Obj^/^W^
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME
 
 Books by E. Temple Thurston 
 
 The Passionate Crime 
 
 Achievement 
 
 Richard Furlong 
 
 The Antagonists 
 
 The Open Window 
 
 The City of Beautiful Nonsense 
 
 The Apple of Eden 
 
 Traffic 
 
 The Realist 
 
 The Evolution of Katherine 
 
 Mirage 
 
 Sally Bishop 
 
 The Greatest Wish in the World 
 
 The Patchwork Papers 
 
 The Garden of Resurrection 
 
 The Flower of Gloster 
 
 Thirteen
 
 THE 
 
 PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 A TALE OF FAERIE 
 
 BY 
 
 E. TEMPLE THURSTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF "ACHIEVEMENT," "RICHARD FURLONG," 
 "THE ANTAGONISTS," "THE OPEN WINDOW," ETC. 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 NEW YORK 1915
 
 COPVMOHT, 1915, BY 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 TO DION BOUCICAULT 
 
 My dear Boucicault, 
 
 You have shown such a kind interest in this story for the 
 drama such as it may be which it contains, that I, long 
 ago, made up my mind to ask you to accept its dedication 
 when it came before the public in the garments of a book. 
 
 It still remains for me to dress it as a play and when that 
 comes to pass, I hope you will still approve of the tailor 
 who is indebted to you for the custom of much kindness. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 E. Temple Thurston. 
 
 Gellibrands, 191$.
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 PART I 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WHO, if any, I wonder, knows the true his- 
 tory of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quar- 
 termaine? Do I really know it myself? 
 
 Some of that which I heard was told me by an 
 old woman up in the mountains near Clogheen. This 
 was not so many miles from where they took An- 
 thony Sorel, therefore I persuaded myself that she 
 would be as likely as any to have the truth. More- 
 over there was something in the telling of it, some- 
 thing in the atmosphere that surrounded her in her 
 lonely cottage on that wild mountainside you 
 must know well what I mean which brought con- 
 viction to me. 
 
 This little hovel of hers stood in the scant shelter 
 of a cluster of mountain ash, only a few hundred 
 yards from the road that winds its silent and lonely 
 way through a pass of the hills. 
 
 Down that pass, the whole winter long the wind 
 drives the beaten rain, an endless herd of raindrops, 
 swelling the brown mountain streams as they froth 
 
 i
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 and fume over the bowlders. For ever they are 
 making cascades and waterfalls, these little streams. 
 Sometimes the mountain land offers them a hollow 
 wherein they swirl into an eddying pool. They look 
 so deep those pools. A mountain pool, a mountain 
 lake who would not believe in faeries, standing 
 by the edge of one of these ! 
 
 This was where the old woman lived who told 
 me the story of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quarter- 
 maine. She knew everything, this old woman. It 
 was as though, in that miserable hovel of hers, 
 many and many a mile from any place of habitation, 
 it was as though she heard, by some miracle, all the 
 gossip of the big world. I felt she knew far more 
 than she wished to tell. From whom did she get 
 her knowledge? That road from Clogheen across 
 the mountains, seems the loneliest road in the world. 
 For miles along its uneven surface, you may walk 
 and walk seeing never a soul, or just a herdsman 
 perhaps, driving his cattle to a distant farm. 
 
 Yet I suppose the whole of the world, the world 
 of those parts, goes by that way. There is no other 
 road I know of bearing to the south. And I can 
 well imagine the rush of joy that leaps up in the 
 heart of a traveler when, out of the lashing sheets 
 of mist and rain, he sees through the gray dark- 
 ness, the candle glimmering in her tiny window. 
 
 Why do I say "imagine"? I know well, without 
 a call upon my fancy, the joy I felt when first I saw 
 that candle-light. 
 
 Coming from Clogheen and nine long miles along 
 
 2
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 the road, with five and more still stretched before 
 me, I found the mist of the rain beating with pin 
 pricks on my face. It was difficult to keep my eyes 
 open. My clothes were drenched, the water drip- 
 ping in collected drops from the edges of my sleeves 
 and slowly draining from the sodden collar of my 
 coat. In the dim light, I could see the mountain 
 sheep, clinging under the shelter of the rocks, their 
 backs turned to the driving wind. 
 
 How many more miles? What hour of night 
 could I hope to reach my destination? My pace 
 had fallen to three miles an hour. How many more 
 miles? And then that little orange chink of light 
 through the ash trees the sight of the glimmering 
 window still more the quiver of trembling light 
 within that told its promise of a cheerful fire of 
 wood and peat. That rush of joy, I felt then. 
 
 I stepped off the road, staggering and stumbling 
 through the sodden marsh land. The water soaked 
 into my boots with squelching noises that seemed 
 to suck the last warm drop of blood out of my veins. 
 
 I knocked at the door and heard a grunt within 
 a human grunt that spoke in volumes of a deep 
 suspicion. Would she open to me? Would I open 
 to the first sound of a knock upon the door on such 
 a night, if I lived in those lonely mountains? 
 
 All fell silent and I knocked again. 
 
 Then I heard footsteps shuffling within -still a 
 suspicious sound, giving me no assurance of the 
 welcome that I needed. They slowly approached 
 the door. With the slow unbolting of a latch, it 
 
 3
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 was opened an inch. The wind seized it and against 
 her body blew it open still further. There was the 
 old woman. Like an animal's, accustomed to the 
 light, her face peered out blindly into the darkness. 
 
 "Can you give me shelter?" said I. 
 
 She paused in curious inquisitiveness before she 
 answered. 
 
 "Shelter ?" I repeated. 
 
 "Is it coming from Clogheen, ye are?" she asked 
 gruffly. 
 
 I said I was. 
 
 "What a fool ye are," said she "wid the night 
 on top av ye, an' ye in yeer little coat." 
 
 I explained that it was a fine sunset when I started 
 and did not promise for rain. But still she held the 
 door against the wind and made no movement to 
 suggest that she would take me in. 
 
 "Now I'm drenched to the skin," I went on "I 
 can't get to Cappoquin to-night." 
 
 "There'd be a corpse to be buried if ye did," said 
 she, and either it was the slow relenting of her deter- 
 mination or it was the wind, but the door yielded 
 another inch against her body. 
 
 "Could I just come in and dry my clothes by the 
 fire?" I pleaded. "The rain may stop soon." 
 
 Perhaps it was my pitiable ignorance of the 
 weather's ways in this part of the world that made 
 her fully relent, for at that she let the wind take the 
 door and swing it wide upon its hinges. I hurried 
 into the little room and she closed out the night 
 behind me. 
 
 4
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 It was a one-roomed cottage. There are so many 
 in the wild parts of Ireland. The floor was of mud, 
 caked and hard dirty it is true but warm and 
 welcome enough then. The fire burned brightly on 
 the floor under the open chimney the glowing peat 
 and crackling faggots were laid on two slabs of 
 stone. They would long have burnt deep into the 
 floor unless. 
 
 Without seeming too curious, I looked around 
 me. It must have been such a cottage as this in 
 which Anthony Sorel had lived. There was just a 
 bed, a table beneath the little window, a dresser of 
 painted deal upon which more of the blue and white 
 plates were broken than were whole. The lower 
 cupboards of this dresser were barred with strips 
 of wood, as a cage. There she kept her chickens. 
 Sometimes to a noise in the room, they shifted on 
 their perches, making raucous sounds as though 
 annoyed at the disturbance. For the most part they 
 were quiet company though, but none too clean. 
 The floor was soiled with them. Even a chair that 
 stood against the wall bore marks of their existence 
 in the room. The old woman had long lost all sense 
 of tidiness. 
 
 Realizing the solitude of her life there alone, I 
 scarcely wondered at it. It is the social instinct 
 that tends to make us regard the cleanliness and 
 well-seeming of the body. When we are surrounded 
 by the loneliness of life, it is the mind we live with. 
 Almost it is as though the body ceases to exist. This 
 h much what Anthony Sorel believed. 
 
 5
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 As soon as she had closed the door, the old 
 woman pulled up the chair from against the wall 
 and set it by the fire. The invitation for me to be 
 seated was a silent one. When she sat down her- 
 self on the three-legged stool near the bellows- 
 wheel, I sat down on the chair. 
 
 For the moment, while we were silent, I glanced 
 at the bed. No better description of it can I give 
 than by saying it was four-posted, yet it seemed 
 to be built into the wall; to be part of the room 
 itself. The bed-clothes were indescribable dirty 
 and disordered. The outer cover of the clothes 
 might well have been a horse-blanket, but stained 
 and long since indistinguishable from the thing 
 it once had been. What clothes there were beneath 
 it, I could not see. Indeed I felt I did not wish to 
 know. 
 
 But it was the odor of that room which first and 
 most of all revolted me. I find it impossible to 
 describe. So many scents were mingled there the 
 smell of peat, the burning wood, aromatic and 
 delightful enough in themselves, but mixed with the 
 smell of the chickens, the close atmosphere, my own 
 damp clothes perhaps as well and God knows what 
 odor from the old woman herself, they all combined 
 to offend my nostrils and stifle the breath in my 
 throat. It was like air out of which all the good- 
 ness and the cleanliness had been breathed; it was 
 heavy, tired, as the smell of flowers that have stood 
 long dead in water no one ever changed. And there 
 outside was the clean wind, leaving the scent of 
 
 6
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 heather in a lingering suspension as it rushed along 
 the mountainside. 
 
 It is strange though how quickly one's senses 
 become accustomed to the things which just a con- 
 trast makes unendurable. In a few moments, the 
 warm atmosphere had taken the chill out of my 
 blood and only the smell of the peat was conscious 
 to my mind as I sat there. 
 
 Outside the wind whistled and it howled. It flung 
 the rain like grains of sand against the window-pane ; 
 it rattled the door on its old hinges and threw the 
 raindrops down the chimney, spitting into the fire. 
 Never did it seem I had known such a night. 
 
 I said as much, hoping to make conversation, for 
 though in odd moments I could see the old woman 
 was taking cunning glances at me, yet for the most 
 part, she sat with her elbows on her knees, her face 
 in her hands, staring into the fire. 
 
 She looked up as though she pitied me when I 
 spoke about the rain. 
 
 " 'Tis fine and soft," said she and then, having 
 once spoken, her curiosity got the better of her. She 
 plied me with questions a? to where I had come 
 from, whence I was going; half ingenuous, half 
 cunning questions as to who I was and what I was 
 doing in that part of the world. 
 
 I pulled a book out of the little parcel of things I 
 was carrying and gave it into her hand. She just 
 looked at it as though it were a strange thing, being 
 no answer to her question and then returned it to 
 me.
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "An' what's that?" said she. 
 
 "A book of poems " I replied. 
 
 "An' what's the good o' them to me and I can't 
 read," said she. 
 
 "Can't read at all?" 
 
 "There's deuce a worrd I can read an' 'tis over 
 the shop windows, an' painted out for me as large 
 as meself. What's poethry to me? What would I 
 be doin' readin' in a place like this?" 
 
 I wished to conceal my astonishment. What 
 could she do in a place like that if she did not read? 
 
 "Have you never heard any poetry at all?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "Oh I have indeed," she replied quickly 
 "Haven't we a gleeman in these parts, an' he as 
 blind, he couldn't find the door, till the wind blew 
 in through the crack of ut." 
 
 I asked her if she liked poetry, to which she re- 
 plied she did "Well enough," she added "when 
 there's a lilt, ye could set yeer feet to ut." 
 
 I opened the book at random and I read out 
 
 "There is a wind that speeds across 
 The mountain heather and the moss, 
 And you alone will know the loss 
 If it has never found you. 
 
 It tunes the harp strings in the trees 
 That play their muted minstrelsies 
 Which fairies dance to on the leas, 
 Around and all around you." 
 8
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 I had scarcely finished the last word before her 
 elbows dropped off her knees and her eyes were 
 dancing in the fire-light with excitement. 
 
 "Shure, glory be!" she exclaimed "wouldn't I 
 know that as well as I'd know my own name ! 
 Wasn't ut up in the mountains here, away up there 
 by Knockshunahallion, that Anthony Sorel drew all 
 thim words down wid a lead pin on bits of paper." 
 
 A lead pin ! She meant with a pencil. But it was 
 not the quaintness of this expression that caught my 
 interest. She, who had never read a written word 
 in her life, knew, at first hearing, the author of the 
 verse I had read her! There was scarcely one in 
 England who could have told me by whom those 
 lines were written. 
 
 There she lived in that part of the world, where 
 the obscure fate of Anthony Sorel had woven its 
 completion on the loom whereon all men's lives are 
 spun. Knockshunahallion, so I calculated, was only 
 four or five miles away, but they were miles of 
 wildest Irish mountain land, where there is scarce a 
 man and never a woman who would walk them after 
 sunset when once the night had fallen. 
 
 Readily as her knowledge was to be accounted for, 
 it surprised me nevertheless. For this was my mis- 
 sion, to learn the truth of the story concerning An- 
 thony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine. Not one in 
 England could tell it me, beyond what had hap- 
 pened to filter through from the Irish papers at the 
 time. And that was well-nigh twenty years ago. A 
 few there were who had heard his name. Still fewer
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 knew that he was a poet. There was scarce one 
 who had read his verse. 
 
 His work, when all of it was collected, only made 
 a small volume that volume which I carried with 
 me in the knapsack on my shoulder. It had been 
 published by a man in Dublin who had been dead 
 some years and the book itself had long since gone 
 out of print. The volume which I possess, I picked 
 up on a bookstall in London, before Aldwych and 
 the Kingsway ever existed and Booksellers' Row 
 was that corner of the Romance of men's thoughts 
 which has long crumbled into the dust. 
 
 First I read the book, strangely attracted to the 
 verses it contained, strangely attracted by the beauty 
 of their imagery and mysticism. Some I could not 
 understand at all. Yet, even without the benefit of 
 understanding, one felt conscious of their over- 
 whelming beauty. 
 
 I began to make inquiries about the life of An- 
 thony Sorel. Who was he? Where did he live? 
 Where was he born? His intimate knowledge of 
 the folk and faerie lore of Ireland suggested indeed 
 that he lived there. I asked. But no one knew. 
 
 Two years went by before I discovered an old 
 bookseller in Netting Hill who could answer my 
 questions and then with no degree of assurance. 
 
 "Anthony Sorel?" he said. "You mean him that 
 killed that woman killed that woman Oh I for- 
 get her name." 
 
 "Killed a woman?" I said aghast "the man who 
 wrote those poems?" 
 
 10
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "That's it. Killed a woman." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "With his hands, I suppose. With a knife or 
 something like that." 
 
 "But why?" 
 
 "Ah why does a man kill a woman, unless it's 
 because he hates her or loves her overmuch." 
 
 "Are you sure of this?" 
 
 He nodded his head quite definitely. 
 
 "Was he hanged for it?" 
 
 "So I believe." 
 
 "When did this happen?" 
 
 "Well it must be twenty-odd years ago." 
 
 "Where?" 
 
 "In Ireland, they say." 
 
 "Why doesn't anybody know anything about it? 
 For two years I've been asking people and you're 
 the first man who's told me anything about it." 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "I know that much," he said, "because I once 
 had a book of his poems and a gentleman bought 
 it from me, out of curiosity, he said. I remember 
 his words at the time. 'You don't often find a poet 
 and a murderer mixed up in one man,' he said and 
 then he told me what I've just told you. He men- 
 tioned the name of the woman, but I can't remem- 
 ber it." 
 
 This much I learnt of Anthony Sorel from the 
 
 old bookseller in Netting Hill. It was quite enough 
 
 to rekindle my interest I read all his poems again, 
 
 thinking as the bookseller's customer had thought, 
 
 2 II
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "You don't often find a poet and a murderer mixed 
 up in one man." 
 
 And every one of those poems I searched for one 
 trace of that violence of passion which might show 
 how he had been driven to such a deed, yet every- 
 where there was gentleness itself a strange gentle- 
 ness that almost seemed as if it were not of this 
 world at all. 
 
 Only one couplet out of the many the book con- 
 tained seemed to strike into my mind with a mean- 
 ing I should not have dreamed of, if I had not heard 
 his story. 
 
 Out of sorrow out of pain, 
 You will find your soul again. 
 Seek it not with burning eyes 
 Where a starving passion lies. 
 Seek it not with quickening breath, 
 There it happens upon death. 
 
 Was it so he had happened upon death? Was 
 jealousy the cause, that common cause through which 
 so many men have lost the power and dignity of 
 reason? I read every poem once again, searching 
 in vain for allusion to the passion of jealousy. I 
 could find nothing but that gentle imagery, that 
 mystical aloofness as though, when once he had 
 taken up his pen, imagination and a buoyant 
 fancy had carried him into some other world than 
 this. 
 
 I tried to forget the matter then, but again and 
 again it kept recurring to my mind. You know 
 
 12
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 that sensation when some unaccountable instinct 
 prompts you to adventure. Every considered motive 
 of common-sense urges you not to set forth upon a 
 wild-goose chase, yet something deeper than your 
 conscience bids you go. Something, voiceless, tells 
 you that you are sacrificing the illimitable unknown 
 for the petty certainty of what you know. Up and 
 forth, that voiceless voice commands you and, if 
 there is but the spirit of a fearless soul within you, 
 you set out. 
 
 With spirit or without I went. The hunger of 
 curiosity, if it were that alone, drove me to Ireland. 
 From Dublin I took the train to Clogheen in Tip- 
 perary, the nearest point I could get to that part 
 of the mountains where Anthony Sorel had lived. 
 Then I set out on foot, with what adventure you have 
 heard already. 
 
 Imagine then, when this old woman, living alone 
 there in the heart of the mountains, imagine, when 
 she mentioned the name of Anthony Sorel, how my 
 heart leaped up. Already I felt that I was at the 
 very gates of discovery. 
 
 "What do you know about Anthony Sorel?" I 
 asked. 
 
 "Shure, what would I know indeed? 'Tis twenty 
 years an' more since he took the knife off av him 
 an' druv it into her soul, the way the blood was 
 burstin' out av both sides av her." 
 
 "He did kill her then?" 
 
 Perhaps I had hoped there had been some mis- 
 carriage of justice, some terrible fault in the reck- 
 
 13
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 oning wherein he had kept silence for honor's 
 sake. 
 
 "Is it kill her?" she replied. "Shure didn't they 
 find her body out there on the heather, with her eyes 
 turned up to the stars and the wind tossing her hair 
 about, an' she dressed like a peasant woman, the 
 way I'd be myself." 
 
 "Was he there beside her?" 
 
 "He was not. They found him when two days 
 had gone, sitting by the lake up there in the moun- 
 tains, he with no food in his stomach at all an' just 
 gazin' into the water, the way he'd be waiting for 
 them on May Eve." 
 
 By "them," I knew she meant the faeries. 
 
 "He was mad, then, was he?" I asked. 
 
 "Mad? Is ut mad? Shure they asked himself 
 down there in the Court House in Cork was he 
 mad and didn't he up and say to the judge, 'Them's 
 mad,' says he, 'as looks for justice the way they'd 
 hunt for a shillin' under a shtone.' 'Twas himself 
 said that to the judge. Shure, he was not mad at 
 all. Yirra, there are some livin' up in the moun- 
 tains there now, can well remember him and they 
 say that 'twas not himself that murdered the woman 
 at all but 'twas the way the faeries took her. A 
 man I know who says he's seen Queen Maeve an' 
 milks a cow himself wid a broken leg to ut, he swears 
 bi the saints he's seen herself walking an' she with 
 the faeries down there in Foildarrig." 
 
 "Then he believes that Anthony Sorel was inno- 
 cent?"
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "He does indeed and he will believe it so as long 
 as the goats make marbles." 
 
 "Where did she live? What sort of a woman 
 was she?" 
 
 "Is ut Anna Quartermaine ?" 
 
 "Was that her name?" 
 
 "That was the name av her an' she livin' down 
 at Ballysaggartmore in a great big house the size ye 
 could put a whole army av min into ut." 
 
 "Was she a lady then?" 
 
 "She was indeed, wid tin servants if ye plaze an' 
 they all hangin' on the steps av her like a row av 
 geese goin' down to the water." 
 
 "How did she come to be in peasant's dress then 
 up there in the mountains?" 
 
 I pressed my questions one quick upon the other, 
 for the more I heard, the more my curiosity awak- 
 ened; the more I felt the mysterious strangeness 
 in this story that was growing before my eyes and 
 at the very outset of my journey. 
 
 "How did she come to be in peasant's clothes?" 
 she repeated. "Shure how do ye come to be sitting 
 here on my chair and ye comin' all the ways from 
 London? Faith it just happened, I suppose, unless 
 it was as they say beyond over, that the faeries had 
 taken her then an' all the tin servants in Ballysag- 
 gartmore were out huntin' the heather for her, an' 
 she passin' by through the middle av them an' not 
 one to know who she was." 
 
 "Do you think the faeries had taken her?" 
 
 "Yirra, how would I know? There's a man up 
 15
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 there in Moonavaullagh and when last June was a 
 year, the Amadhan got the shtroke av him an' he 
 walking over Scart bridge. He's tellin' wonderful 
 tales now, but the earth'll turn over before ever 
 he sees the light of his wits again. Things 
 happen." 
 
 Having said that, she fell back again into her 
 former attitude, sitting there with her elbows on 
 her knees, her hands covering her face, staring into 
 the fire. And the wind howled outside and still the 
 raindrops came spitting down the chimney. I 
 thought of the lonely road I had just left, of the 
 infinite stretches of mountain land drifting into the 
 running mist and I had no wonder that these people 
 could believe in strange happenings. 
 
 By her very attitude, I knew that either she had 
 no more to tell me, or had fallen into that state 
 of reverie peculiar to her race from which no power 
 of mine could waken her. Still I plied her with 
 one more question. I asked her if she could tell 
 me where I might find the man who had known 
 Anthony Sorel, the man who had seen Anna Quar- 
 termaine walking with the faeries in Foildarrig. 
 
 "Are ye a police officer?" she asked then with a 
 cunning glance at my face. 
 
 I told her I was not. 
 
 "Then what's on ye? What is ut ye're after 
 wanting to find wid the pore man?" 
 
 "I don't want to find anything with him. I just 
 want to try and make out why Anthony Sorel killed 
 Anna Quartermaine." 
 
 16
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "There's a man livin' on Crow Hill knows that," 
 said she, "but he wouldn't tell if God asked him in 
 a little voice the way ye'd whisper a thing out av a 
 child." 
 
 "What's his name?" 
 
 "He goes by the name of Malachi " 
 
 "Malachi what?" 
 
 "Faith if he knew that, he might be claimin* 
 himself out av the line of the kings of Ireland, he 
 said." 
 
 I stamped that name on my memory and then 
 she would say no more. She sat in her reverie 
 until the kettle boiled on the peat fire. In silence 
 she made the pot of tea, pouring a cup out for 
 me and a cup for herself. It was black. There 
 was no milk, nor did I like to ask for any. The 
 liquid was warm and comfortable. I felt thank- 
 ful for that. Still in silence, she offered me a piece 
 of dry griddle bread, baked in the ashes of the fire, 
 the crust of it still gray where it had rested in the 
 embers. 
 
 When the meal was finished she rose from her 
 three-legged stool and, without divesting herself of 
 a single garment, she climbed up into the bed and 
 covered herself with the horse blanket. 
 
 "Ye can sleep there on the chair," said she "or 
 ye can lie on the floor, if yeer skin's not tinder 
 an' ye won't mind the way the chicken fleas'll be 
 at ye." 
 
 I said I would stay on the chair. So there I sat 
 and, as the wind shook the door on its hinges, I said 
 
 17
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 good night in my gratitude for the shelter she had 
 given me. 
 
 She made no answer, but I could hear the beads 
 clicking one by one between her fingers as she prayed 
 herself to sleep.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THERE is little mysticism in England; the lives 
 of people are almost destitute of imagination. 
 Perhaps it is so in all big cities and England, 
 in most parts, is one big city now. 
 
 There are many who claim imagination, as, with 
 more right no doubt, they claim a sense of humor. 
 But their imaginings are prompted by experience. 
 They imagine of the things that will be, from the 
 things that have been. In Ireland they do not -do 
 that. 
 
