Norah's Good-bye
:
The World Peril Of 1910
The scene had shifted back from the royal city of Potsdam to the little
coast town in Connemara. John Castellan was sitting on a corner of his
big writing-table swinging his legs to and fro, and looking a little
uncomfortable. Leaning against the wall opposite the windows, with her
hands folded behind her back, was a girl of about nineteen, an almost
perfect incarnation of the Irish girl at her best. Tall, black-haired,
black-browed, grey-eyed, perfectly-shaped, and with that indescribable
charm of feature which neither the pen nor the camera can do justice
to--Norah Castellan was facing him, her eyes gleaming and almost black
with anger, and her whole body instinct with intense vitality.
"And so Ireland hasn't troubles enough of her own, John, that you must
bring new ones upon her, and what for? To realise a dream that was never
anything else but a dream, and to satisfy a revenge that is three
hundred 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 Irishman
now; and you're no good Irishman if you sell yourself to these
foreigners to do a thing like that, and it's your sister that's telling
you."
"And it's your brother, Norah," he replied, his black brows meeting
almost in a straight line across his forehead, "who tells you that
Ireland is going to have her independence; that the shackles of the
Saxon shall be shaken off once and for ever, even if all Europe blazes
up 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 everything
English."
"Hate England, John!" said the girl. "Are you quite sure that it isn't
an Englishman that you hate?"
"Well, and what if I do? I hate all Englishmen, and I'm the first
Irishman who has ever had the power to put his hatred into acts instead
of words--and you, an Irish girl, with six generations of Irish blood in
your 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 right
hand out towards him. "I'm as Irish as you are, and as Spanish, too, for
the 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; but
haven't you learned history enough to know that Ireland never was
independent, and never could be? What brought the English here first?
Four miserable provinces that called themselves kingdoms, and all
fighting against each other, and the king of one of them stole the wife
of 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 worth
setting the world swimming in blood for. You're lighting a match-box to
set the world ablaze with. It isn't Ireland only, remember. There are
Irish all over the world, millions of them, and remember how the Irish
fought in the African War. I don't mean Lynch and his traitors, but the
Dublin boys. Who were the first in and the last out--Irishmen, but they
had 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 the
daughter of your father and mother, I'd inform against you now."
"And if you did, Norah, you would do very little good to the Saxon
cause," replied her brother, pointing with his thumb out of one of the
windows. "You see that yacht in the bay there. Everything is on board of
her. If you went out into the street now, gave me in charge of the
constabulary, to those two men in front of the hotel there, it would
make no difference. There's nothing to be proved, no, not even if my
own sister tried to swear my life and liberty away. It would only be
that the Germans and the Russians, and the Austrians, and the rest of
them would work out my ideas instead of me working them out, and it
might be that they would make a worse use of them. You've half an hour
to give me up, if you like."
And then he began to collect the papers that were scattered about the
big drawing-table, sorting them out and folding them up and then taking
other papers and plans from the drawers and packing them into a little
black dispatch box.
"But, John, John," she said, crossing the room, and putting her hand on
his shoulder. "Don't tell me that you're going to plunge the world in
war just for this. Think of what it means--the tens of thousands of
lives that will be lost, the thousands of homes that will be made
desolate, the women who will be crying for their husbands, and the
children for their fathers, the dead men buried in graves that will
never have a name on them, and the wounded, broken men coming back to
their homes that they will never be able to keep up again, not only here
and 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 like
this upon humanity?"
"I'm an Irishman, and I hate England, and that's enough," he replied
sullenly, 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 loved
Ireland, Norah," he replied, with a snarl in his voice.
"And if I did," she said, with blazing eyes and flaming cheeks, "isn't
England nearer to Ireland than America?"
"Geographically, perhaps, but in sentiment--"
"Sentiment! Yes, when you have finished with this bloody business of
yours that you have begun on, go you through Ireland and England and
Europe, and ask the widows and the fatherless, and the girls who kissed
their lovers 'good-bye,' and never saw them again, what they think of
that sentiment! But it's no use arguing with you now; there's your
German yacht. You're no brother of mine. You've made me sorry that we
had the same father and mother."
