No More Learning

At last he saw that the moment to end had come, and, in a pause after a
dance, cried out from where the horn noggins stood that his daughter
would now drink the cup of betrothal; then Oona came over to where he
was, and the guests stood round in a half-circle, Costello close to
the wall to the right, and the piper, the labourer, the farmer, the
half-witted man and the two farm lads close behind him. The old man
took out of a niche in the wall the silver cup from which her mother
and her mother's mother had drunk the toasts of their betrothals, and
poured Poteen out of a porcelain jug and handed the cup to his daughter
with the customary words, 'Drink to him whom you love the best. '

She held the cup to her lips for a moment, and then said in a clear
soft voice: 'I drink to my true love, Tumaus Costello. '

And then the cup rolled over and over on the ground, ringing like
a bell, for the old man had struck her in the face and the cup had
fallen, and there was a deep silence.

There were many of Namara's people among the servants now come out of
the alcove, and one of them, a story-teller and poet, a last remnant of
the bardic order, who had a chair and a platter in Namara's kitchen,
drew a French knife out of his girdle and made as though he would
strike at Costello, but in a moment a blow had hurled him to the
ground, his shoulder sending the cup rolling and ringing again. The
click of steel had followed quickly, had not there come a muttering and
shouting from the peasants about the door and from those crowding up
behind them; and all knew that these were no children of Queen's Irish
or friendly Namaras and Dermotts, but of the wild Irish about Lough
Gara and Lough Cara, who rowed their skin coracles, and had masses
of hair over their eyes, and left the right arms of their children
unchristened that they might give the stouter blows, and swore only by
St. Atty and sun and moon, and worshipped beauty and strength more than
St. Atty or sun and moon.

Costello's hand had rested upon the handle of his sword and his
knuckles had grown white, but now he drew it away, and, followed by
those who were with him, strode towards the door, the dancers giving
way before him, the most angrily and slowly, and with glances at the
muttering and shouting peasants, but some gladly and quickly, because
the glory of his fame was over him. He passed through the fierce
and friendly peasant faces, and came where his good horse and the
rough-haired garrons were tied to bushes; and mounted and bade his
ungainly bodyguard mount also and ride into the narrow boreen. When
they had gone a little way, Duallach, who rode last, turned towards
the house where a little group of Dermotts and Namaras stood next to a
more numerous group of countrymen, and cried: 'Dermott, you deserve to
be as you are this hour, a lantern without a candle, a purse without a
penny, a sheep without wool, for your hand was ever niggardly to piper
and fiddler and story-teller and to poor travelling people. ' He had
not done before the three old Dermotts from the Ox Mountains had run
towards their horses, and old Dermott himself had caught the bridle of
a garron of the Namaras and was calling to the others to follow him;
and many blows and many deaths had been had not the countrymen caught
up still glowing sticks from the ashes of the fires and hurled them
among the horses with loud cries, making all plunge and rear, and some
break from those who held them, the whites of their eyes gleaming in
the dawn.

For the next few weeks Costello had no lack of news of Oona, for now
a woman selling eggs or fowls, and now a man or a woman on pilgrimage
to the Well of the Rocks, would tell him how his love had fallen ill
the day after St. John's Eve, and how she was a little better or a
little worse, as it might be; and though he looked to his horses and
his cows and goats as usual, the common and uncomely, the dust upon the
roads, the songs of men returning from fairs and wakes, men playing
cards in the corners of fields on Sundays and Saints' Days, the rumours
of battles and changes in the great world, the deliberate purposes of
those about him, troubled him with an inexplicable trouble; and the
country people still remember how when night had fallen he would bid
Duallach of the Pipes tell, to the chirping of the crickets, 'The Son
of Apple,' 'The Beauty of the World,' 'The King of Ireland's Son,' or
some other of those traditional tales which were as much a piper's
business as 'The Green Bunch of Rushes,' 'The Unchion Stream,' or 'The
Chiefs of Breffeny'; and while the boundless and phantasmal world of
the legends was a-building, would abandon himself to the dreams of his
sorrow.