 In Ireland they imagine of the things that will be 
 and the things that are, not from what the past has 
 taught them, but as if they turned their eyes to 
 heaven and had seen strange visions or as if they 
 looked out into the mist across the mountains and 
 heard strange sounds no other man had heard be- 
 fore. There is that look in their eyes as in the 
 eyes of a man who has just wakened out of sleep, 
 not knowing which is more real, the world he lives 
 in or the dream he has just dreamt. So they come 
 easily to their belief in the faerie people. 
 
 I came next day to Crow Hill in search of Malachi 
 and found him to be an old man with such a look in 
 his eyes as that of which I speak. 
 
 He too lived in a one-roomed cottage that clung 
 in lonely fashion to the side of Crow Hill. There 
 
 19
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 you look upwards towards the summit of Knock- 
 shunahallion that pierces into the low-hanging clouds. 
 In nearly all the seasons of the year, the mists are 
 eddying round it, steeping the lonely paths of it in 
 mystery. 
 
 There is always mystery in the thing you know 
 of but cannot see. That is why mountains are so 
 mysterious. There are but few days in the year 
 when the peak of Knockshunahallion emerges into 
 the clear sunlight and gives its face to the world. 
 Then, as the people in those parts say, it is a woman, 
 caught unawares as she looks at her reflection in a 
 mirror. "She has the truth in her face to-day," is 
 what they say. But it is not as if it were the truth 
 they desired. No one it seems would choose the 
 truth from a woman. Mystery must envelop her. 
 There the heart of her beauty lies. They are more 
 at ease, more satisfied there on the mountainside, 
 when the summit of Knockshunahallion is hidden in 
 the misty vapors that conceal her face as a veil of 
 gossamer conceals the eyes of a woman. So they 
 know her best. 
 
 There are many of them afraid of the faeries in 
 those parts; many of them who would not dare to 
 venture forth after dark on the roads when it is 
 May Eve. But that fear of the mysterious, that 
 consciousness of the unseen and the unknown is so 
 much a measure of their lives, that they would not 
 be without it. It seems as if they would mistrust 
 life unless. 
 
 When the old man Malachi opened the door to 
 20
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 my knocking and I found him a withered creature 
 some seventy years of age, dressed in a brilliant red 
 shirt, a leather belt supporting on his limbs a pair 
 of trousers of unbleached flannel, it was not these 
 facts about him that I noted most. It was the look 
 in his eyes. He thought I was a faerie man and 
 dared not close the door in my face, neither dared 
 he open it further and let me in. 
 
 As I learnt from him long before we parted, he 
 had seen faerie people many times in his life. Once 
 a black pig that had looked at him over the wall, 
 then uttered cries like a dying child as it sped off 
 into the darkness. That night, so he told me, a 
 black hen of his died on the roost under the old 
 dresser. It fell to the floor with its head severed 
 from its body, yet no one had slept in the house 
 that night but himself. 
 
 Again there was an old woman dressed as the 
 old women thereabouts are who set a spell on his 
 eyes and took him up into the mists of Knock- 
 shunahallion, showing him there a pit in the earth 
 that looked down into the heart of the world and 
 there he saw his mother in Hell. His mother had 
 hanged herself from the lintel of the door when he 
 was a boy, because her husband continually beat her 
 until life was a sick thing in her heart. Malachi had 
 found her hanging there with the face of her dull 
 black, her lips swollen, her tongue hanging out on 
 her cheek with the flies walking over it. 
 
 The priest had told him she was in Hell, because 
 when a woman receives a beating at the hands of her 
 
 21
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 husband, she must bear it patiently. It was the 
 scourge of God upon Eve, the priest told him, and 
 his mother had gone to Hell because she had taken 
 her life to avoid it. He had pointed to the flies, 
 saying that was a proof of where she was. 
 
 So the old woman had taken Malachi up into the 
 mountains and shown him his mother in Hell and 
 his mother had called out, asking him to take the 
 fire out of her eyes, but when Malachi had made to 
 climb down into the pit, the old woman had held him 
 fast. He had closed his eyes and struggled with 
 her, because he loved his mother much. Suddenly 
 then, her resistance vanished. He opened his eyes 
 and found himself standing knee-deep in the wet 
 heather on the side of Knockshunahallion and the 
 dawn was breaking out in -red and gold over the 
 ridges in the east. But the pit and the old woman 
 had vanished. She was a faerie, he told me. 
 
 When I came to hear these things, I understood 
 only too well that look in his eyes as he opened the 
 door that day to me. 
 
 It was not easy with that expression, half of won- 
 der, half of fear, to explain what I wanted of him 
 then. Indeed I remembered the old woman on the 
 Clogheen road; what she had said of him; how 
 he knew about Anthony Sorel, but would not tell, 
 not even if God asked him in a little voice so she 
 had put it as you would try and whisper a thing 
 out of a child. 
 
 For a moment then I was at loss to speak, but, 
 swiftly gathering my wits together, I asked him if 
 
 22
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 he knew of an inn in those parts where I could get 
 lodging. 
 
 At that he came outside his house and closed the 
 door. There was the instinct of self-protection in 
 the way he did it. It almost seemed as if he were 
 relieved by the opportunity my question gave him of 
 definitely keeping from me the shelter of his roof. 
 
 "If ye go down the road past Doon," said he, 
 "there's wan bi the name av Foley keeps a public- 
 house at Araglin. Himself has a room there he let 
 to a foreigner last year." 
 
 I smiled at his use of the word "foreigner." Yet 
 it is true enough, we are all foreigners to them. 
 Although we both spoke the same tongue, I felt 
 that he found me no less strange than I did him. 
 
 How was I ever to learn it struck me then how 
 was I ever to learn from him a story, he would not 
 tell even to God Himself? But that doubtless was 
 her way of speaking. I did not wholly despair. 
 
 "How many miles is Araglin from here?" I asked. 
 
 "Well it might be two and it might be three." 
 Now he was eyeing me more with simple and fear- 
 less curiosity. "If I'd be walkin' it myself, I might 
 find it was three." He looked me up and down. 
 "But ye've got the good legs on ye," he added, as 
 though the distance differed as no doubt distance 
 does according to your power of covering it. 
 
 I have often thought that. There is the distance 
 of the mind and there is the distance of the body. 
 It is so with Time. What are clocks? One mo- 
 ment can be eternal. 
 
 23
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Do you often walk that distance?" I asked, seek- 
 ing with every effort to draw him into some sort of 
 conversation. 
 
 "Every Sunday to Mass.'' 
 
 "There's a chapel there?" 
 
 "There is." 
 
 "Who's your priest?" 
 
 "Father Dorgan. Sometimes we'd be havin' 
 Father Killery from Ballysaggartmore." 
 
 I know my eyes must have lighted up at that. 
 
 "Ballysaggartmore," I repeated "that's where 
 Anna Quartermaine lived isn't it?" 
 
 He snatched a quick glance at me, quick and full 
 of suspicion. 
 
 "How did ye hear tell of Anna Quartermaine?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "Wasn't it she who was murdered by Anthony 
 Sorel?" I replied. 
 
 He turned his head away, looking up to the peak 
 of Knockshunahallion where the mists were still 
 floating after the night of rain. And then he spoke, 
 not as if he were speaking to me, but with a far-off 
 note in his voice as though he would cast it to the 
 ears of a people in another world than this. 
 
 "Let them bring forth the seed of his body," this 
 was what he said, "but when a man do be walkin' 
 up and down in the mountains, the way a child hunts 
 for shells at the strand of the sea, they'd destroy 
 him entirely and they leanin' out to take hold of the 
 seed of his mind." 
 
 I listened intently, but not one word had a mean- 
 24
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 ing, save that of conjecture, to me. He spoke of 
 women and with a bitterness and contempt you so 
 often find amongst the men in the wildest parts of 
 Ireland. Indeed the land is dearer to them far. It 
 is the land and seldom a woman they leave behind 
 them when they go into the far countries. It is 
 not often their poets sing of women but of the land. 
 Beauty in women is a snare. They mistrust it. 
 Few of the evil spirits in that sad country are men. 
 A strange sexlessness inhabits the souls of the Irish 
 people. Fierce as their passions are, they are more 
 the passions of an excitable mind than of a suscep- 
 tible body. So is the fame of Ireland world-wide 
 for its virtue. 
 
 I looked at him as he spoke, wondering at the 
 strangeness of his life, could I but know it all ; com- 
 paring it with the lives of the men I knew in Lon- 
 don, with my own life as well. He was a different 
 being. It was not race that separated us, nor mode 
 of living, neither habits, nor customs, nor language, 
 so much as the whole structure of our minds. We 
 are products of a modern civilization here; but in 
 Ireland, with all the fervor of their Catholic faith, 
 they are pagans, touching the truer meaning of things 
 in all their mysticism and aloofness. It is they 
 alone, amongst all the people of the West, who know 
 the true value of life, who can appreciate the real 
 momentary significance of death. 
 
 "Are you speaking of Anna Quartermaine?" I 
 asked him. "Are you speaking of her when you 
 say that?" 
 
 25
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "I'm sayin' nothing at all," said he, "but what 
 any man might be sayin' wid his eyes turned in- 
 wards." 
 
 I offered him my pouch of tobacco, but he shook 
 his head, taking out of his pocket a roll of coarse 
 twist from which, with an old knife, he proceeded 
 to cut a piece off into the horny palm of his hand. 
 This he thrust into a remote corner of his jaw and 
 then spat upon the ground. 
 
 I watched the far-off expression in his face as he 
 turned the quid in his mouth. It was true enough 
 what the old woman on the Clogheen road had said. 
 He would not tell his secrets even to God. How 
 great a task then lay before me to persuade him to 
 tell them to a foreigner! 
 
 I felt no object was to be gained then by staying 
 there any longer. I must get him accustomed to 
 talking to me before I could approach the subject 
 of Anthony Sorel again. Those moments with him 
 were only time wasted. He had been there in that 
 cottage on the side of Crow Hill for forty years, 
 so he told me forty years off and-on. He was not 
 going to leave it then. I could visit him again. I 
 determined accordingly to climb up there from 
 Araglin every day every day until I had wooed 
 from his lips the story I had set myself to hear. I 
 was confident then in the early moments of my quest. 
 But little did I know how difficult it would be ; how 
 in the end, mere chance, rather than the power of 
 my persuasion, would only wring it from him. 
 
 "Well," said I, at last "I suppose I'd better be 
 26
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 moving on. Can I miss my way to Araglin from 
 here?" 
 
 "The road'll take ye," said he as if I were a 
 child in its arms. "He has a fine room in the public- 
 house there. I've heard tell 'tis an iron bed he has, 
 wid knobs av gold on ut a man once tuk off an' sold 
 to a tinker for a wealth uv money. But himself got 
 thim off av him when he'd a drop taken an' they in 
 the bag he had in his hand." 
 
 I moved away, saying I would tell the publican 
 who had recommended me to his inn. I said it 
 thoughtlessly, supposing it might mean a drink 
 for him when he was down that way. I mentioned 
 his name. 
 
 "Who told ye I was named Malachi?" said he 
 with quick suspicion, and I knew at once from the 
 look in his eyes that I had raised an immediate bar- 
 rier of apprehension in his mind. 
 
 "An old woman," I replied "on the road from 
 Clogheen." 
 
 "Wouldn't I know ut!" he exclaimed. "Glory be 
 to God isn't there more talk in a woman's mouth 
 'than ye'd find lashins of fish in the sey?" 
 
 I closed my lips and said no more. There was 
 nothing more to be said. A little bridle-path twisted 
 down to the road I could see winding away to the 
 moors in the distance. Down that I stepped and 
 when I had reached the road, I looked back. He 
 was standing as I had left him, outside his door, 
 gazing after me with those little eyes screwed deep 
 into his head, his red shirt flaming like a soldier's 
 3 27
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 coat against the deep green of the heather. He 
 seemed like a mountain sentry, guarding the gates 
 behind which lay that secret my heart was now set 
 upon discovering.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 IF you climb over the high moorland that rises 
 straight up above Ballyduff and the river Black- 
 water, you will, after an hour's rough walking, 
 look down into the green vale of Araglin, through 
 which the river of that name winds its way. Near 
 and beyond it on the right rises the peak of Knock- 
 shunahallion, while to the left, another six miles 
 away, across a valley fed by the river Funshion, 
 stands Galtymoor, lifting its three thousand feet of 
 deep blue mountain into the sky. 
 
 Not in any proper sense of the word is Araglin 
 a valley, but so steep rises the moor and mountain 
 land about it that, as you look down, it seems 
 like a hidden emerald in the cup of these giants' 
 hands. 
 
 They have a passion for names everywhere in 
 Ireland a passion moreover they know most poet- 
 ically how to express. A cluster of white and pink- 
 washed cottages, scarcely claiming the dignity of a 
 street, will yet be given the honor of a name as 
 though it were a village in itself. Such a place was 
 Araglin in those days. I have no doubt it is just 
 such a place to-day. 
 
 From the top of those moors, you could faintly 
 see that handful of cottages like a cluster of peb- 
 bles in the bed of a stream. If of such a place you 
 
 29
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 can speak of a population, then there were a hundred 
 souls no more. 
 
 A blacksmith with his forge was there. There 
 was Foley, the publican. In one of the cottages 
 lived a cobbler who followed a starving trade. Only 
 the men at work in the fields and a few of the 
 women wore boots that came to his last for the 
 mending. There also stood alone, with all the dig- 
 nity of a two-storied dwelling, the house where 
 Father Dorgan lived at the time of which I write. 
 
 I have reason to speak of this house again, and 
 may well describe it. Baggs' House it was called, 
 from an old man of that name who had built it. 
 There it had stood for sixty years and more, hidden 
 away in a group of pine and oak trees. He had 
 cared little for a view, it had seemed, still less for 
 the open light of day. The oak trees must have been 
 there for over a hundred years. He had merely 
 cleared a space in the midst of them and there set 
 down his dwelling-place. Though quite close to the 
 rest of the cottages in Araglin, it was a lonely spot. 
 
 All through the winter days and nights, the rain 
 dropped from the trees on to the gravel drive, then 
 green with moss and the tufts of grass that grew 
 up here and there. In summer it was little better. 
 All the sky was shut out, even from the upper win- 
 dows. The gaunt, big rooms with their high ceilings 
 were filled with an indescribable gloom which even 
 the light through the abnormally large windows 
 could not disperse. 
 
 The walls were weather-slated to the ground. 
 
 30
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 The windows had gray shutters that once were 
 white. The whole house seemed to have been built 
 on land of marshy dampness. Everything about it 
 exuded water. In the rooms the faded paper was 
 peeling in places from the walls, the ceilings were 
 discolored and cracked. The knocker on the hall 
 door, the iron bell-handle at the side, the metal slit 
 of the letter-box, the scraper on the ground, they 
 were all rusty, and the moss grew even in the cracks 
 of the great slab of stone that served as a doorstep. 
 
 Father Dorgan cared little enough for these signs 
 of decay. He cared no more for the unenviable 
 reputation that clung to his house itself. It was 
 haunted, they said. There were those in Araglin 
 old people it is true, to whom maybe visions come 
 easily who had seen the ghost of Simon Baggs, 
 with his full-bottomed coat and the stock about his 
 neck, as he walked up and down from the front door 
 of his house to the iron gate that opened on to the 
 drive from the road. 
 
 I can well imagine the specter. I have approached 
 that rusty black gate at night time, making my way 
 to the house, and with but the gentlest flight of 
 fancy could believe I saw between the twisted bars 
 that square set face so they describe him the 
 beetled brows behind which the little eyes shone cun- 
 ning and clear. Often as I have waited on that moss- 
 covered doorstep, waiting for the untidy servant to 
 open the door to my ringing, I have almost felt con- 
 scious of his presence in the dark avenue of trees. 
 While the old bell has jangled through the hollow 
 
 31
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 house to a heavy silence, I have almost believed I 
 heard his footsteps on the sodden gravel drive and 
 have waited with an unnatural eagerness for the 
 door to be opened, giving me the warm comfort of 
 the light within. 
 
 Here it was then that Father Dorgan lived, and 
 from him, in that lofty dining-room of his, after his 
 evening meal, when the fire was lighted and glasses 
 of hot punch stood between lighted candles, steam- 
 ing before us on the table, I learnt somewhat of 
 Anthony Sorel, but not that secret for which I 
 sought. 
 
 But before I can come to this part of my story, 
 I must speak first of Foley's public-house where I 
 remained all the time I was at Araglin. 
 
 Tom Foley was not a prepossessing man. Like 
 Simon Baggs' house he needed the light of day. 
 Malachi once said of him to me, "The sun never 
 shines through the windows of his soul." It was 
 true. No one had ever seen him out in the open 
 air. From the time he rose in the morning until 
 the hour when he went to bed, he never crossed 
 the threshold of his bar parlor. There he took his 
 meals ; there he sat all day and talked and was never 
 wanting for company. 
 
 I found him that morning leaning over the bar in 
 the parlor, his bloodless face quite expressionless as 
 he listened to the conversation of three men. One 
 was the driver of a donkey butt which, with its load 
 of glittering sprats, he had driven all the way from 
 Ardmore. It was standing outside the door as I 
 
 32
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 came in. The two other men were laborers from 
 the fields, the earth thick-caked upon their boots. 
 
 As I entered, the man from Ardmore was describ- 
 ing a haul of mackerel he had seen the fishermen 
 make in Ardmore Bay. All the wealth of language 
 and richness of exaggeration by which in Ireland 
 they do make speech so real a thing, was swelling 
 from his lips. 
 
 "The gulls had been cruishting outside all day," 
 he was saying "an bi evenin', there they were in, 
 the bay, lashin' the water, an' it black wid the tails 
 av thim and they turnin' over an' over shure 
 couldn't I see thim myself, glitterin' there like a 
 woman's body an' she buried in jools, the way Shaw- 
 neen, whin he made the gold in America, tuk one o' 
 thim bad women and drowned her in pearls." 
 
 As though suddenly aware of the presence of a 
 stranger, his voice dropped on the last words almost 
 to a whisper. He stopped speaking and they all 
 turned round. 
 
 U A man named Malachi," said I "on Crow Hill, 
 told me you had a room here where I could put up 
 for a night or two." 
 
 "Is ut the man who has great talk about the 
 faeries?" asked the one who came from Ardmore. 
 "Him havin' the story of the old woman who 
 showed him his mother, an' she burnin' in Hell?" 
 
 "Is ut the old fella beyond, wearin' a red shirt 
 he got off a tinker woman comin' out of Dingar- 
 vin?" 
 
 They all asked questions about Malachi. Not one 
 33
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of them seemed concerned with what I wanted, least 
 of all the publican himself. 
 
 When I had satisfied them who my informant was, 
 I inquired of Foley if it were true h'e had a room 
 to let. 
 
 "I have indeed," said he, but made no movement 
 to show me where it was or to get to business. He 
 still leaned there over the dirty counter of his bar 
 and stared at me with curious eyes. The others 
 drank their porter and stared at me as well. 
 
 "Well could I see it?" I inquired. 
 
 "Ye cannot," said he. 
 
 "It's not to let then?" 
 
 "It is indeed shure aren't I just after sayin' so." 
 
 "Well," said I "I should like to see it if I could." 
 
 "An' I'm tellin' ye, ye can't," he replied. 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Because there's an old sow been havin' a litter 
 of fourteen there last week and the good 'ooman 
 has not had the inclination to tidy up the place since. 
 I'll set herself on to ut now and 'twill be ready for 
 ye in an hour's time." 
 
 It was not a cheerful prospect, but I had to make 
 myself content with it. No other place was possible 
 in Araglin and whatever it proved to be, I knew I 
 should have to be satisfied. 
 
 The building itself was long, low and one- 
 storied. No painted sign was there outside to 
 attract the unsuspecting traveler. Doubtless it once 
 had been a row of cottages and, with the monopoly 
 of the trade, had grown into one establishment. 
 
 34
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Father Dorgan's was the only two-storied house in 
 the neighborhood. Even the constabulary where the 
 two policemen dwelt, was a thatched cottage, rising 
 not more than one floor from the ground. 
 
 For that hour, whilst the good woman was over- 
 coming her disinclination to tidiness and my room 
 was being made ready for me, I wandered about the 
 village. 
 
 On the banks of the river Araglin, I found the 
 whole constabulary, the two policemen, responsible 
 for law and order, fishing for trout in the brown 
 waters of that little rushing stream. Both eyed 
 me, not with suspicion, but with a candid, village 
 curiosity. Araglin sees few travelers. Few 
 strangers ever come that way. 
 
 A little further on beyond the village, I saw the 
 figure of a priest walking before me on the same 
 bank of the river. I knew it must be Father Dorgan. 
 He was reading his morning office, but before I came 
 up with him, the task was finished. I saw him put 
 the book away in his pocket. 
 
 Here was a man, I thought, who no doubt could 
 help me in my quest. The parish priest in Ireland 
 knows his people as well as he knows the well- 
 thumbed pages of his breviary. 
 
 "Good morning, father," said I. 
 
 He turned more quickly than seemed natural to 
 his mood at the sound of a strange voice. 
 
 "Good morning to ye," said he and immediately 
 his curiosity got the better of him. "You're a 
 stranger in these parts," he added. 
 
 35
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 I was, I told him. I said at once I came from 
 London. 
 
 " 'Tis a great place," said he. "Is ut the way 
 ye're goin' to Ballyduff over for the fishin' ?" 
 
 "No," said I "I'm not a fisherman. I'm just 
 going to stay for a bit at the inn here, if they can 
 put me up." 
 
 "Oh shure, Foley'll see to that," said he with 
 a humorous knowledge of the man. "He'd put up 
 the King himself an' feed him on ham an' eggs 
 rather than miss a bit of money." 
 
 I felt in the way he said it, that he had spoken 
 of the King for my benefit, to please me because he 
 knew I was an Englishman. Had I been one with 
 a brogue from Dublin, he would have spoken of the 
 Pope, maybe. 
 
 In swift moments during the silence that followed, 
 I stole quick glances at him while we walked to- 
 gether, just as I knew he was taking his stock of me. 
 
 He was a thin, spare man. Large-boned he was, 
 with big, nervous-looking hands and high cheek 
 bones, throwing deep shadows into the hollows be- 
 low. His eyes were gray and set far back beneath 
 the overhanging brows. He gave me the impression 
 that he fasted often and was given much to the 
 chastisement of his body and his soul. I could 
 imagine him, like monks of old, inflicting upon him- 
 self the pains of flagellation, beating himself as he 
 said his prayers. 
 
 What he found in me, I cannot say, but without 
 conceit, I think I am right in believing that from 
 
 36
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 the moment of our short conversation that morning, 
 he took a quiet fancy to me. 
 
 "How long are ye goin' to stay in Araglin?" he 
 asked me presently. 
 
 I admitted the truth. I did not know. It all 
 depended so much upon the success of my quest. 
 
 "And shure what brought ye to this shtrip of 
 God's earth?" said he, smiling, it seemed to me, in 
 order to conceal his curiosity. 
 
 "I was told I should find an inn here where I could 
 put up." 
 
 "Who told ye?" 
 
 "An old man up in the mountains there a man 
 named Malachi." 
 
 "Malachi living on Crow Hill! Glory be to 
 God, shure there's a strange wan for ye ! Ye don't 
 find the likes of him walking down the Shtrand in 
 London." 
 
 I laughed. 
 
 "He's an interesting old man," said I. 
 
 Father Dorgan's face assumed a serious expres- 
 sion. His eyes, as Malachi had said to me, in that 
 moment were looking inwards. 
 
 "Away in the mountains here," he said presently 
 "and in all the mountains in the west, ye'll find 
 many a man like Malachi. Yeer advanced doctor, 
 he'd say they were mad. Shure, bring them down 
 into the cities and 'tis mad they are. But up there 
 in the mists, in their lonely cottages, there's a queer 
 kind of wisdom about thim, the way they'd know 
 " r hings it 'ud seem strange for any human man to 
 
 37
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 get a hold of. He's traveled, mind ye, that old 
 man. Many's the season he's been harvesting in 
 Wales across the water. There's not a word he can 
 read or can write, but he'll tell ye tales he might 
 have ransacked the libraries of Europe for, if ye'll 
 give him a drop of whisky to warm up the blood in 
 his veins. Oh shure he's mad and there are times, 
 mind ye, when I'd be as mad meself if by that I could 
 see the things he has the power of seeing." 
 
