Fairies and Folk of Ireland Part 5

"Oh, nothing would do for him," said Naggeneen, "but that he and his men must come on horseback. They can come no faster that way, but they think it's due to their dignity. They had to wait for the horses to be ready, and so I beat them."

Naggeneen had scarcely said this when the door flew open at the end of the hall, and, with a rush and a whirl, in came a great troupe of fairies on horseback--the King of All Ireland and his men. They all leaped down from their horses, and instantly every horse turned into a green rush, such as grows beside the bogs. The King of All Ireland walked quickly up to the King of the rath and stood before him, with an awful frown on his face. The King of the rath was plainly nervous.

"Will you have a light for your pipe, Your Majesty?" he asked.

"Never mind my pipe now," said the King of All Ireland. "Tell me first of all, who is this messenger that you sent to me?" The King of All Ireland had only a little bit of brogue--the Dublin kind.

"Sure," said the King of the rath, "that's only poor Naggeneen."

"Only poor Naggeneen!" cried the King of All Ireland. "And what are you doing with him? Do you see the red jacket he has on? Why doesn't he wear a green jacket, like your people? You know what his red jacket means as well as I. He belongs to the fairies who live by themselves, not to those who live together honestly in a rath. Why do you have him with your honest green jackets?"

"Sure, Your Majesty," said the King of the rath, "I thought it was no harm. He said he was tired of being by himself, and you know how handy he is with the fiddle or the pipes. If he'd been a fir darrig, that's always playing tricks and making trouble everywhere, why, then, of course--but he was only a poor cluricaun--"

"Yes," the King of All Ireland interrupted, "only a poor cluricaun, that does nothing but rob gentlemen's wine cellars and keep himself so drunk that he's of no use when he's wanted for any good. And hasn't he made you as much trouble as any fir darrig could do?"

"I was a lepracaun, too, once, Your Majesty," Naggeneen said.

"A lepracaun, were you? What did you do then? And when was it and how did it happen that a lazy lump like you was ever a lepracaun?"

"It was a long time ago," said Naggeneen, ready enough to talk about anything to draw the King's thoughts away from the trouble that he had made. "After old MacCarthy, of Ballinacarthy, died, those that came after him did not keep up his cellar well, and I felt lonely and sad, and I didn't care to drink any more--"

"Lonely and sad you must have been," said the King of All Ireland; "but you did drink still, did you not, though you didn't care for it?"

"True for you, Your Majesty," said Naggeneen, "I did a little, just for my health. But I was so lonely and so falling to pieces with idleness--"

"Falling to pieces with idleness!" the King interrupted again. "If idleness could make you fall to pieces, there wouldn't have been a piece of you left big enough to make trouble in a fly's eye, these last seven hundred years."

"As you say, Your Majesty," Naggeneen went on, "but, anyway, I was a lepracaun, and I did what any other lepracaun does: I sat in the field or under a tree and made brogues. But it was sorry work and people was always trying to catch me, to make me show them the gold they thought I had. And one time a great brute of a spalpeen did catch me, and he nearly broke me in two with the squeeze he gave me, so that I wouldn't get away till I'd showed him the gold. And I nearly had to show it to him, but I made him look away for a second, and then of course I was off. And after that my friend the King here let me come and live in the rath, just for company--not that I belong to his little tribe at all."

"And now you see," said the King of All Ireland, turning from Naggeneen to the King of the rath, "what trouble comes to you from taking those into your rath that have no right there. He's sending people out of Ireland that might be of use to you and to all of us. He wants to go with them, and that is no loss, but you want to go, too and to take all your people. That might be a loss, though I don't know that it would."

"We think it's best that we should go, Your Majesty," the King of the rath answered, meekly, "if you see no reason why not."

"I see reasons enough why not," said the King of All Ireland. "You don't know where you are going, nor what you'll find there. You don't know how you're to live, nor whether it'll be any fit place to live.

You don't know whether the people there will help you or hinder you."

"Wherever the O'Briens go, they'll help us," the King of the rath answered. "We don't like to have them leave us here."

"You've gone contrary to the law enough already," said the King of All Ireland, "in taking in this fellow with the red coat. Now you may take all the consequences of it and go where you like. I don't care where you go and I think n.o.body cares, only I think it may be best for all the Good People in Ireland to have you out of it. Mount your horses,"

he shouted to his men, "and we'll be off out of this!"

