarvan doomed.

And now all was fierce excitement in the grassy, cobbled courtyard, and while the women hung back, and some half-dozen urchins ran gleefully waving their caps down the hill to tell the startled village that the great factor was to be hung, the men crowded to the ancient battlements and made their scanty preparations. They found a rope in the sheds — a beautiful coil of red " leader," new got for a herring net, as round and supple as you could wish, and — because there is always one genius in every crowd — out of the surging mass sprang little Haggie Crooked-shank, and in a trice, as though he had been bred to it, he took the tail of the rope, and made a loop two feet long, and took three turns upon the slack, and passed the end down through the turns inside and jerked it tight, and put his foot upon it, and pulled and pulled again, and then, jumping on a block, proudly displayed as sweet and neat a noose as ever stilled the feeble flutterings of a wicked heart.

Next light Haggie slipped over the ragged wall, and in dead silence, with all eyes on him, went down by gurgoyle and crumbling coping to where that stern old symbol of rough justice jutted from the ancient masonry, and crawled out along the rotten iron beam, and, nicely measuring the distance, made the halter fast with a couple of stout knots, then, turning, brought the loop back in his teeth to the courtyard battlements where the eager faces were as thick as head of corn in August. They dragged the luckless agent to the scarp, screaming and howling hideously, then drowning his yells for mercy and mad ravings of a swift retribution to follow on them with the fierce cries of their long-stored anger, and hustling and pulling, they got him close to the wall that, in strange mockery to the horrible scene of vengeance they were enacting, was hung with the yellow and crimson flowers of summer, and framed the sweet picture of sea and sky beyond.

There Hackett fought them like a fury until his clothes were all in ribbons, fought them with horrible oaths and blasphemies, until the cowering women hid their heads beneath their shawls and shrank into the corners. There was no time to bind their victim — it was fierce butcher work which nothing excused but the much they had suffered. They overpowered him with sheer numbers, they slipped the noose about his neck, and with a fierce yell of scorn, hoisted him shoulder high at last, and bore him struggling so to the nearest gap. Then up jumped Margaret O'Driscoll, and with a cry of horror and compunction, fled to her kins man, and "Oh, cousin ! " she cried, " it is horrible — horrible like this ! Let him live, let me plead for him ; I, who have most wrong, of mercy have most right ; see how he strains and holds out his hands to you, and knots them together, and implores — oh, cousin, he will not offend again — for my sake !

" and then suddenly, with a scream of terror, she dropped her white face upon her kinsman's shoulder and stopped her ears. Even while she spoke two strong fellows had taken Hackett up, poising him for a moment like a bar, and as the last syllables of gentle pleading left her lips they had swayed for a minute, and then together, with one dreadful send, had tossed the villain out into space ! Over he went — over and over, with the spin of that strong impetus, under the stare of the hundred stern, revengeful faces lining the ramparts — over and over — now head up and now heels, with his wretched rags fluttering from him, and one wild, dying yell rising sharp and keen into the air through the confused shout of the spectators; and then there was a horrible thud, and the rope tightened with a jerk.

Surely, surely, Hackett of Dungarvan was fairly ended now! Out over the battlements eager heads were crowded; the little urchins, bare-headed, clambered up amongst the wall-flowers ; the pale women peered irresolute through the gully-holes to see Black Hackett swinging ; and then, as the sound of that sickening thud died away, out of the dry throats of those straining executioners, as they peered down into the fosse below, broke a furious cry, and then they were wildly gesticulating, and waving their arms, and running here and there. Hackett of Dungarvan's luck was not yet out. Hackett had escaped ! The rope caught under his arm in those mad twirls, and, with a desperate effort, as he fell he got it somehow in his teeth, and when it tightened with a jerk, the rotten mortar up above gave to that desperate strain, out came the stanchion that had hung a score of better villains; out came staples and stone and casing, and in a cloud of rubble and dust and mortar, in an avalanche of green and grey lichens and disjointed masonry, gallows and gallows'-bird fell crashing into the ling and brambles that choked the ancient ditch below.