 "What things?" 
 
 I was as ready to be curious as he. For it was 
 not only what he said, but the lowering of his voice 
 to a note of suggestive suppression my ears were 
 only too eager to receive. 
 
 When he did not answer, I asked again. 
 
 "What things?" 
 
 He looked up at me with a slow smile a smile, 
 characteristic of him, which never seemed really to 
 fulfill its first intention, but died away before it had 
 suggested laughter. 
 
 "Have ye ever been to this country before?" he 
 inquired. 
 
 "Yes," said I. 
 
 "But ye live in London?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well there's not much ye'd understand if I 
 were to tell ye a half of the things that old man can 
 see with his two eyes shut." 
 
 "Do you fancy me incapable of thinking that 
 those are the things worth seeing?" I asked. 
 
 He stopped a moment as we walked and stood 
 38
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 gazing across at the mountains, then turned sharply 
 and looked at me. 
 
 "Ye do think that?" 
 
 "I do," said I, falling easily into that habit of 
 speech in Ireland which neither allows of yes or no. 
 
 "Come round one evening while ye're here," said 
 he "an' have a talk with me. Just drop in." 
 
 By now we were standing on the rough stone 
 bridge that spans the river, carrying the road from 
 the south up into the mountains. Before I had 
 time to thank him for the invitation, he had left me. 
 With long, slouching paces he was striding up the 
 road, his head dropped between his shoulders as 
 one, not only who thinks and reads, but carries his 
 thoughts with him wherever he goes.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 IN an hour's time the room at Foley's was ready 
 for me, Mrs. Foley herself took me in charge 
 and brought me to the door of it, explaining 
 in a ceaseless flow of conversation how it was not 
 usual for them to have strangers coming that way 
 for whom they had to prepare the room at a mo- 
 ment's notice. 
 
 Indeed that sudden preparation had put her in 
 none the best of tempers. She was prepared for 
 immediate aggression. I was obliged to pick my 
 words. As she flung open the door, she gave me 
 to understand that if by word or look I showed I 
 did not like the room always the room, as though 
 it were a state apartment then I might go else- 
 where and waste no time about it. 
 
 But " 'tis aiqual to the deuce," said she 
 "whether ye like it or not." 
 
 This was what she said as she flung open the door. 
 It was, I felt sure, a sensitive apprehension that 
 brought about this aggressiveness in her. I was 
 English. For all she knew I might be accustomed 
 to the most luxurious style of living and were I to 
 express an opinion reflecting upon her pride, she 
 would no longer have had any occasion for me. 
 
 This is the pride of all these people. Poor, un- 
 tidy, wanting even in cleanliness and with no pos- 
 
 40
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 sessions of which to boast, they are yet intensely 
 proud kings and queens of an impoverished mon- 
 archy. So far as one can find justification for it, 
 it is true pride; not that of purse or of possession, 
 but a pride in themselves and always apprehensive 
 of injury. 
 
 She stood there regarding me in readiness for a 
 rebuff as I looked round the room. There was the 
 bed Malachi had spoken of, doubtless an 
 inspiring piece of furniture to them in Araglin, 
 though I could not believe how anyone had ever 
 found it worth while to steal those lacquered brass 
 knobs that adorned it. A piece of carpet, thread- 
 bare and long won; 'in holes, partly covered the 
 floor. The washstand, the dressing-table, the chest 
 of drawers, they were of plain varnished deal. 
 There was no fireplace. Above the window hung 
 tattered lace curtains, in places rent, with jagged 
 edges. There was no blind. 
 
 "Well this will do splendidly," said I "it's an 
 excellent bed." 
 
 'Tis a feather mattrass," said she more genially. 
 "Shure, 'twas I brought it out of Dingarvin whin 
 I was married to himself." 
 
 "I'm sure it'll be very comfortable," I replied 
 amiably. 
 
 "Well it is then. Haven't I slept on it times and 
 again whin himself had a drop taken an' he kickin' 
 me out av me own bed. They say 'tis the way 
 thim mattrasses -do be harborin' the insects, shure 
 I wouldn't believe it at all. It wasn't many I
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 found on that wan and there am I tellin' ye now." 
 I thanked her for her candid information as best 
 I could and thereby made another friend in Araglin. 
 Once having passed the ordeal of my approval, she 
 became kindness itself. There was nothing that she 
 would not do for me. Indeed for many a long day 
 shall I carry in my mind the memory of Mrs. Tom 
 Foley. She was a buxom woman, though energetic 
 enough, with all the abundance of flesh God had 
 given her to carry. Her little eyes, half opened, as 
 though at birth the eyelids had never properly been 
 parted, were full of twinkling good humor. She 
 was, I think, the plainest woman I have ever seen. 
 Those little eyes of hers, so crudely set beneath a 
 shapeless forehead, were like the eyes of a pig, 
 half mischievous, half cunning. Her voice was the 
 most raucous thing in women I have ever heard. To 
 add to the penetrating power of it, it was high- 
 pitched and, as one who drives in nails, she ham- 
 mered it relentlessly upon your ears. 
 
 But with all these disadvantages, she was a homely 
 creature, given to gossip as all of them are, to spite- 
 ful gossip when her temper was roused; but a good 
 friend and generous with it all to those who found 
 favor in her eyes. 
 
 I have taken some pains to describe her because 
 if there is such a thing as the practical aspect of 
 life in Ireland, it is women like Mrs. Tom Foley 
 who represent it. She stands out in my mind in 
 violent contrast to the lonely figure of that old man 
 up in the mountains, even to the quiet figure of 
 
 42
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Father Dorgan who, had it not been for his faith, 
 would have been as much a visionary as any. 
 
 Greatly as all this may seem to be digressive, it is 
 in reality no departure from my story. Conditions 
 of life in Araglin then, were much the same as when 
 Anthony Sorel lived in his little one-roomed cottage 
 on the side of Knockshunahallion and came down 
 the mountain road into the village to buy such food 
 as he needed. 
 
 As I have heard from all those who saw him, it 
 was often only bread he bought. Cronin was the 
 baker in those days, but he had been dead some 
 many years, the cottage and little bakehouse pass- 
 ing into the hands of Wolsey, his successor. 
 
 But even on that first day of my arrival, I found 
 one, an ex-policeman, living on his pension in a little 
 cottage at the end of the village, who had seen 
 Anthony Sorel many times on those occasions when 
 he came down from the mountains. 
 
 From him I received my first description of An- 
 thony Sorel's appearance. Together with other 
 sources of information, I have pieced together a 
 picture in my mind, the accuracy of which I, at least, 
 am content with. 
 
 At the time that he must first have met Anna 
 Quartermaine, he was still a young man, not more 
 than thirty-seven at the utmost. 
 
 "But I've seen older men with less years on their 
 backs," said the ex-sergeant, describing the appear- 
 ance of his age to me. 
 
 I can quite understand how he did not carry him- 
 4 43
 
 self to the full height of his five foot eleven. This 
 exact measurement I had on good authority. He 
 was not a small man. But what I have said of 
 Father Dorgan, could doubly have applied to 
 Anthony Sorel. His thoughts, his imaginations, his 
 belief in faeries, these alone he lived with, carry- 
 ing them with him wherever he went. His figure 
 too was slim, not exactly wasted in any sense, but 
 with that slightness of body which tells of an ever- 
 consuming fire within. 
 
 : 'Twas himself burnt the candle of his soul," one 
 old man said to me and well I can understand the 
 expressiveness of that phrase. 
 
 The color of him was dark, his black hair, as one 
 may well suppose with such limited conveniences as 
 Araglin could afford, untidy, long even, and un- 
 kempt. The tone of his skin was pale, no color in 
 his cheeks; but not as in one who suffers from ill- 
 health. 
 
 "Is ut suffer wid his health," said one to me 
 "an' he livin' like a goat on the side of the moun- 
 tains?" 
 
 I can quite believe he was strong and healthy 
 enough. That burning candle of his soul consumed 
 the heat of blood in him. Our country people in 
 England, living such open lives as this, have no 
 emotions of the mind upon which their blood 
 may spend its warmth. Their cheeks are apple red. 
 They go to their sleep at nights with easy souls 
 and minds untroubled by the lightless skies. It is 
 not this way with those who live in such fashion in 
 
 44
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Ireland. There was not one of those people in the 
 mountains, unless here a young girl or there a young 
 man, who showed a pair of rosy cheeks all weather- 
 burnt with glowing health. Yet they are strong 
 enough and perhaps a thousand times more tenacious 
 of life. 
 
 This I imagine was the condition of Anthony 
 Sorel. Because his cheeks were thin and pale, I do 
 not suppose him one of fragile health. I have seen 
 the cottage, now roofless and windowless, where he 
 lived and there, in the teeth of the countless winds 
 of God's heavens, it would have been hard for any 
 man to have suffered in his body and have lived. 
 
 His eyes, they told me, these were the most strik- 
 ing feature he possessed, and that I can imagine well. 
 Some eyes are dull and almost lifeless ; some sparkle 
 to the healthy blood that rushes through the veins. 
 There are eyes that shine, all brilliant with their 
 own intelligence. But the eyes of Anthony Sorel held 
 never the same light from one day to another. They 
 burnt as they looked outwards. They slumbered 
 as they gazed within. 
 
 "I've seen him look," the old sergeant said to 
 me "the way ye'd think he was pickin' the soul out 
 av ye wid the point of a pin; an' I've seen him look, 
 the way ye'd feel ye might be gone, dead and buried, 
 for all he'd know ye were there at all." 
 
 From such descriptions as these it is, that I have 
 gathered and pieced together in my mind a picture 
 of Anthony Sorel, convincing enough, indeed indel- 
 ible to me. 
 
 45
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 His forehead may have been high, but that black 
 hair in loosened locks mostly covered it. I do not 
 imagine his face to have been of that order one 
 speaks of as intelligent. It was long from the eyes 
 to the chin. The mouth was so sensitive, I can well 
 conceive of the temerity of those who spoke with 
 him. But it was a wonderful face, they have told 
 me. Tenderness and understanding were all alive 
 in it when his mind was not occupied with that mys- 
 terious aloofness which seemed to erect an insur- 
 mountable barrier between himself and those with 
 whom he came in contact. 
 
 One interesting thing, the old sergeant said to 
 me. In all the investigations I made regarding the 
 life and death of Anthony Sorel in Ireland, I remem- 
 bered it best of all. 
 
 "What was on him at all," said he, "for him to 
 be takin' the knife to her? Shure he wouldn't have 
 taken a green linnet out of its nest that was the 
 way wid him." 
 
 Unhappily it must be said that amongst the Irish 
 people, kindness to animals and birds is the extreme 
 proof of gentleness. In those parts I cannot speak 
 of others they think nothing of taking a linnet 
 from its nest as it sits bravely and fearlessly upon 
 the eggs. Once caught, they put it in a cage using 
 it as a snare to catch its mate. It would even amaze 
 them to hear that that was cruelty. 
 
 The sergeant truly thought him a gentle creature 
 when he admitted that. 
 
 "It was with a knife he killed her then?" I asked. 
 46
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Shure it was av course and he with fingers like 
 the strings av Patsy Troy's fiddle, the way ye'd think 
 they could speak if they touched ye. Faith if he 
 took hold of a bubble, he wouldn't break ut." 
 
 This was another little feature to add to my mind 
 portrait of Anthony Sorel. Fingers like fiddle 
 strings! It is expressive in its way. I can see the 
 sensitive hands which that simile brings so vividly to 
 my mind. White as a woman's perhaps, tender 
 and gentle too. Hands that were all a part of the 
 expression of intense refinement in him. If he took 
 hold of a bubble, the sergeant said, he would not 
 break it. I can well imagine them giving that im- 
 pression to a man of his superficial observation. 
 But I can see the nervous strength in them too, the 
 emotional power which, under the stress of passion, 
 could well commit the deed of which he was accused 
 and convicted; for which he suffered the utmost 
 penalty of the law. 
 
 "You're all sure he killed her then," said I, pres- 
 ently. 
 
 "Shure, wasn't he tried at the Cork Assizes and 
 didn't they hang him up at the jail there along by 
 the Western Road? Haven't I seen the place my- 
 self? Did ye think ut was the way the faeries had 
 taken her?" 
 
 He put this last question to me with a laugh. In 
 the capacity of a late member of the force, he had 
 nothing to do with such stories as that and would 
 let me know it. But when I did not join in his 
 laughter, when he saw the still serious expression in 
 
 47
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 my eyes, the Celt in him rose uppermost. The 
 laughter fell from his lips and he leant across to me. 
 
 "I met a woman once, mind ye," said he, lower- 
 ing his voice "an' she after walking all the ways 
 out of Ballyduff. 'Twas herself told me she'd seen 
 Anna Quartermaine on a May Eve. The mists were 
 over Ballysaggartmore and there were the cows 
 standin' out in the fields the way she couldn't see 
 their feet an' they up to their knees in the white 
 water of the mist like as they'd be standin' in a 
 stream. An' didn't she have to take her ways 
 across the fields, not seeing her feet beneath 
 her as she put them down and with the heart beat- 
 ing in her because it was May Eve an' after dark 
 the night when the faeries are out, singing up 
 in the mountains an' dancing down the boreens. 
 'Twas she heard the voice of someone singing and 
 there's a woman, mind ye, who'd tell no lies. 'Twas 
 singin', she said, like ye'd 'tice sleep out av a child. 
 And there up against the flank of one of the cows 
 sat herself, milking the beast an' she croonin' all 
 the whiles to herself. It was as if the mist rose up 
 all round her and made a dress for her to clothe 
 herself in and there was drops of dew in her hair 
 that shone like rubies and emeralds in the light of 
 the moon. Wisha, I dunno did she see it at all, but 
 there was a woman who told no lies before or since, 
 an' she goin' to Mass every Sunday in Ballysaggart- 
 more." 
 
 "You do believe in faeries then?" I asked, for his 
 voice had come to that whisper when a man believes 
 
 48
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 the truth of all he says as though it were the inspired 
 word of God. 
 
 "I do not," said he. "Shure why would I be- 
 lieve in faeries, an' I drawing me pension from the 
 Gover'ment like an honest man?" 
 
 I could not help smiling. It was no longer the 
 Celt who spoke. Officialdom will kill even the spirit 
 of the race in man. This was the price of his 
 pension. 
 
 Here then I have tried to convey the portrait of 
 Anthony Sorel that is so plainly set before my mind. 
 No picture of him that I have ever heard of is in 
 existence. I have had to content myself with the 
 gleanings from the observations of others, and these, 
 with no reservations, I have written into the text 
 of this story, which surely no other country btit 
 Ireland could ever have made.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 EARLY the next morning, I took the mountain 
 road and went in search of Malachi. 
 
 The day had broken with all the riches of 
 brilliant sunshine, but before long, out of the south- 
 west rode a fleet of clouds. They moved like ships 
 of war in battle array. The foremost of them 
 as they came, swept their shadows down the moun- 
 tainsides like the colored raiment a magician flings 
 and flings again distractingly before your eyes. I 
 never felt so much as then, the living things that 
 mountains are, with moods and fancies in such 
 bewildering variety. 
 
 As with a woman, never are they wholly revealed. 
 The most searching light of sun, the clearest and 
 most cloudless sky cannot disclose all the secrets they 
 contain. Never do they stand forth entirely robbed 
 of mystery. With shadows one peak will protect 
 another as with a thousand subtleties a woman will 
 protect her sex. Always there is some ravine, some 
 deep abyss the sun can never penetrate. 
 
 I watched the light that morning come and go as 
 I walked up the mountain road. In its most brilliant 
 illumination, as in its deepest shadow, it was always 
 the same; there was an emotional sense of mystery 
 in that world of solitude, no process of the mind 
 could explain away. 
 
 50
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Then, as I walked, I set to wondering whether I 
 could find in the never-expressed recesses of my con- 
 science, that real belief in faeries and the spirits of 
 the other world. But they were too intangible to me 
 then. 
 
 By the time I had reached the foot of Crow Hill 
 and it became necessary for me to leave the road, 
 taking to the little path that made its way through 
 the heather, the fleet of clouds had gathered into 
 rain. A thin mist was blowing like puffs of smoke 
 across the mountains. Knockshunahallion was now 
 hidden, now in sight as if in moments it spoke and 
 then again was wrapped in some silent contemplation 
 within itself. So after some days in that part of the 
 world, I came to the understanding of how the 
 mountains and the trees, the streams and lakes can 
 all speak to one speech like the discourse of a close 
 and understanding friend who talks of things nearest 
 to the unspoken secrets of one's soul and can fall 
 into that truest silence with its utter absence of intru- 
 sion upon all one's thoughts. 
 
 Reaching my destination, I found the old man, 
 Malachi, digging in the patch of ground beside his 
 cottage. As soon as he heard my footsteps ap- 
 proaching, he ceased from his labor and leant heav- 
 ily upon his spade, watching me as I came up the 
 path. 
 
 "Well I find the inn very comfortable," said I 
 "thanks to your recommendation. It's a great bed, 
 that bed with the brass knobs." 
 
 "I niver seen it meself," said he guardedly. 
 
 51
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 It was the way he spoke, as much as the way 
 he looked at me that for one instant made me feel 
 ashamed of the part I was playing. I was there 
 to steal a secret from him, a secret he would not 
 confide to God Himself and I felt the unconscious 
 resentment in him against my presence there. What 
 right, I asked myself, was with me in the purpose 
 of my mind? The secret, if indeed he possessed it, 
 was his. His jealous guarding of it was a proof of 
 what it meant to him. 
 
 For when once a secret is spoken, it plays no 
 longer any part in the life of him who held it. The 
 very words that tell it, are the broken atoms it 
 becomes. 
 
 Should I go back, relinquishing my quest? Should 
 I let it for ever be the mystery it was to me; believ- 
 ing, when the mood would have it so, that the faeries 
 had taken Anna Quartermaine or in another humor, 
 seeing it merely the outburst of passion in a criminal 
 mind? Why was I not content with the mere knowl- 
 edge that Anthony Sorel had killed her, content as 
 others were to whose knowledge the fact had chanced 
 to come? 
 
 In those moments of a pricking conscience, I asked 
 myself these questions; for then I could see myself 
 as a common journalist, picking the souls of others 
 for my daily bread. But it was no good asking 
 them. I was not content. Some hidden purpose, 
 foreign to all gain, seemed there to be served if I 
 could but prosper. I had gone too far in my search. 
 It had become impossible to turn back then. I put 
 
 52
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 the mood away and talked to Malachi about him- 
 self. 
 
 It was early Spring then. He was preparing the 
 patch of ground for his potatoes. 
 
 "Do you eat much meat?" I asked him, curious 
 in mind about his ways of living. 
 
 "Meat?" He looked at me with his little eyes. 
 "Where -would I be eatin' meat?" 
 
 "None at all?" 
 
 "Sometimes they give me a pig's cheek salted and 
 I'd be eatin' a bit o' that." 
 
 I asked him if he did not buy fish from the men 
 who came round with their donkey butts. 
 
 "There was a man down there in Araglin," I told 
 him, "who came from Ardmore with sprats." 
 
 "I haven't tasted fish these tin years," he replied, 
 " 'cept on Good Fridays when I'd be makin' a 
 meal for meself an' havin' a piece of ling. Shure 
 where would I be gettin' the copper money to buy 
 fish from thim fellas?" 
 
 "Don't you get any money for the work you 
 do?" 
 
 "Work? Shure, I don't work. What work 
 would I be doin' an' me hands tied in knots?" He 
 took a hand from his spade and held it out for me 
 to see; a twisted, horny thing like some willow root, 
 bent and wrinkled with its clinging to the earth. "I 
 live here, yirra," he added "I don't work. What 
 work would a man like meself be doin' here away in 
 the mountains?" 
 
 It was as we were speaking that the mist broke 
 
 53
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 into driving rain. He shouldered his spade and 
 made slowly for the cottage door. 
 
 "May I come in?" I asked as he opened it. 
 
 "Shure, why not," said he. 
 
 I followed him within, watching him in silence as 
 he took the handle of the bellows-wheel and kindled 
 the dull embers of his little fire into flames. 
 
 "What do you do with yourself here in the long 
 winter evenings," I inquired presently. "In Jan- 
 uary and December when it's dark at four o'clock?" 
 
 He looked up at me as though questioning my 
 right to that inquisitiveness. I thought at first he 
 was going to keep silent, but at last he spoke. 
 
 "Aren't there all the tales of the world for a 
 man to be tellin' himself?" he asked strangely. 
 "Wouldn't a man be dumb with the tongue stiff in 
 his mouth an' he havin' no man to talk wid him?" 
 
 "Who comes up here then to talk to you those 
 nights?" 
 
 "Shure, who, indeed! Is there a man would trust 
 himself out from his fireside on the black mountain, 
 whin the cry of a curlew would turn the blood to 
 ice in him?" 
 
 "Who do you talk with then?" I persisted. 
 
 "I talk wid meself. Aren't I after sayin' a man 
 would be dumb wid the tongue stiff in his mouth? 
 Shure I talk with meself." 
 
 He said it as though there were two persons within 
 him and I experienced a strange sensation of awe, 
 rather than that of fear, as I thought of that old 
 man alone there through the wintry evenings, alone 
 
 54
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 in his cottage in the mountains. I wondered what 
 the things were he could say strange things I 
 imagined, which, could I but hear them, I should 
 scarcely understand. A feeling almost of horror 
 came over me. I shuddered as I considered the 
 strangeness of his life. It was so far out of the 
 world. I knew well how in civilized conditions, 
 those conditions in which we tell ourselves all prog- 
 ress lies, how this old man would be thought to be 
 mad. 
 
 He could not read, he could not write. So much 
 had Father Dorgan informed me. And there alone, 
 while the long winter evenings spun out their dark- 
 ness into the deeper blackness of the night, he sat 
 by his fire telling himself the tales of the world. 
 What tales were they? Straightly I asked him what 
 kind of tale he meant. 
 
 "The tales of the men who have loved and fought 
 with the sword," he said "the tales of the men 
 who have gone into the still places, where the beatin' 
 of yeer heart would be no more than the wind in 
 the grasses. The tales of war when the hosts came 
 up out of the East and the hosts came up out of the 
 West and one woman was the death of tin thousand 
 men." 
 
 I watched his face in wonder while he was say- 
 ing this. Had the circumstances been different, had 
 it been any other man, I should have thought he was 
 talking wild nonsense, trying to impress me with the 
 knowledge and the wisdom he possessed. But I 
 could not think that of him. He spoke indeed like 
 
 55
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 one concealing his knowledge rather than expressing 
 it. He made me feel there were a thousand things 
 in the world he knew of, to which my mind was as 
 dead. 
 
 And then at last, after he had been speaking in 
 this strain for some moments, he launched forth into 
 one of the wildest and most inconceivable stories I 
 had ever listened to in all my life. Scripture and 
 history, mythology and folk-lore, all were mingled 
 in one incoherent narrative that took no heed of 
 time or place but sped through the centuries and 
 across the regions of the world with such disregard 
 for the accepted dimensions of possibility as could 
 only have come from an unconstrained imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 Then I realized somewhat of what Father Dorgan 
 meant when he said that Malachi was mad, but that 
 it was a madness he would not fear to share if it 
 gave him the power of seeing those things which 
 Malachi could see. 
 
 What were those things, I wondered, for slowly 
 the belief was growing in me that such things did 
 indeed exist. My eyes were blind to a whole world 
 that was revealed to this old man. The external 
 things were those only which I could see. But for 
 him, there was a vision beyond mere externals. He 
 could speak of the passion of a thousand years, as 
 I should speak of the life of one man. He could 
 see in terms of things eternal, when I must divide 
 my day by the hands of a clock. In his imagination, 
 he could travel to the furthest ends of the earth, 
 
 56
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 speaking in wild poetry of lands I only could reach 
 by aid of modern science and could not conceive of 
 without. 
 