He took one of the little green rushes from the floor and sat astride it, as a little boy rides on his father's cane. "Borram, borram, borram!" he said, and instantly the rush was a beautiful white horse.

Every one of his men did the same. Each one took one of the rushes and sat astride of it and said, "Borram, borram, borram!" and every one of the rushes grew into a horse. There was a little whirring sound, like that of a swarm of bees, and they were all gone.

Everybody in the rath was silent for a few minutes. The King and the Queen looked at each other and were much troubled. Naggeneen, without making a bit of noise, scuttled down to the farthest corner of the hall. The others seemed not to know where to look or what to do or to think. Then the King turned toward them and said; "It's all over; we couldn't stay here now. Wherever has Naggeneen got to?"

The fairies who were nearest to Naggeneen hustled him forward and he stood before the King again. "Naggeneen," said the King, "it's trouble enough you've made for all of us, and it's ballyragging enough you and all the rest of us have got for it, and we don't know, as His Majesty said, what more is to come. So now do the only thing you was ever good for and give us a tune out of the fiddle."

It was the only thing that Naggeneen was good for, and the only thing that was not mischief that he liked to do. He took a fiddle from one of the fairies who had been playing for the dancing before all the confusion began. He held the fiddle under his chin for a moment, while everybody waited, and then he began to play.

He played first some old tunes that every fairy in Ireland knows well.

But not every fairy in Ireland can play them as Naggeneen did. They were tunes which everybody listening in that rath had known for hundreds of years. There were wild and strange airs that made them remember days when Ireland was a strange country, even to them; then the music was full of wonder and mystery, like the spells of the old Druids; then it was strong and free and fierce, and they thought of Finn McCool and the Fenians, and the days when Erin had heroes to guard her from her foes. The fiddle was telling them the story of their own lives and of all that they had ever seen and known. Now it was a strange music, which they could not understand--which the player could understand as little as the rest--but it was soft and sweet, and yet deep and bold, and the fairies trembled as they remembered the holy Patrick and a mighty power in the worlds of the seen and of the unseen. This pa.s.sed away and the music came with the stir and the swing of marching men, and the fairies were again in the days of King Brian Boru, with Ireland free and brave and strong. It grew sad; it gushed out like sobs from a broken heart; then it was quieter, but still full of a softer sorrow; now it was merry and reckless. It made the fairies remember all that they had ever seen in the lives of the people whom they had known so long--the cruel hardship, war, sickness, hunger, and then, besides, the faith, the kindliness, the light-heartedness that had saved them through it all. There were tunes that every man and woman in Ireland knows--tunes that you know--old airs that every Irish fiddler or piper or singer learns from the older ones, that the oldest ones of all learned, they say, from the fairies.

And under all the music, whether grave or gay, there went a strain of grief, sometimes almost harsh and sometimes scarcely heard, and as the fairies listened to it they grew pale at the thought that now they were to go away from all that they had known, to find something which they did not know. While they were thinking of this the music changed again. It was a soft murmur, like the sound of the sea that is kept forever in a sea-sh.e.l.l. Then it grew loud and rough, with the rush of winds and the crash of waves. The fairies were filled with fright, and before they knew that they were afraid, the music was singing a song of hope, and then, all at once, it grew as merry as if there had never been a sad thought in the world.

For a moment the fairies listened to it and all their feet began to stir restlessly on the floor. One of the fairy men caught the hand of a fairy girl--a fairy girl with cheeks like the tiny petals in the heart of a rose, with a white gown like a mist, and hair like fine sunbeams falling on the mist; he threw his arm about her waist, and they danced away down the hall. In an instant all the rest were dancing, too, alone, in pairs, and in rings. Naggeneen looked on and laughed till he could scarcely play. All this time his music had moved him less than anybody else who heard it. He did not feel what he had made the others feel, but he knew how to pour it all out of his fiddle.

The King made a sign for him to stop. All the dancers were still in an instant. The lights in the hall went out. The next minute, if you had been outside the rath and had laid your ear down on the turf which covered it, you would have heard nothing more than you might hear under the turf at any other time or in any other place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ]

IV

THE CLEVERNESS OF MORTALS

If you live in the city of New York, or if you have ever been in the city of New York for any long time, you know how disheartening, how terrible, and how altogether unreasonable the climate can be at times.