Duallach would often pause to tell how some clan of the wild Irish had
descended from an incomparable King of the Blue Belt, or Warrior of the
Ozier Wattle, or to tell with many curses how all the strangers and
most of the Queen's Irish were the seed of the misshapen and horned
People from Under the Sea or of the servile and creeping Ferbolg;
but Costello cared only for the love sorrows, and no matter whither
the stories wandered, whether to the Isle of the Red Lough, where the
blessed are, or to the malign country of the Hag of the East, Oona
alone endured their shadowy hardships; for it was she and no king's
daughter of old who was hidden in the steel tower under the water
with the folds of the Worm of Nine Eyes round and about her prison;
and it was she who won by seven years of service the right to deliver
from hell all she could carry, and carried away multitudes clinging
with worn fingers to the hem of her dress; and it was she who endured
dumbness for a year because of the little thorn of enchantment the
fairies had thrust into her tongue; and it was a lock of her hair,
coiled in a little carved box, which gave so great a light that men
threshed by it from sundown to sunrise, and awoke so great a wonder
that kings spent years in wandering or fell before unknown armies in
seeking to discover her hiding-place; for there was no beauty in the
world but hers, no tragedy in the world but hers: and when at last
the voice of the piper, grown gentle with the wisdom of old romance,
was silent, and his rheumatic steps had toiled upstairs and to bed,
and Costello had dipped his fingers into the little delf font of
holy water and begun to pray to Mary of the Seven Sorrows, the blue
eyes and star-covered dress of the painting in the chapel faded from
his imagination, and the brown eyes and homespun dress of Dermott's
daughter Winny came in their stead; for there was no tenderness in
the world but hers.
He was of those ascetics of passion who keep
their hearts pure for love or for hatred as other men for God, for
Mary and for the Saints, and who, when the hour of their visitation
arrives, come to the Divine Essence by the bitter tumult, the Garden
of Gethsemane, and the desolate Rood ordained for immortal passions in
mortal hearts.

One day a serving-man rode up to Costello, who was helping his two lads
to reap a meadow, and gave him a letter, and rode away without a word;
and the letter contained these words in English: 'Tumaus Costello,
my daughter is very ill. The wise woman from Knock-na-Sidhe has seen
her, and says she will die unless you come to her. I therefore bid you
come to her, whose peace you stole by treachery. --DERMOTT, THE SON OF
DERMOTT. '

Costello threw down his scythe, and sent one of the lads for Duallach,
who had become woven into his mind with Oona, and himself saddled his
great horse and Duallach's garron.

When they came to Dermott's house it was late afternoon, and Lough
Gara lay down below them, blue, mirror-like, and deserted; and though
they had seen, when at a distance, dark figures moving about the door,
the house appeared not less deserted than the Lough. The door stood
half open, and Costello knocked upon it again and again, so that a
number of lake gulls flew up out of the grass and circled screaming
over his head, but there was no answer.

'There is no one here,' said Duallach, 'for Dermott of the Sheep is
too proud to welcome Costello the Proud,' and he threw the door open,
and they saw a ragged, dirty, very old woman, who sat upon the floor
leaning against the wall. Costello knew that it was Bridget Delaney,
a deaf and dumb beggar; and she, when she saw him, stood up and made
a sign to him to follow, and led him and his companion up a stair and
down a long corridor to a closed door. She pushed the door open and
went a little way off and sat down as before; Duallach sat upon the
ground also, but close to the door, and Costello went and gazed upon
Winny sleeping upon a bed. He sat upon a chair beside her and waited,
and a long time passed and still she slept on, and then Duallach
motioned to him through the door to wake her, but he hushed his
very breath, that she might sleep on, for his heart was full of that
ungovernable pity which makes the fading heart of the lover a shadow
of the divine heart. Presently he turned to Duallach and said: 'It is
not right that I stay here where there are none of her kindred, for
the common people are always ready to blame the beautiful. ' And then
they went down and stood at the door of the house and waited, but the
evening wore on and no one came.

'It was a foolish man that called you Proud Costello,' Duallach cried
at last; 'had he seen you waiting and waiting where they left none but
a beggar to welcome you, it is Humble Costello he would have called
you. '

Then Costello mounted and Duallach mounted, but when they had ridden a
little way Costello tightened the reins and made his horse stand still.