 As these thoughts came to me, I looked about the 
 room in search of some clock or means by which he 
 could determine on the hour. There was none. 
 
 "Don't you keep a clock here?" I asked. 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "Have you got a watch then?" 
 
 "I have not," said he. 
 
 "How do you tell the time then?" 
 
 His little eyes dwelt on me for some moments. I 
 felt almost there was contempt in his mind as he 
 regarded me. At last he answered. 
 
 "Away there," said he and he pointed through 
 the wall of the cottage "away there lies the East 
 an' whin the sun comes burnin' up over Knockna- 
 fallia, 'tis the day, an' whin it drops in a bloody red 
 behind Carran Hill there, 'tis night. Isn't that 
 enough for a man to be knowing? How would I be 
 readin' one o' thim clocks an' I can't read me own 
 name? Shure, glory be to God, let thim talk about 
 time as gets paid bi ut. Time 1" he exclaimed and 
 what a note of contempt he had in his voice "Yirra, 
 I wouldn't distress meself wid ut." 
 
 I thought of our clerks in the cities, watching the 
 hands of the clock as they worked at their desks. I 
 thought of the thousands whose daily attitude 
 towards life was as that of a man who with his own 
 fingers counts out the minutes on the graduated dial. 
 These were they and in their millions, who distressed 
 
 57
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 themselves with Time. So many of the external 
 things were on their hands to do, yet they must divide 
 them into a thousand atoms to help them count its 
 passing. But this old man without one property to 
 distract his mind could count his day just by the 
 rising and the setting of the sun. At that moment 
 I looked at him with honest envy. 
 
 "I wish I could say as much," said I. 
 
 We fell then to talking of different matters. Of 
 what was going on in the world that world I had 
 left behind me I found he knew nothing. Had he 
 been able to read, I doubt if he would ever have 
 seen a paper. His world was his own. He made 
 it out of his imagination, but so far from that making 
 him unintelligent, it was as though in a man who has 
 lost the sense of sight, all other senses were more 
 keenly tuned in him. He spoke the wisdom of his 
 own thoughts which made me realize how much the 
 spread of education and of modern journalism has 
 killed the power in a man to think for himself. 
 
 Wild as his wisdom was, there were in it those 
 great and sudden flashes of the truth. "Time !" he 
 had said "I wouldn't distress meself with ut!" 
 And had he said that alone, I should have given him 
 more wisdom than I could have found in a day's 
 march amongst the men one knows as wise. Who 
 but one who thought for himself would have imag- 
 ined the use of that word? To distress oneself with 
 Time ! How many thousands there are who do ! 
 
 So, as we talked of other things, I led him gently 
 to the subject foremost in my mind. He spoke of 
 
 58
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 the lonely lake in that desolate hollow on Knock- 
 shunahallion. 
 
 "Shure, there's no depth to ut at all," said he, 
 lowering his voice mysteriously; by which I knew he 
 meant that it was fathomless. " 'Tis black as night. 
 Haven't I seen the water on a day in Summer and 
 the sun shining down into ut, with shafts av light 
 the way ye'd go blind in the eyes if ye tuk a look 
 up at ut, an' didn't the light shtrike down white into 
 the water an' didn't the water turn it as black as 
 Tim Hennissey's goat? It did indeed. Shure if ye 
 threw a shtone into that lake and wint round the 
 world and came back again on yeer two feet 
 shtandin', 'twould still be sinkin' an' sinkin'." 
 
 This was the lake by the side of which they had 
 found Anthony Sorel. I urged Malachi to tell me 
 
 more. 
 n 
 
 Has anyone ever been drowned in that lake?" I 
 asked and I found my voice too was dropping to the 
 mysterious whisper as though to keep in tune with 
 his. 
 
 He stared for a long while into the fire and then 
 at last he answered. 
 
 "Did ye hear them speak of Maggie Donovan at 
 Tom Foley's at all?" he inquired. 
 
 "No," said I. 
 
 For a moment he looked silently before him. 
 Then he spat into the fire. 
 
 " 'Twas she had the beauty of all women," he said 
 presently "an' she with the young fellas from all 
 over, dancing wid her at the cross roads an' takin* 
 
 5 59
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 her walking up there into the hills. 'Tis crazed they 
 were an' she as beautiful as a blackthorn tree on a 
 long Spring day." 
 
 He would have fallen into a reverie once more, 
 continuing the story in the silence of those dreams 
 of which his life seemed greatly to be composed. 
 Indeed I remember now, for it comes thus prompted 
 to my mind, the vivid impression he gave me then; 
 it was as of one walking in his sleep who wanders 
 from room to room of a vast and silent house, each 
 room, as he comes upon it, awakening some dim 
 remembrances of the daily life, then fading again 
 into the muffled distance of his dream. 
 
 Into such a reverie, he would have fallen then, 
 but with the eagerness of my questioning, I stirred 
 him from it. 
 
 "What happened to Maggie Donovan up at the 
 lake?" I asked. 
 
 He moved on his chair, but still his eyes were star- 
 ing deep into the heart of the fire as though it were 
 the essence of those thoughts his mind was 
 wrapped in. 
 
 " 'Twas Maggie Donovan was walkin' by the 
 road, an' she in her hair wid her littleen shawleen. 
 dropped down behind her neck, coming by Foildar- 
 rig. An' hadn't she the beauty of all women, an' 
 didn't the sparks come out of the boots av the min 
 that danced wid her at the cross roads, the way they 
 danced so lustily? They did indeed. And wasn't 
 there Nanno O'Shea wid her that day and she tellin' 
 the priest whin the thing had happened?" 
 
 60
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "What happened then?" 
 
 Despite myself, despite that spirit of materialism 
 in me which I had believed no other spirit could 
 subdue, I found myself listening with breath eager 
 on my lips, my eyes fixed on his. 
 
 "There came wan out av a pass of the hills and 
 down the side av thim, an' he playin' on a reed he'd 
 cut bi the side av the lake up there in Knockshuna- 
 hallion. Didn't they hear his music an' he comin' 
 down the side of the mountain? An' didn't the 
 thyme blossoms spring up where his feet had trodden 
 to look which way was he goin'? An' he played 
 as he came down the side of the hill an' he with no 
 more than a reed to his mouth that he'd cut for 
 himself." 
 
 Malachi paused to turn the quid in his mouth, 
 when, fearing lest he might not go on, I asked him 
 what sort of music it might have been. 
 
 " 'Twas the sounds of the winds," said he, "that 
 go slippin' wid the bees over the heather. 'Twas 
 the call of the birds and the music av water that 
 drops through the thick av the moss. Shure didn't 
 he laugh as he played and wasn't his laughin' like 
 the sun shtriking down in the mad race of a shtream? 
 An' there was he comin' down the side av the hill 
 in his littleen coat, wid the brogues on the feet av 
 him as he danced. 'Twas herself heard him and 
 stood there like wan in a dream where she was. 
 An' on comes himself an' she shtandin' there bi the 
 road, wid her head thrown back an' her throat like 
 the neck of a bird that is burstin' wid song an' her 
 
 61
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 limbs like the saplin's of ash trees an' she wid the 
 beauty of all women in her face." 
 
 "What happened then?" 
 
 "Yirra, he came droppin' the spell of the music 
 in her ears an' she always ready for the dancin'. 
 'I must go,' says she 'I must go,' says she, an' 
 didn't she follow the feet av him up there into the 
 mists of the mountains, he playin' the madness into 
 her feet wid his little reed. An' whin they came 
 to the lake, he walks wid his laughter down there 
 into the wather an' she after him suckling for the 
 music he played. An' in she walked an' in she 
 walked, till the black waters closed over her black 
 hair and all they found whin they came in search 
 av her, was the littleen shawleen floatin' on the 
 water. Doesn't it hang in the cottage down there 
 in Foildarrig and can't they wring the wather out 
 avut to this day?" 
 
 I sat there in silence when he had made an end, 
 wondering what change had come in me that I could 
 almost believe his tale. In another place, at an- 
 other time, this had been just a story of a romantic 
 suicide; but as I listened to it from his lips in that 
 little cottage in the mountains, it seemed to have a 
 deeper truth than mere narrative. It was this deep- 
 er truth, without perhaps his knowing it, that ap- 
 peared to give reason for its unswerving belief in 
 him. 
 
 What was that truth? Should I ever reach it? 
 It was so distant and yet in the very straining I felt 
 in my soul to touch it, it seemed that I was coming 
 
 62
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 closer to the understanding of why Anthony Sorel 
 had killed Anna Quartermaine. 
 
 There it was, by that very lake, they had found 
 him sitting, when two days had gone by after her 
 death. 
 
 I looked out of the tiny window of Malachi's cot- 
 tage. The wind had swept clear the sky once more. 
 The small oblong of his window showing the sky, 
 was like a rough-cut turquoise set in the uneven 
 wall. 
 
 "The rain's past," said I. 
 
 Without a word he rose from his chair, went to 
 the door and opened it so that his chickens might 
 get out into the light of the sun again. 
 
 "How many miles is it to the lake from here?" I 
 asked. 
 
 He stood there in the doorway looking up to the 
 heights of the mountain and his red shirt shouted 
 like the blast of a trumpet against that sky. 
 
 " 'Tis a matter of two miles," said he- "an' 'tis 
 the feet av a goat that'll take ye there." 
 
 "It's what's in a man's heart," said I "you'll find 
 in his feet," and slipping past him in the doorway I 
 set my face up the mountainside.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE heather grows spare and thin as you climb 
 the hills. Above a height there is nothing 
 but the coarse mountain grass and the 
 moss, with here and there a wild root of creeping 
 thyme, falling down like the strands of dark hair 
 over the face of the lichened rocks. 
 
 Soon I lost myself in the crevices and ravines of 
 the mountains, hollows and gloomy passages, they 
 were, that had looked but mere shadows from the 
 valley below. From there, I could see nothing of 
 the green fields in the lowland around Araglin. The 
 sun crept suddenly in places into the gloom, shafts 
 of light, as through cathedral windows, across the 
 dark spaces of the hills. 
 
 It was a world of great silence, where the slipping 
 of a goat over the mountain stones or the cry of a 
 buzzard wheeling overhead, set the heart beating in 
 every pulse. Here indeed, I could imagine, were the 
 great truths to be found. For here it was that Na- 
 ture in all the glory of her solitude could speak her 
 secrets to the soul of a man. 
 
 Here was the truth which my mind had been 
 reaching forth to touch. There it was for my see- 
 ing, if but the eyes of my imagination had been 
 clear, unmisted by that material vision which is a 
 glass, smoked and dim before the sight of the soul. 
 
 64
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 But at every moment the loneliness of the place 
 encompassed me. I could not see the face of Na- 
 ture for the consciousness of my own solitude; and 
 yet I felt that I was standing in one of those places 
 of the earth where most generously she reveals 
 herself. 
 
 With an effort I snatched my mind away from that 
 oppressive self-contemplation. I thought of An- 
 thony Sorel, living his life, day following night, 
 night following day in the long silences of those hills. 
 What had he believed? There was abundant evi- 
 dence in his poems that that solitude, those dim-lit 
 hollows and all the mystery which wrapped them 
 round had brought their hidden revelations to his 
 soul. 
 
 If I must learn my soul, 
 
 Then, where no feet have trod, 
 
 Give me the speed 
 
 To reach my need, 
 
 And through long days 
 
 But let me gaze 
 
 Into the deep eyes of God. 
 
 So he wrote and I feel sure that then he was speak- 
 ing of those very mountain passes ; for again, in an- 
 other poem, he says : 
 
 I am alone with the sob of the wind, 
 
 The rushes are chanting the wind's wild song; 
 
 And I hear them say as they drift and bind, 
 
 The voice of God is a silent voice, 
 
 And the patience of God is long. 
 
 65
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 It is ever when he writes of the attributes of God, 
 that I feel he is speaking of Nature, both which to 
 him were one. 
 
 I took his book out of my pocket then, for I 
 brought it with me wherever I went, and read those 
 verses and many others beside. For an hour I sat 
 there on the table of a great bowlder surrounded by 
 the dim light of the gray mists that kept sweeping 
 by, until I felt almost that the spirit of Anthony Sorel 
 had arisen and entered into me. 
 
 Such gentleness of imagery, such sensitiveness to 
 the truths and the beauties of Nature ! How, I won- 
 dered, could that ever have been flung into the wild 
 frenzy of murder and sudden death? The more I 
 seemed to achieve understanding of the spirit of the 
 man, the more incomprehensible did it become. 
 
 Shutting the volume and putting it back again in 
 my pocket, there fell upon my mind the recollection 
 of what the old bookseller in Netting Hill had said 
 "Why does a man kill a woman, unless because 
 he hates or loves her overmuch." But as I came to 
 my understanding of him, Anthony Sorel was a vi- 
 sionary. In all his work, he cried that fact aloud. 
 Was it in such a man that love or hatred could be- 
 come obsession? I could not conceive the bodily 
 passions in him overcoming the purpose of his soul. 
 Yet in the portrait I had formed of him within my 
 mind, there were always the sensitive lips on which 
 kisses would have burnt like coals of fire. 
 
 So I put the book in my pocket and made my way 
 still higher up into the mountain in search of that 
 
 66
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 lake where, after those two days, they had found 
 him. It was suddenly that I came upon it, hidden 
 away in that lofty amphitheater of the hills. 
 
 A chill struck through me as I turned the corner 
 of the cliff and found it there before my eyes. The 
 black waters were so silent and so still. An almost 
 irresistible impulse rushed upon me to cast myself 
 down into it and wrench from it the secrets of its 
 depths. I stood there trembling. It was no earthly 
 place. 
 
 Well indeed could I believe as I stood beside the 
 edge, that the faeries had taken Maggie Donovan 
 there to her wandering sleep. So earthly a thing as 
 suicide could never have been attempted there the 
 very human purpose of it would have shuddered and 
 stood still in a swift arrest. Nothing but the unseen 
 powers could ever induce a human thing to let those 
 inky waters close forever on its head. 
 
 Here was I learning the meaning of the faeries 
 swift and fast. They are the symbols of our un- 
 traceable moods which no science of psychology in 
 the mind of man can ever hope to reveal. 
 
 And there, in those silent mountains, gazing 
 "into the deep eyes of God" the moods of a man 
 are Nature's moods ; the truths of her are his. 
 
 What indeed must have been the mood of An- 
 thony Sorel, when, as I understand, he sat beside that 
 awesome lake one day and all one night until they 
 found him? So black, so terrible a thing it must 
 have been, that I shivered as I thought of the deso- 
 lation of it. 
 
 67
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 All down the mountainside from the peaks above 
 it, great stones and bowlders had bee.n cast that had 
 never reached the water's edge. How many thou- 
 sands, I wondered, had not sped onwards in their 
 thundering acceleration and been lost in the fathom- 
 less waters. Playthings of the giants they were, 
 flung down by mighty hands as boys throw pebbles 
 in a stream. 
 
 So ran one's thoughts in such a place. Giants and 
 faeries not only became real, but were the only reali- 
 ties. For there it seemed, man was a puny thing. 
 As I stood there I was overwhelmed with my own 
 insignificance. Strong swimmer as I was, I knew I 
 could never trust myself in those still waters; not 
 from the belief that currents would suck me down, or 
 if it was, it did not speak in those words to my mind. 
 The fear that hidden hands would grasp me was that 
 which thrust itself upon my thoughts. I peered into 
 the water and, in the quivering lights I saw, that 
 flashed and faded and then flashed again, could well 
 believe they were the hungry eyes of those that lay 
 in wait for human things. 
 
 And here it was that they had taken Anthony 
 Sorel, in the last moments of his remorse or his de- 
 spair. 
 
 I turned away with a sick horror in my mind and 
 climbed down the mountain once again. This time 
 I went by a different way when, taking the turning 
 of a wandering path, I came upon a cottage, roofless, 
 windowless, that cried out its lonely desolation to 
 the echoes of the hills. 
 
 68
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 I knew at once it must be the place where Anthony 
 Sorel had lived, yet scarce anything remained but the 
 four walls to show a sign of life. The chimney even 
 was shattered, yet there were the marks of the smoke 
 on the wall where he had lit his fire. There was the 
 gaping window on which doubtless he had often 
 leant, looking out across the mists, gazing even from 
 there into those "deep eyes of God." 
 
 All the floor was sprinkled with debris, the brown 
 straws of the thatch, the crumbling mortar, the very 
 beams that had upheld the thatch. 
 
 In its day it had been such a cottage as Malachi's, 
 one-roomed with a door at back and front. The 
 floor was of mud, cracked here and there. 
 
 It was in one crack of the floor, as I looked at it, 
 that something glittered and winked as I moved my 
 head. It spurred my curiosity. Swiftly I went 
 down on my knees and with a pen-knife cut away the 
 hard caked earth. 
 
 There lay a ring a ring of gold, setting an em- 
 erald roughly cut. With heart beating at my discov- 
 ery, I took it out into the wider light, looking at it 
 as one looks at some treasure found in an Egyptian 
 prince's tomb. 
 
 As I turned it over, I saw the letters of an in- 
 scription inside the band. Dirt clogged the letters. 
 I wetted my finger and rubbed them clear and this 
 was what I read: 
 
 "Out of the earth." 
 
 I read it again and again. What memory was it 
 69
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 that it raised in me? Then I remembered it was a 
 phrase, oft repeated in one of Anthony Sorel's 
 poems. 
 
 This incident of the ring I have mentioned be- 
 cause, at the time, it brought so near to my mind the 
 life of Anthony Sorel in that place, still more the 
 death of Anna Quartermaine. For though I was 
 never able to confirm my belief that she it was who 
 had given it him ; though indeed, in all the story that 
 I heard from Malachi's lips, he never mentioned it, 
 yet it convinced me then, when I found it, that it had 
 played some part between these two whose history is 
 now lost amongst the echoes of those Irish hills.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 A FEW days after my visit to the lake, I 
 dropped in one evening, as he had bid me, to 
 see Father Dorgan. 
 
 It was a cold night, late in the month of March 
 and a fire was burning cheerfully in his parlor. The 
 light in the room was pleasant, but dim, for except 
 for the light of the fire, starting and dancing on the 
 walls and ceiling, only two candles were burning on 
 the table between which he had placed the book he 
 was reading. 
 
 The housekeeper, an ugly old woman, slightly 
 deaf and with a wall eye, had opened the door an- 
 nouncing me, and giving him no warning of my com- 
 ing. 
 
 At the hall door, we had spent some difficult mo- 
 ments over the pronunciation of my name. After 
 two or three ineffectual attempts, I had given up 
 all hope of her mastering the first part of it and 
 had resigned myself to spelling the second part 
 alone. 
 
 Even then, with the separate letters carefully 
 spelled out by me, she had not grasped it but opened 
 the door, announcing "Mr. Thrruston," with a 
 great rolling of "r's." 
 
 He looked at me steadily from between the points 
 of the lighted candles ; then, suddenly recollecting our 
 
 71
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 meeting by the bank of the river, he rose and genially 
 held out his hand. 
 
 "Good evening, Mr. Thrruston," said he. 
 
 The vanity which is in all of us and makes it im- 
 possible for us to hear the mispronunciation of our 
 names compelled me to correct him. I said my 
 name clearly and distinctly. 
 
 "Ah shure, I see," said he "Mr. Thrruston 
 ah, of course what a fool she was." 
 
 He had pronounced it exactly the same. I let it 
 go at that. 
 
 "Well now would ye like any more light?" he 
 went on. "It's dim in here, a man couldn't see the 
 way to his mouth and I'll get herself to make us a 
 drop of punch." 
 
 As to the way to my mouth I had nothing to say, 
 but for any other account I begged him not to light 
 more candles for me. Knowing what was in my 
 mind to discuss, I felt that dim, suggestive light was 
 far more conducive to his confidence. 
 
 "Oh we have a lamp," said he, as though he 
 wished me to know that they were not wanting in 
 matters of convenience. 
 
 "I'd prefer this light," I persisted, at which, 
 shrugging his shoulders in acknowledgment of the 
 fact that I was his guest and must have things to my 
 liking, he went in search of the housekeeper to tell 
 her about the punch. 
 
 Whilst he was gone, I looked about me. It was a 
 high-ceilinged room, unfurnished with any of those 
 comfortable luxuries with which you might expect a 
 
 72
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 man to surround himself when he lives alone. And 
 yet, it did not want for comfort. The sense that it 
 was a haunted house seemed unable to penetrate the 
 thick curtains that were drawn before the high win- 
 dows. The two sacred pictures on the walls offered 
 nothing in the comforting suggestion of decoration, 
 yet they gave an atmosphere to the place which you 
 felt to be in keeping with the man. 
 
 Things out of keeping in a room, however luxu- 
 rious they may be, contribute in no way to the real 
 essence of comfort. The body may be at ease, but 
 with a restless spirit there can be no repose. The 
 restfulness of that room was in the flicker of the fire, 
 the two candles burning on the table, the shielding 
 curtains shutting out the night and the sense of quiet 
 contemplation it all offered to the mind. 
 
 I leant over the table, looking at the book he had 
 been reading, still lying open where he had left it. 
 There I knew I should more suddenly and closely 
 come upon the man of whom as yet I knew so very 
 little. 
 
 It was the Bible and it was opened at the book of 
 Job. I think I must have smiled, realizing as I did 
 that this was no occupation of faith, but the recrea- 
 tion of a man who knew the worth of literature and 
 knew it at its best. 
 
 I had left the table and was warming my hands 
 at the fire when he returned. The first thing he did 
 was quietly to close the book, replacing it in the 
 bookshelves that stood against the wall. I smiled 
 again to myself. So evidently was it literature to 
 
 73
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 him ; I have no belief in the Bible that is openly dis- 
 played upon a table in any room. It is seldom read. 
 
 He motioned me to a horsehair armchair near 
 the fire, seating himself on the chair he had occupied 
 before, but turning it round from the table, the bet- 
 ter to be able to talk to me. 
 
 "Well," said he "how do ye find yeerself in 
 Araglin? 'Tis like a peep into the grave after Lon- 
 don, I suppose." 
 
 "It's quiet enough," I admitted, "but I didn't 
 come here expecting to find it anything else." 
 
 "Have ye ever been to Ireland before?" 
 
 I told him how I had lived some years in the South 
 and knew it well, though this part of the country was 
 new to me. 
 
 To every answer of mine, he kept nodding his 
 head, saying, half under his breath, "Indeed in- 
 deed" a habit he no doubt had acquired from the 
 confessional. I had often noticed it in other priests. 
 So he continued asking me questions, only pausing 
 when the old woman came in with the punch tum- 
 blers and all those necessary ingredients for its mak- 
 ing. I was quite contented to sit there, answering 
 him, knowing that sooner or later, without my forc- 
 ing it upon him, he would come upon the purpose of 
 my visit to Araglin. While he made the punch, he 
 spoke but little. It was an important ceremony, 
 needing attention. First the hot water in the tum- 
 blers with their little lips. This to bring them to 
 the requisite warmth. Then the sugar, melted in a 
 wineglassful of steaming water, again a wineglass- 
 
 74
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 ful of whisky, then the shreds of lemon peel cut to 
 the thinness of a wafer and last of all the boiling 
 water to the brim. From one of the tumblers he 
 poured out a wineglassful and handed it to me. 
 
 "That'll turn March into July," said he. 
 
 I sipped it and the fumes rose warmly to my nos- 
 trils. He watched my face for approval as I drank 
 it and there was a smile half-humorous, half of en- 
 joyable anticipation in his eyes. 
 
 "Well?" said he. 
 
 "Splendid," said I "an excellent antidote for 
 winter." 
 
 "Faith, ye're right there," said he. "A man can 
 pull the curtains, set a match to the fire till the skin 
 of him's warm, but 'tis this stuff lights the kindling 
 inside of him." 
 
 After the punch-making, he settled down to his 
 questioning again, not with that same eagerness of 
 curiosity now, but with a genuine interest, finding 
 that I was quite ready to tell him all he wanted to- 
 know. 
 
 When I replied to one of his questions that I was 
 a writer, his sharp eyes fixed the more keenly on my 
 face. 
 
 "Indeed indeed," said he. "I've not come 
 across the name." 
 