But you also know how heavenly it can be on an autumn day, when the sky and the air and the water are all in a good humor. To see and to feel the best of it, you must be down in the Narrows, or somewhere near there. The fierce heat has gone out of the air, but there is a gentle warmth left in it. All the sh.o.r.es near you are turning from green to brown and yellow, with here and there a dash of red. The sun makes every sail in the bay a gleaming spot of white. Far up the bay you see just an end of the city, with the tall buildings standing so close that it looks like one great castle, built all over a hill that slopes steeply down to the water on both sides. The Bridge looks like a spider's web, spun across to the other sh.o.r.e. Beyond it all the hills look purple, through the thin mist. If, instead of having seen all this often, you saw it for the first time--if you were coming from a far country, where you had always been poor--if you had toiled all your life to pay your rent, never expecting to do more--then perhaps you would look, more than anything else, at the giant woman standing before you and holding her torch high into the sky to light the world.

It was on such a day as this that the O'Briens and the Sullivans saw New York first. It was on the same day that the fairies who had left the rath and followed them saw it too. The O'Briens and the Sullivans had left their old home and gone to Queenstown, and the fairies had followed them. Cork and Queenstown had rather alarmed the fairies.

They did not like the look of a city. It looked cold and stony and uncomfortable. It did not look like a good place to dance out of doors at night. They almost wished that they had stayed at home and let the O'Briens and the Sullivans go where they liked without them. Some of them even wanted to go back, but Naggeneen laughed at them, and fairies can stand being laughed at even less than human beings. But they all hoped that when the O'Briens and the Sullivans got wherever they were going, it would not prove to be in a city.

Then the O'Briens and the Sullivans went on board a ship and were stowed away in a place forward, with many other people, which the fairies did not think roomy or airy or pleasant in any way. But they were not obliged to stay in it. They found better places on the ship.

n.o.body could see them, so they went where they liked. They went out on the bow, where the lookout stood, and watched with him for sails and for tiny puffs of smoke by day and for little glimmers of light by night. They ran about the bridge and swarmed up the rigging. They even danced on the deck, as if they were in a field at home; and the deck was dewy at night, just like the field. They fluttered and whirled in circles around the red light on the one side of the ship and the green light on the other side, and they reminded them of the rubies and the emeralds that had helped to light their own rath.

One day they saw swimming in the water beside the ship an ugly creature, like a man, with a red nose, tangled green hair, green teeth, and fingers with webs between them, like a duck's foot. There was another creature, like a woman, very beautiful, but with green hair, like the man. These were merrows--sea fairies.

"Where are you bound in that ship?" the merrows called to them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WHERE ARE YOU BOUND IN THAT SHIP?"]

"Where would we be bound at all," the King answered, "but to the States, where the ship's bound?"

"And what are ye goin' there for?" the merrows asked again.

"Sure," said Naggeneen, "it's followin' the O'Briens and the Sullivans we are, and it's the long way they're takin' us."

"Could you tell us what the States is like at all?" asked the King.

"Is it like Cork?"

"There's parts of them," said the man merrow, "that's more like Cork than Cork itself, and there's other parts of them that's no more like Cork than the sea here is like Cork Harbor."

"But are there no places there," the King asked again, "like the country parts of Ireland, with the fields and the bogs and all?"

"I can't tell you that," the merrow answered. "We've never been far on the land. Deep down under the sea it's the same way it is under the sea about Ireland. There's the land at the bottom, with the sand all fine and firm, like a floor, and there's the water above, like a green sky, and there are the sh.e.l.ls and the sea-flowers, and there are the weeds that wave around you and over you, like red and green and purple curtains to your house, and it's all as cool and as neat as any of the sea-places around Ireland. And if you like to go up to get the warmth of the sun or the light of the stars, there's white sand where you can lie at your ease, and there's great rocks where you can sit and look out over the sea and get the fresh breeze. And that's all we know of it; we've not been away from the sea."

And after a week of voyaging through the sea--after going on and on for so long and so far that both fairies and mortals began to think that they must soon fall over the edge of the earth--the ship suddenly stood up straight, instead of rolling and pitching about, and a little later they saw the giant woman before them, holding up her torch, and beyond her they saw the city. And then it was only a bit of a while longer till they came close to the city.