"Good night, Shane!" she said abruptly. She moved swiftly toward the
house through the yew-trees. In her pale dress against the moonlit turf,
between the dark trees, she was like some old, heart-wringing ghost....
Section 10
He brought back from Tusa hErin that night a sense of dread. What in
God's name had Granya done? To what committed herself? There were rumors
abroad that the men of '67 were not dead yet.... In America, in the
hills of Kerry, in Galway, there was plotting ... not glorious, but
sinister plotting.... God! had they enmeshed her?
He had three times heard her sing the old Ulster ballad of General
Munro:
Up came Munro's sister, she was well dressed in green,
And his sword by her side that was once bright and keen.
And she said to the brave men who with her did go,
"Come, we'll have revenge for my brother Munro!"
He had looked on that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what
she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to
it all.... She was often in Dublin these days.... Did they? Had they?...
If it had been the Jacobite times, or '98 or even '48, he would not have
minded. The Irish might call these Irish rebellions, but in reality
they were world affairs. James and the Prince of Orange were the clash
of the ideal of courtliness and tradition worn to a thin blade and of
the stubborn progress of pulsing thought. And '98 was the echo of the
surge for liberty--the frenzy of France and the stubborn Yankee
steel.... And '48 was another breathing of the world.... Even '67 he
would not have minded. Sixty-seven was a gallant romantic rally, a dream
of pikes amid green banners, and men drilling by moonlit rivers....
But to-day was different.... Revenge was in the air, and revenge was no
wild justice, as an old writer had said. Revenge was an evil
possession.... An exhausting, sinister mood.... The men who would fight
this modern battle, if battle there was to be one, were dark scowling
men.... The amenities of battle, the gallantry of flags meant nothing to
them. They would shoot from behind ditches in the dark.... In America
was talk of dynamite--an idealist using a burglar's trick.... There was
no gallantry that way....
And besides, it wasn't an Irish war. It was a matter of agriculture....
A war of peasants against careless landlords, Irish themselves in the
main, who had fled to England to avoid the suicidal monotony of Irish
country life, and lost their money in the pot-houses and gambling-dens
of London, and turned to their tenants for more, forgetting in the
glamour of London the poverty of the Irish bogs.... It was contemptible
to squeeze the peasants as a money-lender squeezes his victims, but the
peasants' redress, the furtive musket and horrible dynamite, that was
terrible. God, what a mess!... And had Granya been caught into that evil
problem, a kingfisher among cormorants?
And if she had what was he going to do about it?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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