 I did not think that was likely, even if he had got 
 it right. But he said it with a charming air of apol- 
 ogy as though it argued an inexcusable ignorance in 
 him. However, I quickly exonerated him of that. 
 
 "I can't expect to penetrate," said I, "into places 
 6 75
 
 where people really are alive. Life there would be 
 too short for them to dream of reading me. You 
 read the right sort of stuff " I nodded my head to 
 the book he had put away. 
 
 "Ah there's some poetry there," said he and we 
 fell to talking upon the decay of poetry, both 
 amongst those who read and those who write it. 
 
 "I don't call it the fault of the poets," said he. 
 "If there's no beauty about bearing children in the 
 mind of a woman she won't have a beautiful child. 
 She will not. Faith, ye might say she'd never have 
 a child at all. 'Tis the fault of the people beyond 
 over, they don't want things beautiful and yirra, they 
 don't get 'em. That's the way with 'em. They don't 
 want children and faith, don't they go barren? Shure, 
 ye can get beauty for nothing but 'tis amusement 
 they want and that's the divil's expense. Didn't I 
 have to pay five shillings for my seat in a London 
 theater to see a lot of painted canvas they called a 
 glorious production and couldn't I see things up in 
 these mountains the way the tears 'ud come into me 
 eyes to be lookin' at them an' I walkin' there for 
 nothing on me two feet. Haven't we got more poets 
 than anything else in this country an' they, half of 
 them, writing in prose the way they'd put bread into 
 their mouths. The whole matter with yeer busi- 
 ness," he continued, "is that ye have to live by it. 
 Shure if I gave the thrush in my garden a worm for 
 every song he sang, wouldn't he get choked in the 
 throat of him? He would so." 
 
 I must confess it was no little joy to me to sit 
 76
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 there listening to this kind of idealism. It voiced 
 the instinct which every one of us would obey if 
 we could if we had the courage. As it is, there 
 is scarcely one of us who dare even mention it, so 
 conscious are we of the inevitable accusation of folly, 
 and of the certain contempt of our fellows. 
 
 But I could say what I liked to him without any 
 such fear as this. I could tell things to him an ut- 
 ter stranger things I would not dare to say as he 
 would have put it beyond over. 
 
 "An' is it the way ye've come here to get away 
 from it all?" he asked me presently. 
 
 I admitted incidentally that that was so. 
 
 "However, I have another more definite reason," 
 said I and out of my pocket I pulled the volume of 
 Anthony Sorel's poems. 
 
 He looked at it long and intently. Then his head 
 shot up with a sudden jerk and he looked at me. 
 
 "Where did ye get this?" he asked. 
 
 I told him where I had bought it how long ago. 
 
 Then he nodded his head backwards and for- 
 wards as he gazed at me. 
 
 "What have ye found out from old Malachi?" 
 he inquired. 
 
 "Nothing," said I, for so far my endeavors had 
 been fruitless. Whenever I had mentioned the 
 name of Anthony Sorel to the old man, and I had 
 done so, always in a casual way, every day that I 
 had seen him, he had shrunk into himself like a snail 
 disturbed upon the garden path. 
 
 ' 'Tis the silence of the dead he has in him," said 
 77
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 lie and then he added, "Yirra, that story'll never 
 be written." 
 
 "Do you know nothing about it yourself?" I in- 
 quired. 
 
 "Nothing but what any people about these parts 
 know as well. The unfortunate young man admit- 
 ted that he'd killed her." 
 
 "He did admit it?" 
 
 "He did of course. Shure, wasn't the blood of her 
 on his hands when they found him." 
 
 "Did he give any reason for killing her?" 
 
 "He did not divil a word. 'Twas himself keep- 
 ing long silences and they hanging him with nothing 
 passing his lips from the moment he said he was 
 guilty." 
 
 "I heard he had said something about justice when 
 he was being tried." 
 
 "Oh he did indeed 'Them seek for justice' 
 'twas himself said it- 'them seek for justice the way 
 they'd hunt for a shillin' under a stone.' And there 
 was an amount of truth in it mind ye, for I've a feel- 
 ing in me 'twas not the justice of God they were after 
 giving him if a' be it was the justice of the law. And 
 shure what's the law, will ye tell me that, and they 
 sending Michael Daly to prison because he deserted 
 the Army and he sickening to be with the mother 
 who'd suckled him from a babe?" 
 
 For a while we both fell to meditation while he 
 turned over the pages of the book I had given into 
 Jbis hands. 
 
 "Have you read them?" I asked him presently. 
 78
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "I have indeed," he replied. "Didn't I take a 
 copy for a while from Father Killery in Ballysag- 
 gartmore and didn't he hear all about it from Father 
 Nolan, he that was parish priest in the place whin the 
 thing happened?" 
 
 "Is Father Nolan alive?" 
 
 I asked it so eagerly and so quickly that he turned 
 a smile to me. 
 
 "He is not," said he. 
 
 I must have shown the bitterness of my disap- 
 pointment, for he smiled again. 
 
 "If he were," continued he, "ye'd learn little 
 more than what Father Killery knows, or what I 
 know and what plenty round about in these parts 
 know as well. They will have it round here, that 
 that old man Malachi knows the secret of it; but 
 between me and the tumbler of punch there, I 
 shouldn't be surprised if he didn't know anything 
 at all." 
 
 "You think it was just a common, sordid murder 
 then?" 
 
 I know I must have spoken warmly, for the heat 
 of my belief was very strong in me. Ever since that 
 morning when I had stood beside the lake in the 
 mountains, when I had found the ruins of Anthony 
 Sorel's cottage and had discovered that ring in the 
 crack of the mud floor, not only had the story be- 
 come doubly real to me but a thousand times more 
 firmly had grown the conviction in my mind that 
 this was no crime of vicious motives. I did not 
 willingly incline to the belief that the faeries had 
 
 79
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 taken her; but coming to that realization of what 
 the faeries meant, that they were the poetic sym- 
 bols of those intangible moods of the mind, which 
 no psychologist can either explain or define, I could 
 so readily understand how such a belief had grown 
 in these credulous children of the mountains. 
 
 For some reason, Anthony Sorel had killed Anna 
 Quartermaine, some reason upon which it would be 
 beyond any court of law to legislate. So, in his hour 
 of trial, he had kept silence rather than be misunder- 
 stood and so, out there in the dim mists of the moun- 
 tains, the people had seen her walking with the faer- 
 ies for want of that understanding which maybe the 
 old man, Malachi, was the only one in the world by 
 whom it was possessed. 
 
 "Is that what you really think?" I repeated "that 
 the man who could sing the songs he did, was capable 
 of the foul and ugly instincts of a common mur- 
 derer?" 
 
 "D'ye know what I'd like to be able to think?" 
 said he. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 His eyes twinkled not altogether in humor but 
 partly with an intensity of inward light which per- 
 haps I never shall be able completely to understand. 
 
 "I'd like to think," said he, "that she was down 
 there, walking the fields with the faeries in Foildar- 
 rig, because, mind ye, that young fella could sing a 
 song as well as the thrush that sits on the top of the 
 thorn bush at the bottom of my garden. And when 
 I think of himself taking the knife in his hand and 
 
 80
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 planting it in her, the way his own hands were spurt- 
 ed with blood, then all the music goes out of them 
 verses to me. I'd sooner hear an owl screeching the 
 hoarseness out of itself on a long night than listen 
 to one of them poems." 
 
 "Well why not think it?" said I eagerly. 
 "What harm is there to a man to believe in faeries?" 
 
 He sat staring for a long while into the fire as 
 though meditating upon thoughts his mind had sud- 
 denly been reawakened to. I would not interrupt 
 him, but let him think. At last he looked up at me 
 with that same intensity of inward light still in his 
 eyes. 
 
 "What would the Bishop say," he asked, "and 
 he hearing that Father Dorgan believed in faeries? 
 Shure don't ye know that the Faith has no call for 
 faeries at all? The souls of the departed dead are 
 in Purgatory and isn't that enough for any man to 
 be believing?" 
 
 "Yet many of these people round here," said I, 
 "who go regularly to Mass every Sunday, they be- 
 lieve in faeries. Would their lives be quite as they 
 are, would they be so near to the truth of things, if 
 they didn't?" 
 
 "Ye put great honor on the faeries," he remarked 
 presently. 
 
 "I do," said I. 
 
 "D'ye believe in them yeerself ?" 
 
 "No I wish I could. I wish I could reduce my 
 mind to that state of simplicity. I can't. It's ham- 
 pered and choked up by all the thousand disadvan- 
 
 81
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 tages of education; like yours is if you'll forgive 
 my saying so by religion. I'm not a Protestant; 
 you can't accuse rtle of party faith; but it seems to 
 me that all forms of orthodoxy such as you find in 
 religion and in education, they all destroy the free- 
 dom that is the only salvation in the soul of a man. 
 I've no doubt that education teaches the mind to 
 think, but not with any freedom ; only on those lines 
 which education itself has formulated for one and 
 all alike. Scholarship is the whole system, to achieve 
 which a man must cram his head with prescribed 
 knowledge. But that has no meaning for the free- 
 dom of his soul. It's only because I've been brought 
 up under that system of education and you in that 
 orthodoxy of religion that, failing a belief that the 
 faeries took Anna Quartermaine, we can only con- 
 ceive of her death as that of a sordid murder. So 
 you say that, since you can't believe she is still walk- 
 ing the fields in Foildarrig it drives your mind to 
 nd no music in any of Anthony Sorel's poetry. Isn't 
 that slavery of the mind? Aren't there a million 
 tones and colors between white and black and when 
 we talk like that, aren't we blind to every blessed one 
 of them?" 
 
 He straightened himself up in his chair and took 
 a sip of his punch. 
 
 "Ye've got dangerous talk in ye, young man," said 
 he. "If we all had that freedom of soul, Hell 'ud 
 be a queer place and over-full, I'm thinking." 
 
 "Would it?" I exclaimed. "Can you point a fin- 
 ger of accusation at the morals and virtues of these 
 
 82
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 very people of yours who despite your Mass and 
 your confessional, still have a freedom of soul which 
 not even the power of Rome can take away from 
 them? Over in England, we call them superstitious. 
 We think of them with minds still wrapped in the 
 darkness of superstition. But isn't it because the 
 thing we call progress is no progress at all? All our 
 science is engaged in adding a few years to the life 
 of the body, as if that mattered when the body must 
 die in the end. And so it is that the valuation of life 
 has become absurd. The deeper we study Nature 
 with instruments and with microscopes, the further 
 we get away from her, the more we shrink from 
 death. And the more we shrink from death, the 
 firmer grows the belief in us that there is no life for 
 the soul hereafter. How can a man believe in his 
 own soul if he's so concerned with the life of his 
 body? Can a man escape out of prison if he is for- 
 ever striving to make unbreakable the chains which 
 bind him?" 
 
 Father Dorgan regarded me steadily as though 
 the heresy that I spoke must be excused in me be- 
 cause I was not of his faith. But added to the mean- 
 ing of that glance, or perhaps it was only my fancy, 
 I seemed to see a light of envy in his eyes. He had 
 wished so he had said to me that he could be as 
 mad as Malachi, if it would enable him to see the 
 things Malachi saw. Now I felt that he wished he 
 could be as free in his speech as I. His next question 
 almost convinced me that my fancy was not false. 
 
 "What do ye make of the faeries then?" he asked. 
 
 83
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Symbols," said I expressing for the first time 
 in words those thoughts that had come to me in the 
 mountains "symbols of all our untraceable moods. 
 That's as far as I've got. If I were to live long 
 enough in these mountains, perhaps I should become 
 simple enough to be able to see them myself. But 
 because I'm not, I don't believe that other people 
 don't see them." 
 
 "I've thought that myself," said he. "I've 
 thought they can't have all this talk in them and they 
 seeing nothing at all. But what sort of moods d'ye 
 mean ? Shure how can ye have a symbol of a mood ?" 
 
 I seized upon a simile, the first that came haphaz- 
 ard to my mind. 
 
 "What do you feel when the mist comes down 
 from the mountains?" I asked "when all day long 
 it drips in drops of water from the trees all round 
 you here and night seems like an abortion, born be- 
 fore its time? What do you feel then?" 
 
 "Faith, I feel as if me heart was made of lead 
 and I'd take to the grave as soon as look at a man." 
 
 "Well isn't that a mood? And doesn't the mist 
 from the mountains bring it down upon you? And 
 in that mood, wouldn't you do things you wouldn't 
 dream of doing when the sun was up and the sky 
 was blue when God was in his Heaven as Brown- 
 ing said? Who's to judge you for what you do in 
 such a mood as that? What brought it? The mist. 
 Isn't that mist then the creator of your mood and 
 with but a little effort couldn't you let your imagina- 
 tion stretch forth to see that mist as the breath of 
 
 84
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 some unholy thing that had crept its way down the 
 mountainside to poison you? Then wouldn't that 
 unholy thing become the symbol of your mood ? And 
 when you laugh and when you sing to yourself and 
 when you despair and when you determine aren't 
 all those moods, coming from such impulses as you 
 can never detect? Why not symbols for them all? 
 There are good faeries, there are bad faeries, there 
 are faeries of death and faeries of life. That's what 
 faeries are the symbols of all those things in life 
 which none of us will ever understand. We teach 
 them to our children less and less it's true but 
 we never teach them to ourselves, because we think 
 that our wisdom of progress can do without them. 
 Our study is of the body. But faeries are bodiless 
 things. They take shape to themselves, but they are 
 all shapes that vanish in the thin air. Why shouldn't 
 Anthony Sorel have killed Anna Quartermaine for a 
 reason that neither you nor I can understand? But 
 just because it was the body he killed and by the 
 body that he must be judged, they set him up there 
 to receive justice at the hands of fallible men. 
 Twelve men decide upon the facts. As if facts 
 count when facts and bodies are the only things that 
 die." 
 
 He got up and stirred the fire. 
 
 "I don't know that I ought to be talkin' to ye at 
 all," said he. "Faith, ye'd talk a hen off of her eggs 
 ye would so. But I don't know that what ye're 
 after saying doesn't stir up a good many things I'd 
 be thinking meself. Mind ye I can't quite under- 
 
 85
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 stand why a young man like that should be killing a 
 woman like herself, unless 'twas the way the wits 
 had gone out of him. But there was never said any- 
 thing about that at the trial. I do believe they had 
 the doctor to him but the doctor found him sane 
 enough. And another thing I can't understand is 
 why she came to be dressed in those colleen's clothes 
 an' she livin' like a high lady down in a great house 
 in Ballysaggartmore." 
 
 "How much do you know about her?" I inquired. 
 
 "Oh shure, I know what Father Killery told me 
 and he hearing it first hand from Father Nolan what 
 went before him. 'Twas Father Nolan knew her 
 well. Shure, didn't he hear herself in confession." 
 
 "Can you tell me what you know?" 
 
 "Well indeed then, there's no harm in telling," 
 said he and he drew his chair round before the dying 
 fire and told me what he knew.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THERE'S no doubt," said he "she had the 
 beauty of all women in her face." 
 
 This was what Malachi had said of 
 Maggie Donovan. It was indeed a saying of the 
 people, a simple phrase enough, but full of ex- 
 pression as they speak it. 
 
 "She must have been a woman with thirty years 
 to her," he went on presently "and she living 
 in Ballysaggartmore from a child. Her father 
 was an Englishman, but her mother was one of 
 the Connells of Castle Connell away there in 
 County Tipp'rary. 'Twas they could trace their 
 names back to the kings of Ireland, and the house 
 in Ballysaggartmore belonged to them." 
 
 "Why did she never marry?" I asked. 
 
 There was the need with him as there was with 
 Malachi, to prompt with questions. He was ever 
 in danger of drifting into the contemplation of 
 his own thoughts. 
 
 "She wasn't married was she?" 
 
 He had not answered my first question, where- 
 fore I urged him again. 
 
 "She was not," he replied at last "and she with 
 all the sons of the gentry round making offers 
 to her an' not one of them to her likin'. I'm think- 
 in' 'tis queer she was, she livin' there all with her- 
 
 8?
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 self in that big house. The old man died when 
 herself was a slip of a girl and her mother was 
 soon after him." 
 
 "Did she never go away at all to England or 
 abroad?" 
 
 "She did indeed. Every year they'd shut up the 
 big house the way 'twould look as if the ghosts had 
 brought a bad name to it and away she'd go with all 
 them servants sent back to their homes. An' months 
 'ud go by, nobody knowing where her ladyship was, 
 till suddenly the train would come into Lismore one 
 fine morning and there'd be boxes piled up on the 
 platform an' it steamin' out of the station. ' 'Tis 
 Anna Quartermaine come back from her jour- 
 neys,' they'd say, an' shure weren't they right? 
 All the boxes would go up to the house in Bally- 
 saggartmore and herself would come back the next 
 day. Shure ye'd see the servants lollin' out of the 
 windows and the whole place lookin' as if it were 
 alive again. Oh, indeed there were queer stories 
 goin' about in those days with herself comin' back 
 after three months' absence. Wasn't there one 
 man goin' about the world over, said he'd seen 
 herself an' she walkin' in the cities of Egypt, the 
 way she'd be walkin' down by the side of the Black- 
 water? I dunno, was it true, but Father Nolan 
 had the tale to himself from the man who saw 
 her." 
 
 "Well that's quite possible," said I "many 
 people go to Egypt. Thousands go out from Eng- 
 land to winter there. But if she traveled as much 
 
 88
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 as all that, how is it she never met anyone to take 
 her fancy? She was wealthy wasn't she?" 
 
 "Indeed, she'd a power of money," said he. 
 
 But what might have been a power of money to 
 him and all the people over there, may not in 
 reality have been so considerable a sum. With 
 five hundred pounds a year a girl is an heiress in 
 the South of Ireland. There are plenty of offers 
 of marriage waiting for her. 
 
 I have seen the house myself in Ballysaggart- 
 more, and though in comparison with the houses 
 in the neighborhood, it is imposing enough, there 
 is nothing in it to suggest that any fabulous amount 
 of wealth would have been needed for its up-keep. 
 It stands in its own grounds, completely hidden 
 from the road, with a little thatched cottage at 
 the lodge gates. There must be thirty acres there 
 of fields and garden round the house itself. 
 
 At the time I went there it was unoccupied and 
 with a little persuasion on my part, the old woman 
 at the lodge showed me over. There were some 
 fine rooms in it one room in particular that faced 
 away to the mountains. It was in that room, so 
 she told me, that Anna Quartermaine had lavished 
 the full expression of that taste there is no doubt 
 she possessed. 
 
 "They say 'twas hung wid purple," said she 
 "the way ye'd think 'twas halfways to the grave." 
 
 But this I can well believe was exaggeration, 
 grown as stories do so swiftly grow, out of the air of 
 mystery surrounding her name. All that I gathered 
 
 89
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 from the various accounts I received in Ballysag- 
 gartmore, was that she was a woman of keenly 
 artistic perceptions and taste a type of mind which 
 I have no doubt was little understood by the people 
 with whom she came in contact. 
 
 Things, for instance, have been told me which 
 prove to my mind that she was no more peculiar 
 than many a woman I have known who likes to be 
 surrounded with beautiful things. Yet it was this 
 very culture in her which, to the people of Bally- 
 saggartmore, appeared to indicate a strangeness of 
 temperament they were too gentle in their thoughts 
 to call insane. Even Father Dorgan still carried 
 the impression in his mind that she was queer. I 
 have no such thoughts myself. As I have seen her, 
 Anna Quartermaine was an intensely human woman. 
 
 Beautiful she must have been. I see no reason 
 to suppose that they exaggerated upon that score. 
 The picture I have seen of her bears it out. 
 
 She was tall and nobly made. Her love of the 
 country where for miles she walked alone into the 
 mountains, must well have added health to her 
 beauty. Advanced even in those days, as her taste 
 appears to have been, I have found no trace of a 
 mind that was abnormal or distorted, as the mind so 
 often is, by a cult of beauty. 
 
 Dressed in fitting garments, they say, she would 
 often set forth in the morning, a walking-stick in 
 her hand, a dog at her heels, turning her face up 
 the mountain road and only returning when evening 
 had well set in. There is a cottage on the moor- 
 
 90
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 land above Ballyduff where lives an old couple 
 who well remember her coming to their door for 
 a cup of milk and a piece of griddle bread. This 
 seems to have been the only way she took her meals 
 when on those journeys. 
 
 "A short skirteen she'd on her," they told me, 
 "an' she wid the mud on her boots the way 
 she might have been liftin' the praties in the 
 fields." 
 
 This picture, combined with that portrait I saw, 
 of a woman dressed so beautifully, even then, that 
 one forgot the cruel fashion of the time, gives me 
 the impression of an arresting personality. I was 
 not concerned with the suggestion of suspicion in 
 the voices of those who told me that she made use 
 of rouge upon her lips and cheeks. Unknown as 
 it may have been in those days for one in her posi- 
 tion, I am only the more convinced of that original- 
 ity in her which must so deeply have stirred the im- 
 pressionable mind of Anthony Sorel. 
 
 Anna Quartermaine was an uncommon woman, 
 of that I have no doubt. The very fact of her un- 
 married existence alone in that old house is proof 
 of it; the sudden tragedy of her death, a greater 
 proof than all. But notwithstanding all this, I 
 carry no impression of an unnatural creature in my 
 mind. As the work of some men is before their 
 time, so the temperament of Anna Quartermaine 
 must have been in advance of the conditions in 
 which she lived. There may be, indeed there are 
 many like her to-day; women who refuse the limita- 
 7 91
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 tions of the state of matrimony because a wild free- 
 dom of imagination in them cannot submit to its 
 narrow boundaries. 
 
 Still, remembering Father Dorgan's statement 
 that she was queer, I pressed him further on that 
 point. 
 
 "Would you deny women a right to freedom," 
 I asked him, "just because the vast majority of 
 them seem to have no particular liking for it? I 
 can't see that there was anything queer about Anna 
 Quartermaine. It's not necessarily queer to be dif- 
 ferent from other people. Can't you conceive a 
 woman having such exacting ideals, that she keeps 
 herself aloof from marriage rather than sacrifice 
 the most vital possession she has for the doubtful 
 benefits of convenience?" 
 
 " 'Tis not natural," said he with rigid conviction. 
 "Shure, if a* be 'twas natural would she have 
 been found up there in the stretch of the heather, 
 she with the blood still warm on her breast an' her 
 blind eyes turned up to the stars? She would not. 
 For what was there natural in that? 'Twas an un- 
 holy passion that brought her to such a pass as 
 that. Faith, isn't that why they hushed up the 
 whole affair and she one of the Connells of Castle 
 Connell?" 
 
 I leant forward in my chair and stared for long 
 into the fire. I felt then that I was on the verge of 
 understanding. 
 
 "If you and I could believe in faeries," said I, 
 "we might be capable of the conception of a pas- 
 
 92
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 sion great enough to have passed all question of 
 unholiness. It's her death that makes it unholy to 
 us. We think of that which severs life from the 
 body and with our valuation of it, can imagine no 
 more terrible thing. Why should not a man's pas- 
 sion for a woman, or hers for him, be so tran- 
 scendent a thing as that death becomes a little thing 
 beside it? Have we lost all the conception of an 
 overwhelming and imperishable love such as they 
 had in the days of Dante and Beatrice? Was 
 death anything to them? Are we such languid, 
 weakly creatures now that we cannot rise to such 
 heights of passion as are reached in death? You 
 think the love for love there must have been of 
 Anna Quartermaine for Anthony Sorel was an un- 
 holy and sensual thing well, look at this " 
 
 I pulled out of my pocket the ring I had found 
 in Anthony Sorel's cottage and laid it on the table 
 there before him. 
 
 So evidently had it been a woman's ring that I 
 was prepared to uphold it as a gift from her to 
 him. 
 
 "Look at the inscription," I went on, when I 
 had told him how I had come by it. "Look at the 
 inscription; engraved on it, so I believe, solely for 
 him, when she gave the thing to him. The letters 
 are cut, long since the ring was made. The sharp- 
 ness of them held the earth. It was with difficulty 
 I rubbed them clear." 
 
 He read it in an uncertain voice. 
 
 " 'Out of the earth ' " and then again " 'out 
 93
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of the earth' well what do ye make of that?" 
 he asked. 
 