It was a sheer steep deep drop of thirty feet or more, and at first the ragged kerns who bent eagerly over the rotten parapet hoped that, if their victim escaped hanging, yet the fall itself would have killed him. Eagerly they bent over, staring with starting eyes and open mouths into the green tangles of briar and fern below. Was he alive ? Was he dead ? They could scarce fashion the question in a fierce whisper one to another ere in a minute the brambles rustled and parted, and out of them rose a wild head and ragged shoulders, and in another second a horrible ashy face, lean with pain and terror, was turned up in dazed confusion to those who peered above, and Hackett of Dungarvan was staring at them with a dull, vacant stare while the blood and sweat ran down from his forehead in thin streams, and the strong throes of the unspent fear shook him like an ague.

There was no gate on that side — only a long sweep of steep grey wall, and so for a minute judges and judged glared at one another, and then — the kerns had suffered, and the furious Irish blood was up — on the ears of the hunted man fell the shout of some running round from the rear of the castle to take him again. With a hoarse cry, Hackett staggered to his feet, tore the broken strands of the noose from his swollen neck, and casting it down, scrambled up the bank of the moat. An hundred yards away his grey Irish pony was standing, where he left it, under the lee of a hawthorn bush, with no thought in its placid mind of human hates and passions, and round the far corner of the keep the kerns were streaming, their bare sheath-knives in their hands and their shaggy red hair flying in the wind.

All around the wretch saw the sweet green hills in the low rays of the afternoon sun, and yonder was the steed might sweep him to them out of the fangs of this cursed mob of wolves; but he was sick and giddy and weak, he reeled and pitched so like a ship in a cross sea the first few steps he made, that those who, with bated breath, watched from the castle, thought even then he could not escape. Out over the flowerspeckled grass staggered the unhappy agent, one E hand stretched before him towards the white form of that patient beast, and the other grasping his burning throat, reeling and tottering and faint, and behind him fifty paces, running three steps to his one, were the pursuers. Another moment and he had got the startled pony by the mane, and the foremost of the kerns was not twenty yards away.

Then they who watched upon the wall saw Hackett essay to get upon the beast — and fail. They saw the swiftest-footed runner behind draw his fingers down the white blade of his knife as though he were already wringing red blood from it — they saw Hackett gather himself for one last effort — and the next moment the white pony was galloping out towards the open heather with Hackett — near prone — lying along its back, and the kern's keen Irish blade was hurtling harm lessly through the summer sunshine after them. Out towards the moors he galloped, and when he came to the top of the first rise and pursuit was already over, and the grey town, lost to him for ever, lay basking below in the green arms of the hills, he pulled reign for the first time, and looking back, broke out in a furious, incoherent, spluttering storm of rage and shame, shaking his clenched fist back at the peaceful village of white fronts, grey thatch, and square red chimney-stacks whence the blue evening smoke was already drifting out in a thin veil over the marsh lands.

" Curse on you, Baltimore ! Curse on you ! Curse on your foundations and your roof-ridges ! Curse on your pavements and hearthstones ! Curse on your walls and roofs ! Black death walk your streets, and disaster dwell with you ! The bitter, bitter curse be yours for this day's work ! " And so, spending his spleen in savage invective, he presently gave out, and turning once more rode northward along the bleak, unwalled coast road, with its barren peat mosses on one hand, and long sad beach and streaks of sea-wrack on the other, ambling sullenly along, though each step was agony to his battered limbs and many bruises, his black cloak flapping in the wind, and his long, lean arms thrown out at times, as the wrath and the pain welled up. And sometimes he would stop and shake his fist back at the blue smoke-mist of the village, and shout such bitter curses back at it that the plovers which had settled on the grassy hillocks for the night rose in wheeling flocks against the saffron-sunset sky, circling overhead with plaintive cries, and then he would press forward with head again deep down between his shoulders, and blind fury, headlong malice, and wounded pride grinding in his heart.