As she spoke, she went to the door, opened it and, before he could
reply, slammed it behind her, and went to her room to seek and find a
woman's usual relief from extreme mental tension.
John Castellan went on packing his papers, his face grey, and his
features hard-set. He loved his beautiful sister, but he thought that he
loved his country more. When he had finished he went and knocked at her
door, 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, her
eyes glistening, and her lips twitching.
"Yes, good-bye, John," she said. "Go to your German friends; but, when
all the horrors that you are going to bring upon this country through
their 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 a
moment or two, and then with a slow shake of his head he went away down
the stairs out into the street, and along to the little jetty where the
German yacht's boat was waiting to take him on board.
Norah had thrown herself on her bed in her locked room shedding the
first but not the last tear that John Castellan's decision was destined
to draw from women's eyes.
About half an hour later the encircling hills of the bay echoed the
shriek of a siren. She got up, looked out of the window, and saw the
white shape of the German yacht moving out towards the fringe of islands
which guard the outward bay.
"And there he goes!" she said in a voice that was almost choked with
sobs, "there he goes, my own brother, it may be taking the fate of the
world with him--yes, and on a German ship, too. He that knows every
island and creek and cove and harbour from Cape Wrath to Cape Clear--he
that's got all those inventions in his head, too, and the son of my own
father and mother, sold his country to the foreigner, thinking those
dirty Germans will keep their word with him.
"Not they, John, not they. The saints forgive me for thinking it, but
for Ireland's sake I hope that ship will never reach Germany. If it
does, we'll see the German Eagle floating over Dublin Castle before
you'll be able to haul up the Green Flag. Well, well, there it is; it's
done 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 inner
bay, and disappeared to the southward. Norah bathed her face, brushed
out her hair, and coiled it up again; then she put on her hat and
jacket, and went out to do a little shopping.
It is perhaps a merciful provision of Providence that in this human life
of ours the course of the greatest events shall be interrupted by the
most trivial necessities of existence. Were it not for that the
inevitable might become the unendurable.
The plain fact was that Norah Castellan had some friends and
acquaintances coming to supper that evening. Her brother had left at a
few hours' notice from his foreign masters, as she called them, and
there would have to be some explanation of his absence, especially as a
friend of his, Arthur Lismore, the owner of the finest salmon streams
for twenty miles round, and a man who was quite hopelessly in love with
herself, was coming to brew the punch after the fashion of his
ancestors, and so, of course, it was necessary that there should be
nothing wanting.
Moreover, she was beginning to feel the want of some hard physical
exercise, and an hour or so in that lovely air of Connemara, which, as
those who know, say, is as soft as silk and as bright as champagne. So
she went out, and as she turned the corner round the head of the harbour
to the left towards the waterfall, almost the first person she met was
Arthur Lismore himself--a brown-faced, chestnut-haired, blue-eyed, young
giant of twenty-eight or so; as goodly a man as God ever put His own
seal upon.
His cap came off, his head bowed with that peculiar grace of deference
which no one has ever yet been able to copy from an Irishman, and he
said in the strong, and yet curiously mellow tone which you only hear in
the west of Ireland:
"Good afternoon, Miss Norah. I've heard that you're to be left alone for
a time, and that we won't see John to-night."
"Yes," she said, her eyes meeting his, "that is true. He went away in
that German yacht that left the bay less than an hour ago."
"A German yacht!" he echoed. "Well now, how stupid of me, I've been
trying to think all the afternoon what that flag was she carried when
she came in."
"The German Imperial Yacht Club," she said, "that was the ensign she was
flying, 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. "Mr
Lismore, it's a sick and sorry girl I am this afternoon. You were the
first Irishman on the top of Waggon Hill, and you'll understand what I
mean. If you have nothing better to do, perhaps you'll walk down to the
Fall with me, and I'll tell you."
"I could have nothing better to do, Norah, and it's yourself that knows
that 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'd
like to get the reason out of any other man. That's Irish, but it's
true."
He turned, and they walked down the steeply sloping street for several
minutes in silence.