 I opened the book of poems, turning with cer- 
 tain fingers to the verses it contained in which that 
 very phrase was used. 
 
 "That's what I make of it," said I. 
 
 What shall we win, you and I, 
 Out of the earth? 
 What shall we win, 
 If we toil and spin? 
 Will the day draw out 
 To a night of doubt 
 Ere we win, you and I, 
 Out of the earth ? 
 
 What shall we win, you and I, 
 Out of the earth? 
 Where the dew is wet, 
 Are there jewels yet 
 You never wore? 
 Can love yield more 
 Ere we win you and I, 
 Out of the earth? 
 
 He laid the book down on the table, placing his 
 hand upon the closed cover as though it were a story 
 that was ended, a matter past the need of speech. 
 For a moment it seemed as if he had nothing fur- 
 ther to say, but at last he raised his eyes and looked 
 at me. 
 
 "There are so many worlds," said he enigmat- 
 ically. "Shure, how can a man live in them all in one 
 lifetime?" 
 
 94
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THIS was the first, but not the last of the visits 
 I paid to Father Dorgan while I was in 
 Araglin. A tentative, half timid desire in 
 the man to touch the knowledge of those things his 
 faith denied him, was greatly attractive to me. He 
 was so fervently a Catholic and yet so drawn, by 
 all the Celtic influences within him, to the visionary 
 spirit. 
 
 "Ye've got the dangerous speech in ye," he was 
 always saying to me and if indeed there was any- 
 thing I might say which ever could be dangerous, 
 I felt it was a danger he courted rather than 
 feared. 
 
 We might talk of a thousand different things, but 
 always the conversation came round to the same 
 topic, the death of Anna Quartermaine and how the 
 visionary spirit and the freedom of the imagina- 
 tion could alter one's whole aspect of that tragedy 
 in the hills. I have known a Catholic priest to 
 play with the fire of science, burning the fingers of 
 his faith yet ever drawn to it as a child to the 
 forbidden fire. It was so with Father Dorgan 
 and the subject we so often discussed. 
 
 When he sprinkled the four corners of Power's 
 fields with holy water, it was he assured me as one 
 dispensing the blessing of God upon the harvest 
 
 95
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 to come. But Power himself openly confessed to 
 me, it was to keep off the evil faeries. 
 
 "Don't they take the seeds," said he, "for their 
 own harvest and isn't it the way they put grains of 
 sand into the furrows to fool ye deuce take 'em !" 
 
 I have my suspicions that much of this was in 
 Father Dorgan's mind as well, for one evening he 
 said to me, 
 
 "What right have ye to be believing in the 
 faeries? Weren't ye born a Protestant and isn't 
 there English blood in ye to the tips of yeer fin- 
 gers?" 
 
 It was almost as though he resented my point 
 of view, for no matter how earnestly I assured him 
 that I wished my mind were so simple in its atti- 
 tude, I think he never really understood how the 
 willingness of the spirit to believe could not con- 
 quer the impotence of the flesh to see. He has even 
 taunted me with seeing these bodiless spirits on 
 the mountainside, all in good humor but with, I 
 believe, a taint of jealousy in his thoughts. 
 
 From him I learnt a great deal more of Anna 
 Quartermaine which must be written when the tale 
 comes to be told. Father Nolan it appears had 
 known her well and had spoken freely to Father 
 Killery, from whom Father Dorgan had gathered 
 his facts. 
 
 I do not wish here for one moment to infer that 
 any confidence such as he might have learnt in the 
 confessional was ever repeated by one priest to the 
 other. Had I heard such things, I might indeed 
 
 96
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 have been able to lay bare the very secrets of her 
 soul. This information that I gathered and with 
 infinite pains, was only from such report as might 
 well have been spread about her by one who knew 
 her well. And what I heard from Father Dorgan, 
 from many another too beside, all the merest scraps 
 of history that I could gather together, I have 
 knit in one story the tale of Anthony Sorel and 
 Anna Quartermaine. 
 
 Yet without that which I learnt from Malachi, it 
 would have been impossible to write. And it was 
 Malachi who kept silence longest of all. Day 
 after day I visited him up in the hills until he had 
 found the ease of speech with me. He would talk 
 indeed of a thousand things, but never the subject 
 I needed from him most of all. 
 
 Through him my mind became imbued with all 
 the grand and passionate simplicity of Irish folk- 
 lore. Even though he was so seldom seen by any 
 of those who lived in the neighboring villages, yet 
 he had a wide reputation as a teller of tales. There 
 are many his like in the more remote parts of Ire- 
 land. They seem to perpetuate the old spirit of 
 the wandering bards, telling their stories in the 
 wild poetry of prose and always concluding their 
 narratives with the simple finality, "That is my 
 story." 
 
 Malachi never told his stories twice in the same 
 way. I learnt by that, for I heard many of them 
 again and again, how much he brought his imagi- 
 nation to bear upon the telling of them. Their 
 
 97
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 substance seldom differed; it was the details that 
 changed. There was one story of a great lady in 
 Connemara that he told me three separate times, 
 and every time he dressed her in different garments, 
 calling upon the beauties of Nature for his like- 
 nesses, and each time his descriptions became more 
 wonderful in their poetic conception. 
 
 This drawing upon Nature for his ceaseless need 
 of imagery was characteristic of all the tales he 
 told. As he had said of Maggie Donovan, "She 
 was as beautiful as a blackthorn bush on a long 
 Spring day," so he gave pictorially from Nature 
 in every story he related to me. 
 
 I remember well his description of the great lady 
 in Connemara "She rose from her chair," said 
 he, wishing to give me the impression of the great- 
 ness of her anger "she rose from her chair, like 
 a cloud going up into the mountains, and haven't 
 I seen sparks out av the hoofs av gallopin' horses 
 would have died black out beside the light in her 
 eyes." 
 
 Well could a book be made out of the stories I 
 had from Malachi, those long days in his little cot- 
 tage under the shadow of Knockshunahallion. But 
 the story I so eagerly waited for him to tell me, 
 of that I heard nothing. 
 
 Whenever I mentioned the name of Anthony 
 Sorel, or spoke of Anna Quartermaine, the lids 
 of his eyes tightened the one upon the other. His 
 withered skin puckered into a thousand wrinkles 
 and the whole mentality of him seemed to shrink
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 to nothingness before me. He never definitely told 
 me that he would not speak of it, for words were 
 not needed from him then. He became like a book 
 that is sealed and locked upon the lectern. Its 
 pages were no longer open for me to read and 
 usually, when it came to this, he would speak but 
 little upon any subject, withdrawing his mind into 
 that silent contemplation from which it was im- 
 possible to distract him. 
 
 One day I found him seated over his fire, racked 
 with a cold and struggling to get the warmth into 
 him. 
 
 He spoke despairingly of death, a subject he 
 often talked about but never with such melancholy 
 as then. 
 
 "Won't ut be comin' on me," said he, "in the 
 black of the night and I like an old tree beaten by 
 the wind alone up here in the mountains? Yirra 
 God be wid the days, for the days are long and 'tis 
 mighty little comfort a pore man like meself would 
 be gettin' out av them. Who will there be to lay 
 me out and I slippin' out av the world wid no priest 
 to put his hands on me? O Almighty God, what 
 would a man be doin' in the darkness when the 
 light av the day is gone?" 
 
 So he talked, rocking himself to and fro, his 
 mind wrestling with the fatalism of death. 
 
 "You want a little spirit," said I, "to get the 
 blood warm in your veins then you won't be think- 
 ing so much about dying." 
 
 "Is ut whisky ye mane?" he asked. 
 99
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 I nodded my head. 
 
 "An* where would I be gettin' the spirit from?" 
 he asked me. "Isn't the price of a bottle of that 
 stuff what would keep me here in this cottage till 
 to-morrow was a month?" 
 
 "You haven't got any in the place?" 
 
 "I have not. Wouldn't I be drinkin' it now the 
 way a cat 'ud lap milk out of a saucer?" 
 
 "I'll go down to Araglin now, at once," said I, 
 "and get you some." 
 
 "Six miles?" said he. 
 
 "Well I'll be back in an hour and a half. Put 
 something round your shoulders and sit tight into 
 the fire. It's going to be a bitter night. You'll 
 want all the warmth you can get." 
 
 He was gazing up at me in wonder, scarcely be- 
 lieving yet that I was going to do this thing for 
 him. But when I went to the door, he realized that 
 I was in earnest. 
 
 "May the blessin' of God Almighty rest on ye," 
 said he, "and may all the hairs in yeer head turn 
 into mold candles to light yeer soul to glory on 
 the last day." 
 
 With that blessing ringing in my ears, I closed 
 the door behind me and set out in the driving rain 
 down the mountain road to Araglin.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 AS long as I live, I shall remember that night, 
 not only when I climbed back up the moun- 
 tain road, with the rain washing in tor- 
 rents down the gutters it made for itself, but all 
 the long hours afterwards till dawn. Yet they 
 were not long hours to me. Never indeed will the 
 hours of a night without sleep pass so swiftly by 
 for me again. 
 
 It was after six o'clock when I started back from 
 Foley's public-house with the black bottle of whisky 
 under my arm. The daylight was vanishing then 
 in rents of orange across a sky of sullen gray. All 
 of the men in the bar parlor of the inn told me it 
 would be a fearsome night. If the mists came up, 
 they warned me, I might lose my way when I re- 
 turned. But I had made the journey so often I 
 had no fear of that. 
 
 As I climbed the mountain road with its loose 
 stone wall on either side, where rock plants grew 
 in company with numberless Irish ferns and harts- 
 tongues thrusting their leaves out of the crevices, 
 I could hear the murmur of the wind rising away 
 across the mountains to the west. It was like 
 the cry of men far off in battle; men striving against 
 the power of men in mighty anger. Malachi would 
 have told me it was the voices of the hosts of the 
 
 101
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Sidhe as they sweep in their thousands down the 
 passes of the untrodden hills. 
 
 I realized then how surely I was coming under 
 the influence of these mountain visionaries, for 
 every sound I heard, conveyed in the heart of it 
 the likeness to some human note. A curlew cried 
 across the moorland and it fell on my ears like the 
 lonely cry of a child. And what child, they would 
 have argued, could have found its way into the 
 silences of those hills at such an hour? Then, as 
 they reached their humble firesides, they would have 
 told how the faerie children had been crying in the 
 blackness of the storm. The very sound of it would 
 have urged a speed into their feet as they toiled 
 homewards. With the loneliness of that crying 
 coming over me, I found myself quickening my 
 own. 
 
 As I climbed over the wall of the road to reach 
 the rough path through the heather, a donkey gath- 
 ered itself hastily to its feet and hurried away with 
 ears laid back into the darkness. My heart for- 
 got its beating and then with a sudden leap in my 
 breast, drove the hot blood burning to my cheeks. 
 After a moment, I stumbled on, falling again and 
 again over the roots of the heather, feeling the 
 distance to be never so long as then, in the gloomy 
 darkness of the over-riding night. 
 
 For seldom have I felt such desolation before. 
 The deep gray moors and rising mountains stretched 
 out around me like a deserted continent. Never a 
 light was there, no sign of life but the wildest. The 
 
 102
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 beating of an owl's wings as it flew by me, its 
 mournful cry dying away into the distance of the 
 hills, was like the cry of a soul that is lost be- 
 tween the gulf of the worlds. 
 
 And all the time as I walked, my mind would 
 picture for me that lake up in the hollow of the 
 mountains, where, as Malachi had said, at night 
 time, the souls of those the faeries have taken 
 "do be flyin' in crooked circles with the bats in 
 the shadows of the hills." 
 
 I struggled not to think of it, for those black 
 waters and ghostly echoing cliffs forced themselves 
 in an impenetrable depression on my mind. My 
 solitude in the midst of Nature bore down upon 
 me then. I thought of a line from one of Anthony 
 Sorel's poems, so clearly expressing that utter 
 melancholy which besets one: 
 
 When the earth is chill and one human stave 
 Of music would bring men from the grave. 
 
 He must have known those moments of solitude 
 when he wrote that, such solitude I felt stealing 
 through my flesh then as I made my way up into 
 the mountains. 
 
 A fresh hope sprang up in me when I saw the 
 flicker of light in Malachi's cottage. For the 
 moment, that was all I needed. The thought of 
 my return I could put aside with the exquisite re- 
 lief that sight of human habitation brought to me. 
 Perhaps I could put it away the more easily, for 
 
 103
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 in my bones was the sensation that I was not going 
 to return that night. 
 
 I did not return. But little did I think of the 
 thing that would detain me. 
 
 There was yet the best part of a mile to be 
 walked before I could reach his door, but the 
 warm flicker of that light put fresh heart into me. 
 When a black dog slunk by me, quitting the path 
 it was following and crouching past across the 
 heather, it struck no note of fear in my mind. The 
 poor beast was so apprehensive of ill-treatment at 
 my hands that I stood for a moment to watch it, 
 creeping away there into the darkness. It had given 
 me a wide berth, cowering low to the earth with 
 swift glances over its shoulder. Only when it was 
 some distance past me did it return to the little 
 beaten path through the heather. I whistled to it. 
 You must know the loneliness and fear of a dog 
 that is lost, what a piteous thing it is. In the 
 belief that the kindness of a human voice can give 
 them courage, a man must stop, no matter the night, 
 no matter the weariness of his way. 
 
 I called to it, but it never paused in the direction 
 it was going. A moment or so I watched it when 
 at last it had faded away into the blackness of the 
 night and I continued my way, thinking of the 
 strange loneliness of that thing which God had 
 made alive and how bitter a place for it the world 
 must be on such a thankless night. 
 
 When I was within a quarter of a mile of 
 Malachi's cottage, the clouds blew over, leaving a 
 
 104
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 rent in the heavens as brilliant as black ice, from 
 which the stars shone forth cold and clear, the one 
 jeweled piece in that somber raiment of the sky. 
 That clearing was not of long duration. In great 
 folds of lightless, seamless gray, the heavy clouds 
 swept on, with just this tear in the murky garment 
 through which an instant later the light of the 
 moon shot out. For that instant the wide stretches 
 of heather, the broken boundary walls, the narrow 
 passes between the hills and the uplifted moun- 
 tains were all washed white in moonshine. From 
 a place of gloomy foreboding, the wold had sud- 
 denly become one of passionate emotion. I gazed 
 about me as one standing in a darkened gallery 
 in whose hand, unawares, a naming torch has been 
 thrust. The earth glittered with light; it dazzled 
 me. Before I could realize it all, the torch in 
 my hand had flared, the rent was mended in the 
 garment, the clouds had closed over the moon. I 
 was in utter darkness once again with just the pin- 
 prick of that orange light winking at me from the 
 window of Malachi's cottage. 
 
 I did not wait to knock upon the door, but just 
 entered, once my fingers had found the latch. The 
 rain was beginning to fall again and my clothes al- 
 ready were well drenched by it. 
 
 He was sitting there over the fire as I had left 
 him, crumpled up with his knees against his chest, 
 neither did he move from where he was, nor raise 
 his head as I entered. 
 
 I closed the door and shut out the wind and rain 
 105
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 behind me. I took off my coat and shook it before 
 the fire. The rain flung from it hissing and spit- 
 ting into the flames. Still he did not move. 
 
 "Do you feel any better?" I asked. 
 
 He moaned under his breath and I knew that 
 the sickness of life was still with him. Then I 
 searched the dresser for a cup, pouring some whisky 
 into it and filling it with water from an old earthen- 
 ware pitcher on the floor. There he kept the water 
 he drew every morning from the spring that bub- 
 bled through the heather. 
 
 "Take a little of this," said I. "Drink it all down 
 the whole lot of it if you can." 
 
 His teeth chattered against the rim of the cup 
 as he put it to his lips. Yet even before it was 
 finished, it seemed his hand was steadier. Then 
 he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a 
 piece of dillisk a seaweed they dry and bring up 
 from the coast, selling it through the country. This 
 he began chewing as though it were a quid of to- 
 bacco, his jaws working round and round like a 
 cow chewing the cud. 
 
 It is hard to say what satisfaction they get out 
 of this habit, for dillisk is like leather in the mouth 
 and, to my unaccustomed palate, brought only the 
 taste of the brine. 
 
 However the mere fact of him stirring himself 
 to this extent, showed me that the spirit had taken 
 its effect. He still had no inclination to talk and 
 when a little later the storm broke in its full fury 
 outside, the windows rattling and the old doors 
 
 106
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 straining on their hinges as though some wild beast 
 were trying to force an entrance, then he fell to 
 shivering again and began once more to lament 
 upon the loneliness of death. 
 
 I took the bottle off the floor and extracted the 
 cork. He saw the movement and his eyes shot 
 quickly out from the deep hollows where they lay. 
 
 "Is ut the way yeVe got more of that stuff in 
 there?" said he. 
 
 I told him the bottle was full, except for the 
 quantity I had already given him. He looked at 
 me, silently for a moment and in wonder. 
 
 "Glory be to God!" said he presently. "Didn't 
 ye pay a power of money for that?" 
 
 I told him how much it cost, at which he raised 
 his eyes above him, staring for a while at the rafters 
 below the thatch. 
 
 "Is it the way ye spent all that silver money to 
 get me a drop that 'ud warm the blood in me and 
 ye walking all the ways through the storm of the 
 night?" 
 
 He could scarcely believe that any human being 
 could be so generous. It was not so much the jour- 
 ney I had made, for he merely added that as an 
 afterthought. It was the spending of the money 
 that seemed such a noble act to him, whereas, if 
 I took any credit to myself, it was for walk- 
 ing that distance, as he said, in the storm of the 
 night. 
 
 "Well may the Almighty God heap blessin's on 
 ye," said he, when at last he realized that the bottle. 
 8 107
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 was full and meant for him. "May the Almighty 
 God send ye the power of good fortune and may 
 ye walk in the land wid health and happiness on 
 ye and all that belong to ye to the last day. Will 
 ye pass the bottle across to me now, the way I 
 can be helpin' meself when the sharp of that wind 
 there gets into me blood?" 
 
 I swear I saw no harm in it. I swear that at 
 that moment no thought of what Father Dorgan 
 had said about him when he had drink taken, ever 
 entered my mind. If he could get no warmth from 
 his blood or from the fire that burned at his feet, 
 it was artificial warmth that he needed. I handed 
 the bottle across to him and he placed it down on 
 the floor by his side. 
 
 I can remember now, as the recollection of that 
 night comes back to me, how there were many 
 things that he asked me to do about the room. One 
 of the panes of glass in the window was broken, 
 the rain came spitting through the jagged aperture. 
 He asked me to put back the wad of brown paper 
 which had been jammed there to keep out the 
 draught. He asked me to count the chickens under 
 the hatch of the old dresser, for that he believed one 
 of them had strayed and was out, as he said, "in 
 the black whirl of the storm." 
 
 There were other things he pressed me to do 
 for him and during all these moments of my oc- 
 cupation, he must have been filling his old cracked 
 cup with the whisky I had brought from Foley's 
 public-house. However it was, in half-an-hour he 
 
 108
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 was a different being. There needed no incentive 
 from me to give him speech. He launched forth 
 into the wildest extravagance of exhaustless nar- 
 rative tales of the faeries, of the strange happen- 
 ings to men and women in those glens and val- 
 leys of the hills. 
 
 Never shall I remember them all; but the dim 
 impression of their wild poetry remains with me 
 now. Phrases of speech, instinct with an unfet- 
 tered imagination, fell unhesitating from his lips. 
 I can see his wrinkled face now as he sat there in 
 the faint, warm light of the peat fire, while the 
 storm outside rushed madly like some hunted thing 
 through the hollows of the mountains. It was as 
 the sound of a million men stampeding in the de- 
 feat of battle. At times, when the wind shrieked 
 and howled through the faulty crevices of the doors, 
 I heard as it were the crying of their voices in 
 terror as they rushed ceaselessly by. 
 
 And there he sat, sometimes rocking himself to 
 and fro as if to give measure to the monotony of 
 his voice, his little eyes lit with unnatural flames, 
 talking, endlessly telling his tales of the world, al- 
 most as though my existence was not conscious to 
 his thoughts. 
 
 Then suddenly at the conclusion of a story he 
 had related about that lake in the far hollows of 
 Knockshunahallion, he looked across the red light 
 of the fire at me and filled the cracked cup again. 
 
 " 'Twas bi the edge of thim waters, they laid 
 the hands on the young fella, an' he with the black 
 
 109
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 heart in him an' his eyes struck wid the desolations 
 of the world." 
 
 It was Anthony Sorel he meant and this was the 
 first time of his own account he had spoken of 
 him. 
 
 I claim no indulgence for the thing I did, beyond 
 the fact that at the moment I knew nothing of that 
 empty bottle at his feet. It is excuse or no excuse, 
 according to those who judge me, that I was so 
 eager for the truth. But once he had spoken of 
 Anthony Sorel of his own free will, then, controlling 
 my eagerness, acting the lie that I did not care 
 whether I heard it or not, I encouraged him to tell 
 me more. 
 
 He was slow to begin, but when he had drunk 
 more from the cracked cup in his hand, it was at 
 last that he gave himself up to the pride of his 
 story. 
 
 " 'Twill be the Almighty God and He judging 
 him whin the hosts do be blowin' their trumpets on 
 the last day." 
 
 It was with these words that he ushered in his 
 tale and there, in that wind-swept cottage in the 
 mountains, with the storm hissing in the thatch and 
 the raindrops spitting into the peat fire, till the 
 long hours of night were treading on the heels of 
 dawn, he told me the story of Anthony Sorel and 
 Anna Quartermaine.
 
 PART II 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THERE came one day a young man to Arag- 
 lin, from some foreign place, so the people 
 said, and he paid money down to Michael 
 Quinn for Heggarty's cottage that had stood empty 
 on the edges of Knockshunahallion ever since old 
 Heggarty had died. 
 
 They talked of the wits having gone out of him 
 and he paying good money for that hovel of a 
 place, but Michael Quinn pocketed the gold and 
 was known to have said, 
 
 "There are as many shillin's in a gold coin that 
 comes out av an old sow's mouth as a man 'ud be 
 findin' in the mint itself." 
 
 Who could deny the truth of that? But one and 
 all, they declared he had got a great bargain for 
 himself and there is no doubt he had. 
 
 The only expense to the vendor was the cost of 
 a new thatching, part of the bargain entered into 
 and drawn out by Quinn on a piece of paper he 
 got from Jim Keane, the publican then in Araglin. 
 For no sooner was the matter verbally agreed upon, 
 than Quinn, who had once been involved in legal 
 proceedings at the petty sessions court in Fer- 
 
 in
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 moy, made eagerly to get the substance in writing, 
 though he had never heard of an official stamp 
 in his life. 
 
 The business was then concluded and a drop of 
 bad whisky drunk by Quinn on the strength of it 
 when once he had scratched his name across the 
 piece of paper, well soiled by the exertions of his 
 legal propensities. 
 
 "By this accordingly " so the document was 
 worded "Michael Quinn agrees to hand over the 
 cottage in the grip of the hills that was after being 
 old Heggarty's cottage and will do the same, having 
 put a new thatch to it the way it will keep out the 
 drift of the rain, for the sum of ten pounds which 
 no man can say is not a fair price." 
 
 It is interesting to see how the legal tone of the 
 agreement quickly loses its flavor and falls away 
 into the more human measure of speech. It is still 
 more interesting to observe that last little touch 
 of a pricking conscience, as though he anticipated 
 the whole world's criticism of his bargain and would 
 have it in writing that he had dealt fairly by his 
 man, however much they might declare in those 
 parts to the contrary. 
 
 At the foot of this document, he scrawled his 
 name, Michael Quinn, while below it, you will 
 find the name, Anthony Sorel, in tiny letters that 
 would need almost a magnifying glass to decipher 
 them. 
 
 u 'Twas himself didn't want the world to be 
 knowin' he'd put his name to a dirty bargain," they 
 
 112
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 said in Araglin when they saw the signature. 
 Michael Quinn could answer nothing to that. 
 
 But if they supposed that Anthony Sorel thought 
 he had made a bad settlement, they were much mis- 
 taken. He bought some little furniture in Fer- 
 moy and settled himself down in this thatched cabin 
 in the heart of the mountains, much as a man who, 
 long riding the stretches of the implacable sea, 
 comes before the Winter storms into the peace of 
 the harbor. 
 
 It was the month of November when he came 
 and the winds of God were seeking out the moun- 
 tain crevices and the clouds were wrapping the 
 passes of Knockshunahallion in a seamless garment 
 of gray. The nights were falling quickly with im- 
 penetrable darkness. Even the sea-gulls came in- 
 land so far to haven from the Atlantic storms. In 
 the daytime, far down In the valleys, they could 
 be seen like fluttering pieces of whitest paper blown 
 in the wake of the plowman's team. 
 
 There was not one amongst the people of those 
 parts but who believed that Anthony Sorel would 
 be gone from his cabin before the Winter was past. 
 
 "Is it stay up there in the wrath of the moun- 
 tains," they said u an' he havin' the white of death 
 already in his face?" 
 
 That was what they said, but they were all wrong. 
 An unearthly pallor there may have been in his 
 cheeks when first he came to Knockshunahallion, 
 but it was not the whiteness of death. There was 
 an eager virility in that slim body of Anthony
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Sorel's which none of them had taken into account. 
 
 When even a month had gone by, the mountain 
 winds had burnt a faint color into his face, bur- 
 nished a brighter light in his eyes. Those who met 
 him then, tramping the half-trodden paths through 
 the heather, would scarcely have believed him to 
 be the same man when once the old year had shot 
 its bolt and the new year had lifted the latch. 
 
 Twice every week he came down those four miles 
 into the village to buy food, bread and butter and 
 tea; sometimes fish when the men came out in their 
 little rail carts from the coast. In the stony piece 
 of land that was tilled behind his cottage, he said, 
 he was going to sow his own potatoes in the Spring. 
 
 It was the postman, bringing the letters a lone- 
 some walk, those three miles over the moors from 
 Ballyduff who first told the people that Anthony 
 Sorel was one of those who made songs and had 
 the beauties of the world in the tips of his fingers. 
 They never said any more after that about the Win- 
 ter driving him out of the mountains, because they 
 knew that a man who made songs and could see 
 the beauty of the world, would find such beauties 
 in those hills as that he could never wish to leave 
 them. 
 
 It was in time, when the Spring was coming 
 round, when the first buds of the mountain ashes 
 were faintly brushed with green and the larks rose 
 in sudden upward flights out of the heather, such 
 time as that it was when people about began to 
 have some awe and great respect for him. And 
 
 114
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 as the months went by, there were men in the cot- 
 tages who could say his poems off by heart. 
 
 They knew him all about; for lonely though he 
 was up there in that cabin of his in the grip of 
 the hills, he would come down to the quiet farms 
 and to the cottages that lie in the valleys, as the 
 toys of a child lie in a woman's lap, and there he 
 would sit with them, talking at their firesides. 
 
 All the folk-lore and the tales of the faeries' en- 
 chantment, he heard in this way from the people 
 themselves. Much of the poetry he wrote came 
 first from their lips. 
 
 It was when they waked Mary Dorgan, that 
 black night in March, he first read one of his poems, 
 as they sat about the room with the coffin lonely 
 on the table and the two candles burning with 
 shrouds of wax at her feet. 
 
 There was a strange note of remoteness in his 
 voice as he read. He allowed himself but little 
 variety of intonation, and yet the tone of it was 
 sweet, in brighter moments like the running of a 
 mountain stream under the moss, in solemn cadences 
 as the wind that threatens the hills before even the 
 storm is near. He read for the beauty of the 
 words alone and would not distract the ear with 
 that emotional appeal of the actor to the senses. 
 
 "Catch up the garments of your night 
 Embroidered with its stars, 
 And look not neither to the left nor right, 
 Nor heed the flaming scimitars.
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Set out with quiet feet and noble heart; 
 Death has commanded you shall take your part. 
 
 Pluck you a thorned hazel twig 
 
 And shake the blossoms free; 
 
 The very hour itself is big 
 
 With your soul's destiny. 
 
 Girdle your faith and be as fifty men 
 
 That march to battle in the hollow glen. 
 
 Bring you no tears, the dew will fall 
 
 To wet the path you go; 
 
 And you will hear the curlews call 
 
 Across the moors below. 
 
 The flame-flies shall burn candles in the grass 
 
 To light your silent footsteps as you pass." 
 
 There is much honor for that man in Ireland 
 who can make songs. So from amongst the people 
 there, who lived in the sight of Knockshunahallion, 
 there came great honor to Anthony Sorel. Wher- 
 ever he went, there was a welcome for him a cup 
 of milk, a piece of griddle bread, a seat by the 
 peat fire. And as time went by, the reverence of 
 mystery grew about his name. 
 
 "We've a mystery man up there in the moun- 
 tains," they said, "an' he singin' his songs through 
 the watch of the night." 
 
 No one knew how he lived. In time, no one 
 asked. Once every month, he walked the long road 
 across the moors into Ballyduff, took the train to 
 Lismore but was not seen there by the townspeople, 
 
 116
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 except when he arrived and, after three days, when 
 he returned. But in Lismore itself, he wasted no 
 moment, was come there and was gone; was come 
 again and then again returned to Ballyduff, from 
 whence he walked back over the windy moors to his 
 cabin in the mountains. 
 
 Some supposed him rich some poor. None of 
 them knew. Even when Shauneen Troy climbed 
 up into the mountains, one of those days when 
 Anthony Sorel had gone away, and peered in 
 through the window of his cottage, he learnt but 
 little for his daring to tell them down in the val- 
 ley below. 
 
 There was the old bed built into the wall, just 
 as Heggarty had died in it "But weren't the 
 clothes on it white," said Shauneen "the way he 
 might have stole the cloth off the altar; an' wasn't 
 there a robe over it all of the colors of the world, 
 the Pope might have on his shoulders an' he sittin' 
 on the holy chair of Rome itself?" 
 
 Quite possibly this was a patchwork quilt cast 
 over the bed and likely to bring great wonder to 
 strange eyes that had never seen its like before. 
 Shauneen made the most of it, for he had no other 
 news to tell. The light from that little window had 
 but faint power to illuminate the room within. He 
 could not see how simple the furniture in the place 
 might be, so he colored everything with the light 
 of the patchwork quilt, speaking of great chairs 
 that kings might sit in and twenty high candlesticks 
 of polished brass when he had seen but two. 
 
 117
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 The only thing, a Russian crucifix, set with 
 all the barbarous beauty of rough-cut stones, 
 a thing he might have talked about with 
 bated breath, he caught no sight of. It stood in 
 a niche of the wall by the open chimney and 
 none besides Anna Quartermaine ever beheld it 
 there. 
 
 Here then and in this fashion, Anthony Sorel 
 lived in the lonesomeness of the hills while a year 
 drew by. There was no more heard of his fear- 
 ing the wrath of the mountains after that and no 
 longer did they talk of the white of death in his 
 face. 
 
 By many gentle things, he endeared himself to 
 those about him. When old James Cotter was 
 thrown from his horse on the Clogheen road, it 
 was Anthony Sorel himself who sat by his bed- 
 side while two days were going in and out and 
 but for him, they said, the old man would have 
 got his death at that time. 
 
 Yet notwithstanding all his familiarity with the 
 people, there never departed from him that sense 
 of mystery. Often when the heavy dews were fall- 
 ing and the long evenings of the summer were drop- 
 ping into night, a herdsman late coming from his 
 flocks in the hills, would find Anthony Sorel walk- 
 ing alone, long distances from his cabin on Knock- 
 shunahallion. Because of the songs he made, per- 
 haps, too because of his solitary life up there in 
 the mountains, they said he talked with the faeries. 
 They whispered that he had some spell against 
 
 118
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 their charms by which none of them could take him 
 to themselves. 
 
 So he lived, close against the face of Nature, till 
 one Spring had gone by and yet another Spring 
 with its racing clouds and bursts of sunshine was 
 dressing the mountains in their purple robes. Then 
 again the air was filled with the beating of birds' 
 wings and the hum of bees. Up into the heavens 
 the larks soared, bearing the burden of their quiver- 
 ing music into the clearer light. The stone-chats set 
 about their building under the mountain stones. 
 All day long rose the far, faint bleating of the 
 mountain sheep, calling their errant young. The 
 Winter mists were swept away ; the valleys stretched 
 out their arms to the awakening sun once more and 
 then it was that Anthony Sorel first met Anna 
 Quartermaine.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 OFTEN, with sly laughter, like children cun- 
 ning in their ways, the old folk teased 
 Anthony Sorel because he lived alone in his 
 cabin up in the mountains. 
 
 "One fine day," they said, " 'tis yourself will be 
 takin' a shtrapping young girrl up there to the moun- 
 tains, and ye makin' the songs to her through the 
 long nights. Shure, wouldn't ye be as mean as bog- 
 water, keepin' that bed to yeerself with all the young 
 men about gone foreign and not one but yeerself 
 to marry a dacint girrl that 'ud be lookin' sideways 
 at any young fella walkin' the roads." 
 
 At the cross roads indeed, whenever a fiddler 
 came those ways and they would be dancing till 
 the night was dark, there was many a young girl 
 casting her daring eyes at Anthony Sorel while 
 he stood by the loose stone wall watching them. 
 Was it not he who could make the songs of the 
 mountains and is there not in the breast of every 
 woman some voice that calls her to the singers of 
 the world? 
 
 Indeed a woman may well and fondly love the 
 man who woos her with the light of battle in his 
 eyes, who wins her with the strength of victory in 
 his arms. Like a mother she will dress his wounds 
 and bathe his forehead with her tears. Then it is 
 
 120
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 as to a child she gives her love, knowing that, as 
 a child, to just one word of hers he will obey. 
 
 But it is the man of dreams, of unknown pas- 
 sions and mysterious moods, to whom for deeper 
 sorrow or for greater joy she gives the secret of 
 her soul. His songs can waken her to unsuspected 
 depths; his hidden thoughts are always riddles for 
 her watching eyes. She never knows the man he 
 may not be and never can with all enchantments 
 wholly enslave his mind. He is no child, obedient 
 to her voice, but with some strange elusiveness al- 
 ways evades her when she thinks to hold him fast. 
 And so because it is not easy victory she asks, this 
 is the man whose eye arrests hers in a world of 
 men. 
 
 Perhaps it is the priest in him, vowed celibate 
 against the flesh, that urges on the conflict in her 
 soul. She questions the youth and beauty in her 
 face that cannot bring him pleading to her feet 
 and seeks to gain from him the very passions that 
 she scorns in coarser men. That strange aloofness 
 in his eyes, spurs on her spirit to the sterner quest. 
 It is the marble that her blood would warm, 
 towards which her nature leans to kindle the fire 
 of life. 
 
 In all unconsciousness no doubt, yet still in such 
 a mind, the young girls glanced at Anthony Sorel 
 when they saw him at the cross ways, or met him 
 walking by the road. The death of Maggie Dono- 
 van in the mountain lake was told at night about 
 their firesides and many a one of them could see 
 
 121
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 in Anthony Sorel, him that came down the heather 
 path, playing the sound of the winds in the reed 
 between his lips. And not one alone, but many 
 as they lay awake in the darkness would find imagi- 
 nation to believe that such a death could bring its 
 joys to them. 
 
 Yet he looked at none but with the eyes that see 
 beyond, until it grew to be much spoken of that 
 he had visions coming to his sight; that in his cabin 
 where the winds meet in the hills, he could call forth 
 the souls of the departed dead and hear their mes- 
 sages from the other world. 
 
 Amongst such a people as those in Ireland, with 
 all the riot of their imagination running wild, it 
 is not difficult to understand how legend and mys- 
 terious tales should gather about such a man. And 
 yet he moved amongst them, reading his songs at 
 their humble firesides, listening to their stories of 
 the faeries, and all in that lonely simplicity of life 
 it seemed so strange a man should choose for his 
 expression. 
 
 It was in the Spring of his second year on Knock- 
 shunahallion that Anna Quartermaine came out of 
 Ballysaggartmore, walking up into the mountains. 
 She went by the road that passes through Feagar- 
 rid, swinging her body to a tireless step as she 
 walked, with Michael, an Irish terrier, trotting at 
 her heels. 
 
 An open eye and clear she had for the beauties 
 of the world that stretched before her. There was 
 not a lark that rose or a curlew that called but 
 
 122
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 what her eyes had seen, her ear had heard. Sport 
 there was too for that devil Michael when once 
 they came to the moors. She carried a whip in 
 her hand, but it was her voice that brought him 
 in to heel. 
 
 When at Foildarrig, she left the road and set 
 across the moors to join the road again past Boon. 
 Then she unpinned the hat from her head and let 
 the winds of that Spring morning blow their scent 
 of heather through her hair. 
 
 So she was walking, humming that music of a 
 heart glad of the day, when she first met Anthony 
 Sorel. 
 
 He was lying out on a flat table of rock, his 
 elbows raised on it, supporting his face in his hands. 
 Below him stretched the theater of the hills and 
 all the valley with its patchwork fields of luminous 
 green. 
 
 There was a murmur of life in the heather; 
 there was the first sharp warmth of Spring in the 
 sun. It was a day for lovers in that magic world 
 and yet, when Michael stood with his front paws 
 raised upon the rock in eager curiosity, the man 
 looked at the dog and not at her. 
 
 She called him back to her heels as she passed, 
 knowing, as women do, without observing, that she 
 had pitched her voice upon its sweetest note. Then 
 it was he looked, as she had meant he should, when 
 in his eyes she saw that far aloofness which only 
 could explain his presence in so wild a world alone. 
 
 On his head too there was no covering. His 
 9 123
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 black hair was blown, disordered on his forehead, 
 and he lying there like a man at rest at the noon 
 of the day. She looked for that satchel on the 
 shoulder, proving him one of those strange pedes- 
 trians you meet the world over, who seem from 
 choice to face the road alone. But there was none. 
 Realizing that he was no man of those parts, not- 
 withstanding the untidy condition of his clothes, 
 there was yet the suggestion to her mind as she 
 glanced at him that he was no stranger to that 
 corner of the world. 
 
 These are the instincts, and God knows how, that 
 lead a woman to the truth. Was it the attitude in 
 which he lay, the easy posture of his slim figure? 
 She would have been the first to swear she did not 
 know how she came by that conviction. A convic- 
 tion it was; for when she had passed out of sight 
 round a bend of the hills, she too seated herself 
 in such position as that if he left his table rock 
 she could observe which way he went. This was 
 curiosity; that spirit that stirs within a woman long 
 time before she knows she is awake. 
 
 Well into an hour she sat there wondering would 
 he ever go and then, when at last her patience was 
 exhausted, with sudden impulse she retraced her 
 steps. It was not that she knew what she was 
 going to do. Women do not know, do not set their 
 minds to this or that, or if they should, are never 
 prepared to do it. 
 
 When once again she turned the corner and 
 found him still lying on his table rock, there rose 
 
 124
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 conviction, now doubly sure, he was no man of 
 those parts. But had he shown the wish to speak, 
 then there had been no echoing wish in her. 
 For a woman knows that wish in a man far sooner 
 than he dreams he has the courage to attempt it. 
 Had that wish been there in Anthony Sorel at that 
 moment, she would have passed him by with a 
 light in her eyes, a certain poise of the head, which 
 would have given him his answer before he asked 
 it. 
 
 But there was none of this. She felt he almost 
 resented her intrusion. And when he looked at her, 
 it was as one who saw her in perspective with that 
 vast outline of the hills when she would have had 
 no other object for his eyes but her. 
 
 So this it was that prompted her, urged her it 
 would seem almost to attitude of defiance. Be- 
 fore she knew the cunning of her tongue or had 
 designed the gentle defenselessness of her pose, 
 she had stopped and spoken as she passed. 
 
 "I hope I don't disturb you," she said, "but can 
 you tell me how I can get back to the road to Bally- 
 saggartmore? I've been wandering about here for 
 the last hour almost and I can't find a path." 
 
 Not consciously did she strike the note of help- 
 lessness in her voice, but there it was and, hearing 
 the echoes of it in her ears, she knew that, had she 
 been a man, she could not have resisted it. 
 
 "The way you came," said he, "will take you 
 back." He raised himself and pointed to the south. 
 "Ballysaggartmore is over there." 
 
 125
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Two things there were that fastened themselves 
 upon her mind, the quality of his voice and, as he 
 pointed the way across the moors, the wonderful 
 refinement of his hands. Both were strange and 
 unexpected in such a man in such a place. Curiosity 
 became a conscious emotion in her then and, not- 
 withstanding the finality of his information, she 
 still lingered there, pursuing the swift impressions 
 that sped across her mind. 
 
 The first words then that came to her, she spoke, 
 determining to force him into conversation that she 
 might hear his voice again; resolving in herself to 
 conquer his impenetrable reserve. 
 
 "And which way is Foildarrig?" she asked. 
 
 "Foildarrig is down there in the valley the 
 group of cottages close to that belt of trees." 
 
 Still he was looking at her when he spoke, as if 
 she were no more than a part of the world his eyes 
 were compassing. Where was her beauty then? 
 she asked herself. 
 
 When the issue between human beings is in the 
 balance, no one knows swifter than a woman when 
 her looks are put upon the scales. He had not so 
 much as taken them to account; yet there she stood 
 below him, with the wind blowing through the loose 
 tresses of her hair, tinting her cheeks with that 
 glow no art can imitate, knowing that if ever she 
 had beauty it was with her then. This was driving 
 her and almost in self-defense, as though each un- 
 comprehending glance of his was an attack. 
 
 "Do you know this part of the world well?" she 
 126
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 asked, the very difficulty encouraging her to her 
 purpose. 
 
 "I live here," said he. 
 
 "Here?" She looked about her, across the long 
 slopes of the hills, the wide stretches of the heather, 
 the stray thorn trees bent and twisted by the pre- 
 vailing winds. "Here?" she repeated. "Where?" 
 
 By a motion of his hand, he lifted her eyes to 
 the mountains above them. 
 
 "On a sort of plateau up there," said he, 
 "there's a small cottage. It's mine." 
 
 "And you live there?" 
 
 "I do." 
 
 "All the year round?" 
 
 "All the year round." 
 
 "Not by yourself?" 
 
 "Yes by myself." 
 
 "Whatever for?" 
 
 "One must live somewhere." 
 
 "Yes but surely you choose company, don't you?" 
 
 "I have company." 
 
 "Whose?" 
 
 There she stopped. An expression she could not 
 read as yet had swept into the sensitive lines of his 
 face. It might well have been displeasure at her 
 questioning. She hastened to make amends. 
 
 "Please forgive me," she said quickly. "I'm very 
 rude aren't I?" 
 
 "Why should you say it's rude to be curious?" 
 he replied. "Everyone is curious. We cease to live 
 when we cease to have curiosity." 
 
 127
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 She looked up to his table of rock and she smiled. 
 
 "But you're not curious." 
 
 "Oh yes, I am," said he "thank God, full of 
 curiosity." 
 
 "Not about me." 
 
 She remembered afterwards, indeed she was con- 
 scious of it then, how he looked down at her as 
 though aware of her personality for the first time. 
 
 "No," he replied slowly. "Isn't it a waste of time 
 to be curious about people?" 
 
 This was a strange point of view. That none 
 of them ever fulfilled her expectations had not de- 
 terred her from being curious about people all 
 her life. Yet strange as it was, it did not sound 
 unexpected from him. Her mind did not even take 
 offense at it, when from some other man she would 
 intentionally have sought the personal implication. 
 
 "I don't find it a waste of time," was all she said. 
 
 There followed a silence and in that silence had 
 his eyes been upon her, she would have let it con- 
 tinue. But when she looked up again, he was gazing 
 away to the high peak of Knockshunahallion where 
 a white cloud, dropped down from the blue heav- 
 ens, was brushing the crest with a fringe of mist. 
 
 "Why do you think it is?" she continued. 
 
 It was his reluctance that was stimulating to her 
 and it was not the reluctance of one who will not be 
 engaged, but of a mind engrossed with things beyond 
 her comprehension. She felt she was against some 
 barrier that human nature had never confronted her 
 with before, which. all the desire in her was leaping 
 
 128
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 up to overcome. It was only by keeping her eyes 
 fixed upon his face, she felt she could bring him to 
 the consciousness of her question, and when at last 
 he did answer, it was slowly made, as though he 
 had left another world to speak to her. 
 
 "Because people come and go," he said. "That's 
 why it seems to me a waste of time to be curious 
 about them. So much as they touch your own life 
 and become for a time a part of it, they have all the 
 meaning that people can have in the world and 
 curiosity won't help you to find out what that mean- 
 ing is. You'll discover it, a thing growing in and 
 completing the growth of your own soul." He 
 spoke that word with hesitation, as though she might 
 misunderstand his use of it. "They set you back 
 or help you onwards. The people you imagine and 
 make in your own mind have more power of uplift- 
 ing than any you meet in the flesh." 
 
 "Is that what you're doing, up there on your 
 perch of rock dreaming about people you've never 
 met?" 
 
 For the first time he smiled and she saw the hidden 
 charm in him. 
 
 "I was not aware that I was doing anything," said 
 he. "I've been here for an hour before you came." 
 
 "Doing what?" 
 
 "Nothing. Watching those lapwings down in the 
 valley listening to that lark. Every quarter of an 
 hour, he makes a new flight up into the heavens. I 
 don't know what I've been doing. Look at those 
 clouds gathering over the Galtee mountains. It's 
 
 129
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 something to watch them, isn't it? In an hour's time 
 their shadows will be chasing across the moors." 
 
 She looked at him in growing interest, uncertain 
 how to understand the things he said. For though in 
 any other place, there might have seemed extrava- 
 gance in the sound of his speech, yet there and in the 
 simple manner in which he spoke, everything he said 
 seemed to have a truer meaning. 
 
 "You're a queer person to meet like this," she 
 said and candidly, for the first time unconsciously 
 losing the woman in her and speaking just as one 
 human being to another as travelers speak, wend- 
 ing their ways along the same road. Indeed, either 
 because of him, or despite herself, she had taken 
 off that garment of femininity in which she had been 
 wrapped. The knowledge that he was a man and 
 she was a woman and that there they were alone 
 in the wild passes of those hills was swiftly dropping 
 from her. It was the aloofness of his mind she 
 knew had brought about the change. So she could 
 come to candor and, undisguised, speak the passage 
 of her thoughts. 
 
 "You'd be the same as I am," said he, "if you 
 lived up here in the sounds and silences of the moun- 
 tains. I'm not queer only to you. I'm not queer 
 to myself or to all those people who live in the farms 
 and the cottages you see dotted about down there 
 in the valley. At least I don't think I am. I know 
 they believe that I talk with the faeries and do all 
 sorts of strange things in my little cabin up there 
 but after all that's not so queer a thing to them. 
 
 130
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 They see faeries. There's scarcely one of the old 
 people about here who hasn't seen some evidence of 
 them one way or another. If you know the country 
 hereabouts at all, you know that about them. Oh 
 
 I'm not queer " He raised himself on the slab 
 
 of rock and jumped down into the heather by her 
 side. "You think about it wherever you're going 
 to be to-night and if you're going to be alone you 
 think about it. I'm not queer." 
 
 He had not hat to raise that he might bid her fare- 
 well, but a faint smile came across his eyes as he 
 turned away. So there she stood watching him 
 as he climbed up the side of the mountain, then he 
 turned upon the slope of the hill and was gone.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 IT may not have entered Anthony Sorel's mind 
 when he bid Anna Quartermaine think about 
 him that night, that she would so implicitly 
 have obeyed. Despite herself, the thoughts were 
 forced upon her and all the way back across the 
 moors her mind ran upon little else. 
 
 Who was he ? Why did he live alone there in the 
 stillness and in the wrath of those mountains? Was 
 there madness in him had he lost the gift of his 
 wits? So common a thing is that solitary madness 
 in Ireland sane enough to evade the meaning of 
 the Asylums Act that it seemed a supposition rea- 
 sonable enough when first her mind encountered it. 
 Yet even that did not hold weight with her for long. 
 He did not look as those witless creatures look. 
 However distant it may have been, there was direc- 
 tion in his eyes. The lapwings hovering in the valley 
 far below, the clouds in their cumulus banks over 
 the Galtee mountains, as he had said, it was doing 
 something to watch them. Perhaps the thing she 
 would have done herself, though with less meaning 
 than he seemed to derive from so indefinite an 
 occupation. 
 
 No, that was not madness, she thought. Even 
 when he spoke of the faeries, saying, as though it 
 were the most ordinary fact in the world, that the 
 
 132
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 old people had evidence of them, it was not as one 
 who believes in the witlessness of his imagination. 
 She could bring no conviction to her mind that his 
 wits were gone. So far and no farther her thoughts 
 had brought her when at evening she came back to 
 the big house in Ballysaggartmore. 
 
 Then, as her custom often was, when her mind 
 was restless and she felt the solitude of the place 
 about her, she sent for Father Nolan to take his 
 evening meal with her. 
 
 These invitations came always full of welcome to 
 the parish priest. There were not many diversions 
 in that neighborhood of Ballysaggartmore, and in 
 no parish that he had ever known, he often said it, 
 was there a woman of such attraction and intelli- 
 gence as Anna Quartermaine. 
 
 Though every week she made her confession to 
 him in the cramped confessional of their little chapel, 
 it was never, he felt, the woman who came to him, 
 only that ordered creature with the human sins of 
 omission and commission, obedient in mind to the 
 regulations of her church, but ever with the spirit 
 of insurrection holding about her the garb of mys- 
 tery 7 that she wore. 
 
 The more she told him in confession, the less he 
 knew of her when he met her in the world, where- 
 fore, having no shame of his manhood as a priest, 
 these little invitations to the big house always sud- 
 den and unexpected were never refused by him. 
 She gave him good wine. She could talk and with 
 such experience of the world as in no woman he had 
 
 133
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 ever met. Whenever she returned from her travels 
 abroad, she entertained him with stories from every 
 country she had visited. Full of that quaint ob- 
 servation, intelligent women have, of the unexpected 
 details of life, she could be witty, instructive, and of 
 absorbing interest. 
 
 Those little things which by right she should have 
 told him in the confessional, she let fall in the casual 
 course of their conversation. His eyes were keen 
 enough to see through that. In the confessional 
 there might have been forced upon her the little 
 necessities of explanation; but at the dinner table, 
 good manners forbade his questioning whereby the 
 woman in her escaped detection. With all the wit 
 of a clever tongue, with expressions too that swiftly 
 came, inviting confidence, and as swiftly went when 
 she deemed she had said enough, she made her ad- 
 vance, she effected her retreat. The next instant 
 the woman of whom she had accorded him that 
 transitory glimpse, was gone. 
 
 So it was when Father Nolan received her invita- 
 tion on that still Spring evening, he went to the door 
 of his room and called at once to his housekeeper. 
 "Let ye eat the chop," said he, "and don't be cook- 
 in' but half the potatoes, I'm goin' to have me dinner 
 at the big house." 
 
 There was always a warm sense of satisfaction 
 within him when he made that announcement. He 
 knew with what respect it was received in the 
 kitchen; how it would be well across the village 
 before the night had fallen. To add to the warmth 
 
 134
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of it, he took her note from its envelope and read 
 it through once again. 
 
 There is a place laid for you this evening and an empty 
 chair for you to fill. 
 
 That was all. This second time as he read it, he 
 smiled. The brevity, the precision, the confident 
 expectation, they were all so characteristic of her. 
 He knew so well what she would say were he to 
 refuse, the look of astonishment that would come 
 into her face, the countless ways she would punish 
 him for that declining, with the ready assumption to 
 her mind that he had something better to do. But 
 he never refused and short of the extreme exigencies 
 of his calling, she never expected that he would. 
 
 Having thrust the letter back again into his pocket, 
 therefore, he reached down his old silk hat from its 
 peg in the hall, looked at his hands and shook his 
 head when on any other occasion he would have 
 pronounced them "clean enough," and, opening 
 the door, he set out down the street to the big house, 
 hiding in its belt of trees on the outskirts of the 
 village. 
 
 "I'll wash me hands and I gettin' there," said he. 
 
 On those occasions, when there was no other com- 
 pany, he was shown into a little boudoir next to the 
 dining-room and, much as he liked company, being 
 a native of his land, he preferred these quiet even- 
 ings alone with her who was company enough for 
 any man. 
 
 135
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 The servant closed the door quietly behind him 
 as he crossed to the fireplace and sat down, pre- 
 paring for those long moments of anticipation which 
 he knew her unvaried habit it was to keep him 
 waiting. 
 
 Seven-thirty were the figures she had written at 
 the foot of her sheet of notepaper. According to a 
 little enameled clock on the mantelpiece, it was 
 five-and-twenty to eight. He folded his hands on 
 his lap and stared into the fire. 
 
 He was not a young man; he was not an old. 
 That age he was, so she often told him, when a man 
 can keep his illusions about Romance and yet be 
 sensible with women. That was her way of putting 
 it and invariably she would make it the more per- 
 sonal by assuring him how impersonal it was. In- 
 deed she was the only woman he knew, who con- 
 stantly reminded him that he was vowed to Holy 
 Orders and that by ostensibly helping him to for- 
 get it. 
 
 He had never told her his age. He had never 
 told it to anyone. He was fifty-three; indeed just 
 that age when a man volunteers no unnecessary in- 
 formation about it. He was handsome to look at; 
 handsome in that ascetic way which is one of the 
 two types you find amongst the priests of Ireland. 
 There are no intermediary types. The Church 
 breeds but two classes of men only. He was of the 
 class that finds promotion and, had he been on good 
 terms with his bishop, would never have remained 
 in Ballysaggartmore. 
 
 136
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 There was a kindly humor in his eyes when his 
 mind was engaged in conversation. In repose they 
 had that far inward look which belongs to the 
 visionary when it does not belong to the Church. 
 His cheek bones were high, his thin lips sometimes 
 twisting humorously, sometimes drooping to that 
 sudden sadness which is so innate in the race. He 
 was tall and slight, a slimness of figure that went 
 far to conceal his age. Indeed he was a man of 
 pleasing appearance. It is doubtful if Anna Quar- 
 termaine would have had him so often to her table 
 unless. For this certainly was characteristic of 
 her. She was a beautiful woman who neither 
 needed, nor could endure the contrast of ugliness 
 about her. All the servants at the big house were 
 chosen as much for their looks as their ability. 
 
 "There's no need for people to be ugly," she 
 said, "and when they are, there's still less need to 
 look at them. That's why you come here to dine 
 with me so often," she said to Father Nolan. "I 
 couldn't bear it if you were ugly. But you've got 
 such a nice ascetic old face that I like looking at it." 
 
 So she reminded him of his Holy Orders in the 
 same breath that she persuaded him to forget them. 
 No man objects to that. 
 
 The enameled clock on the mantelpiece was just 
 drawing its breath to strike the hour of eight when 
 the door opened, wakening him from the reverie into 
 which he had fallen. 
 
 He rose to his feet and turned round. She stood 
 in the doorway in a light dinner gown, perfectly 
 
 137
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 draped about her. First she smiled. This was her 
 
 apology. Then she said, 
 
 "I'm not late am I? Say I'm not late." 
 
 He said she was not, knowing that this was the 
 
 form of apology expected from him to set her mind 
 
 at rest.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THEY sat down for dinner to the table where 
 four shaded candles were burning in tall 
 Queen Anne silver candlesticks. This was 
 the only light in the room; strange illumination in 
 those days when a brilliantly lighted table was con- 
 sidered beautiful. 
 
 They had it in Ballysaggartmore that Anna Quar- 
 termaine took all her meals in the dark and sat in 
 the dark too by herself at nights in the big room 
 that looked over the mountains. 
 
 "An' wouldn't that be queer," they said, "for 
 one as handsome as herself?" By which it must 
 be supposed they meant she was hiding her beauty. 
 
 But Anna Quartermaine knew better than to hide 
 her beauty; she knew better than to be too generous 
 with it. Whatever he may have thought of those 
 shaded lights as means of illumination, Father No- 
 lan always came away from the big house with the 
 impression of a man who has been in the presence 
 of beauty rather than of one who has had it thrust 
 upon his sight. 
 
 On that Spring evening, he sat down to table, 
 conscious that there was some purpose in his being 
 asked there and equally content to wait until she 
 saw fit to tell him what it was. Quite possibly he 
 may have imagined its substance; some little thing, 
 10 139
 
 as so frequently happened, of which she had no 
 desire to unburden herself in the confessional, some 
 twinge of the conscience which could not be con- 
 strued into a measure requiring absolution ; some in- 
 tention upon which her mind was already set, yet for 
 which she needed the warrant of his approval. 
 
 These were the subtle and feminine motions of 
 her mind which required far more delicate treat- 
 ment than the open admission of venial sins in the 
 confessional. He was used to such dealings with 
 her. So far as it is possible for a man to under- 
 stand, he knew the directions of her mind. 
 
 "My spiritual adviser " so she sometimes ad- 
 dressed him, half in jest, half in earnest; and in 
 such capacity it was often when her determination 
 was set upon a certain course that she called him to 
 her, conjuring cunningly from his lips his approval 
 of the thing she meant to do. So many times had 
 her tricks deceived him, that he had become wary 
 of the fascination of her craft. This evening he set 
 to his meal in silence, as though to share her food 
 was the only purpose of her invitation. 
 
 "Have you got nothing to say?" she said at last. 
 
 He looked up humorously from his plate. 
 
 "Plenty," said he "but 'tis nothin' so good as ye 
 might be saying yeerself." 
 
 "How do you know I've got anything to say?" 
 
 "Didn't ye ask me here to take the dinner with 
 ye?" 
 
 She laughed and the shaded light of those four 
 candles all added to the mystery of her laughter. 
 
 140
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "You're a dear thing," said she. "You know me 
 very well don't you?" 
 
 This was one of her guiles, a cloak thrown across 
 his eyes, all embroidered with the charm of that 
 term of endearment. He knew what it meant. It 
 meant that he knew her so well that his eyes were 
 blinded to what she really was, to what she had fully 
 made up her mind to be. 
 
 "Go on," he said smiling. "What is it ye've got 
 to say?" 
 
 And when, in the simplest voice in the world, 
 she assured him that quite honestly there was noth- 
 ing, what else was there to do but for him to believe 
 her? It was then, but not till then that she pro- 
 ceeded with all her subtleties to tell him what it was ; 
 not that he might know, when all the telling had 
 been made, but that she could obtain from him 
 whatever expression of opinion she might need. 
 This much, however, must be said for him; he had 
 his shrewd suspicion he was being so dealt with 
 the vague impression, but no more. 
 
 Yet notwithstanding that shrewd suspicion, her 
 first question came upon him utterly unawares. Rest- 
 ing her cheek in her hand and, beneath the glow of 
 those shaded candles, setting her eyes to his, she 
 said, 
 
 "Do you believe in the faeries?" 
 
 He laid down his knife and fork and met her eyes 
 with his astonishment. 
 
 "Now, in the name of the Almighty God," said 
 he, "why are ye asking me a thing like that?" 
 
 141
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "The people about here believe in them," said 
 she "the old people do." 
 
 "They do indeed." 
 
 "Well don't you tell them how foolish it is?" 
 
 "Shure, why would I?" 
 
 He was beginning to lose all consciousness of that 
 shrewd suspicion. She had this quality. She could 
 always distract his mind with the interest of what 
 she said. 
 
 "Why would I?" he repeated. "Shure, what 
 harm are they doing believing in the faeries? Didn't 
 old Mary Quinn the other day go down on her two 
 knees bended and implore me the way I'd sprinkle 
 the room of her cottage with Holy Water an' she 
 kept wakin' at nights by the noises they made, sing- 
 ing and dancing till her ears were deafened with it?" 
 
 "What were the noises? Did you find out?" 
 
 "I did not. 'Twas in her ears she heard them, 
 not in mine." 
 
 "Well did you sprinkle the Holy Water?" 
 
 "I did not, of course." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Shure what would herself be saying about us if 
 I brought her the Holy Water and never a sound of 
 their dancing went out of her head from that day 
 to this?" 
 
 "You don't believe there was anything in it then?" 
 
 "Shure, I wouldn't say that. I've no doubt there 
 was something the pore woman heard in her ears. 
 Didn't I send the doctor to have a look at her?" 
 
 "What did he say?" 
 
 142
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "He said 'twas not in her ears at all but her 
 mind had it, the way she could describe the patter- 
 ing of their feet and even repeat some of the songs 
 they sang and she no poet, mind ye, to be invent- 
 ing the things she said. ' 'Tis no matter for the 
 priest,' said I 'an' 'tis no matter for the doctor,' 
 says he, for ye couldn't put a woman like that into 
 an asylum an' she just hearing the noise of music ye 
 couldn't hear yeerself." 
 
 Something in the reserve of his speech committed 
 him to a belief he would not openly subscribe to. 
 She sat there at the end of the table, watching him 
 as he continued with his meal, all the lighter spirit 
 of her manner gone, and in its place a gentle serious- 
 ness that softened to a shadow in her eyes. 
 
 "You don't think she was mad?" she asked pres- 
 ently. 
 
 He looked up at her, knowing in the cadence of 
 her voice, in the gentled expression of her face, that 
 all subtlety had gone from her; that now she was 
 truly herself, disrobed of all the secreting garments 
 of her sex. Why this subject had brought her such 
 a mood was beyond his understanding. He had seen 
 it in her before. Once, when she had believed she 
 was in love, she had given him this glimpse of her 
 real self, a prey to emotion, her spirit striving for 
 those upward and exalted flights of the mind where 
 no reason or quality of the intelligence could fol- 
 low. 
 
 But in all the course of his knowledge of her, she 
 had never spoken of the faeries before. When he 
 
 143
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 brought his eyes back to the plate before him, he 
 still was at a loss to understand this sudden inclina- 
 tion of her thoughts. 
 
 "Do you think she was mad?" she repeated, when 
 her question remained still unanswered. 
 
 "I do not," said he "no more than there are 
 times when I'm mad and ye're mad. Shure, don't 
 they say about here that 'tis queer ye are yeerself 
 an' ye never marrying any man at all." 
 
 "Do they say that?" 
 
 She smiled, but with an odd humor, not of laugh- 
 ter, in her face. 
 
 "They do indeed," said he. 
 
 "Do you think I'm queer?" 
 
 He looked up with a laugh in his eyes. 
 
 "Well now what do ye want me to say to that?" 
 he asked. 
 
 "Just what you think." 
 
 "Well then, I suppose I do." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 He knew just how carefully this question must be 
 answered and debated some moments before he 
 spoke. But she was eager to know. She could not 
 wait long to be told. 
 
 "Why?" she said again and again, "Why?" 
 
 "Well aren't there many men have asked ye?" 
 said he. 
 
 "Yes many." 
 
 Indeed there were many in his knowledge alone. 
 She never had any wish to hide them from him. 
 "There was a man he was in love with me by the 
 
 144
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 way " so she ushered in many a story for his 
 hearing. Knowing her friendship for him there 
 were not a few who had admitted as much to him 
 themselves, begging for his intercession, seeking his 
 counsel. To one and all of them, he had said the 
 same thing. 
 
 "Anna Quartermaine," said he, "will do what 
 she wants to, when she knows what it is." 
 
 "Don't ye think, then, that ye're queer yeerself> n 
 said he, "an' ye refusing them all?" 
 
 She leant back in her chair, all interest of the 
 meal lost in this of more absorbing moment. It was 
 a charming egotism. There was no discussion she 
 liked so well as an argument about herself, setting 
 forth her virtues as best became them, admitting her 
 faults with a fascinating reluctance; making volun- 
 tary confessions of the creature she was, and always 
 with the same nai've conclusion, "Don't you know 
 that about me?" 
 
 The parish priest knew this mood in her well and 
 never made endeavor to discourage it. Some new 
 feature of herself he learnt on every occasion when 
 it was displayed; yet never did she admit so much 
 as gave him power to penetrate the mystery of her 
 sex. With it all, she still remained the woman no 
 man can see or understand. 
 
 Such a mood she was entering upon now. With 
 every interest awake in him, he anticipated it. There 
 were ways of encouraging her, and he knew them 
 well. Finding her eyes lost in that contemplation 
 which sees no barrier to the limitations of one's sur- 
 
 145
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 roundings, he urged her with yet another question. 
 But there was no emphasis in his voice. He spoke 
 quite gently as one who wakes a sleeper from his 
 dreams. 
 
 "I suppose 'tis the way ye've never found a man 
 to yeer liking?" 
 
 She glanced up at that, when he could see how he 
 had struck a note which vibrated. 
 
 "There are so many men," she said "and so 
 many me's. That's what's the matter. The tinker, 
 the tailor, the soldier, the sailor and so on and so 
 on the beggarman and thief do you understand?" 
 
 He nodded his head. 
 
 "There's never been a chemist in love with me 
 though." 
 
 "Why a chemist?" 
 
 "Well " she was half teasing, but half she meant 
 the spirit of what she said "You never know. 
 Think if the whole world became too difficult, what 
 a wonderful potion a chemist could give you if he 
 were in love." 
 
 Father Nolan smiled at her, not altogether in 
 laughter. Despite himself he had caught the note 
 of meaning in her voice. 
 
 "Do ye think he would give it ye," said he, "if 
 the young man were in love?" 
 
 "But of course," she said, "that 'ud be the only 
 way he could prove it. What would be the good of 
 his being a chemist, if he wouldn't do that?" 
 
 "Rather a penalty for the pore man," said he. 
 
 "But isn't there always a penalty?" she replied 
 146
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 and little knew the truth she said. "If I love a sol- 
 dier, he must be a soldier and the greatest glory a 
 soldier can have is to die fighting. That's why I 
 don't want to marry a soldier. It's no good marry- 
 ing a man if you're going to lose him. I want to keep 
 the thing I love don't you know that about me?" 
 
 He laid down his knife and fork and broke into 
 laughter. There was the charm of something irre- 
 sistible in her folly, perhaps because there was more 
 than mere folly to it all. She was not only talking 
 of herself now. She was voicing one of the hidden 
 secrets of her sex. 
 
 "Supposing ye didn't lose him?" said he. "It isn't 
 all soldiers die that way. Indeed 'tis a good many 
 would be surprised to hear they had a chance of 
 it. Wasn't there an officer I knew in the North 
 Cork Militia and didn't he get his death with a cold, 
 waiting for a lady at the corner of Patrick's Bridge 
 and she never turning up for him till the rain had 
 drenched the coat on him and Mangan's clock 
 pointed to an hour after the time she said she'd be 
 there? Shure, what's wrong with a soldier beyond 
 the chances of his getting shot, if he'll come by his 
 death like that for a woman? What was the matter 
 with Major Allen, except that he was an English- 
 man, mind ye? Was there e'er a man ye'd have 
 more right to call a man, than that fella? Didn't 
 he stand six foot two in his stocking vamps and 
 wasn't he as handsome as an Apollo in a hateful red 
 tunic? Didn't he almost lose his wits about ye and 
 shure what was the matter with him?" 
 
 H7
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He had dropped his voice to a gentler note, know- 
 ing that he spoke of one of those tender incidents 
 in her life for which memory still chastised her with 
 sudden lashes of regret. 
 
 "What was the matter with him?" she repeated 
 "just that he wasn't a tinker or a tailor or a beggar- 
 man or a thief that's all. He was a soldier just 
 a soldier. And he was fond of me wasn't he? 
 You know that. But when I first met him, I thought 
 I loved soldiers then after a time I got so tired 
 of them. Life would have become a regiment of 
 days if I'd married him. We should have trooped 
 our colors till they were in rags. Why must a man 
 be anything? Why can't he be everything? Spiritual 
 adviser I shall never marry. There are too many 
 men in the world and they're all something different. 
 And if I married one, I should be bound to see 
 something in the other that I wanted. Come along 
 let's go into the other room. That's why I'm 
 queer. Tell them that if they ever ask you. I won- 
 der would they ever understand it." 
 
 She rose from her chair and led the way into the 
 little room beyond. There, she crossed to the win- 
 dow and stood looking out through the darkness to 
 where the mountains rose like purple rainclouds 
 against the evening pallor of the sky. 
 
 "I wonder what it's like," she said. "I wonder 
 what it's like at night to be up there alone in the 
 
 mountains."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THERE she stood for some minutes, holding 
 the curtain back against the white line of her 
 bare arm, not an outline of her face visible 
 to him as she gazed out to that land of the moun- 
 tains over which hung the silver sickle of an early 
 moon. 
 
 "Would you call a man queer," she asked sud- 
 denly and turned round into the room, letting the 
 curtains fall together behind her "would you call 
 a man queer who preferred the singing of birds to 
 the voices of the greatest singers, who would sooner 
 watch clouds gathering over the hills, and lapwings 
 hovering over the fields, than the motions of people 
 going about the world, who would sooner listen to 
 the babbling of a stream than the talk of human 
 beings would you call him queer?" 
 
 She was so full of unexpected moods for Father 
 Nolan that night that he relinquished all hope of 
 understanding her. 
 
 "Is there such a man?" said he, at haphazard in 
 order to gain time. 
 
 "I've known a man like that," she replied. 
 "Would you say he was queer?" 
 
 "Well I'd sooner hear frogs croaking than I'd 
 listen to a fella with a voice like Jamesy Power; and 
 I'd sooner see an old cow going home to be milked 
 
 149
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 than I'd watch Molly Heggarty walking the road to 
 Mass of a Sunday. I don't know would I say he 
 was queer, if he'd as good a reason for doing it as 
 that." 
 
 "I don't know what his reason was," said she. 
 "He just cut himself off from the world and there 
 was something in his eyes that defied you a sort of 
 mental advantage, a kind of spiritual supremacy, that 
 dared you to assail it." 
 
 She had come back into the room, back to the 
 extravagance of a fire lit in Spring. And there she 
 sat, staring into the glowing embers of it, with that 
 look in her eyes women so often indulge in a look 
 when they fondle a memory with little contemplative 
 smiles to make you jealous of it. It was inevitable 
 that question of his which followed. She prompted 
 indeed she asked for it. 
 
 "I suppose that was why ye did assail it?" said 
 he. 
 
 She could not quite trust her eyes to meet the 
 glance of his, for in that moment he had revealed 
 her to herself. She was smiling and hiding her 
 smile. He imagined it to be of the past, but what he 
 had said was true of her in the days that lay before 
 her. Until that instant she had not fully realized 
 how surely the eyes of Anthony Sorel had defied her; 
 had not realized how surely, too, the spirit of Ro- 
 mance had stirred in her to answer that defiance. 
 
 "Am I right?" he asked presently, when her head 
 was still turned away from him and she had given 
 no answer to his question.
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Then, with an effort, she could look at him, forc- 
 ing that expression of far memory into her eyes, 
 simulating that note in the voice which speaks of 
 what is long distant a faintly refreshed memory. 
 
 "I must be loved," she answered. "Don't you 
 know that? You don't blame me do you?" 
 
 Here, if he but knew it, she was seeking his ap- 
 proval, winning his consent for the thing her mind 
 already was deliberating upon. With that subtle 
 logic of women, she could deceive herself that the 
 issue was the same whether it were of a matter that 
 was past or of an intention yet to come. Forgive- 
 ness for the thing done, she argued, was approval 
 of the thing in contemplation ; yet she knew well 
 enough that the first was much easier to obtain. 
 
 Deceived by now by the intricacies of her mood, 
 the parish priest little knew how he was contributing 
 to the decision her mind had set itself upon. 
 Shrewdly suspicious though he was, he was no match 
 for her cunning here. He did not blame her, he 
 said, but remembering the hopeless passion of the 
 man whose name he had just mentioned, all his 
 sympathies went out to this other victim of her 
 fascination. 
 
 "An' I suppose ye robbed the pore fella of his 
 mental advantage," said he. "Ye didn't leave a rag 
 of that spiritual supremacy to his back?" 
 
 He thought of his own ideals, the illusions he 
 cherished, the vows he had taken, and a bitter regret 
 for the remorse that man must have suffered, swept 
 like a hot wind across his mind. Almost he felt his
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 anger rise against her, and swiftly enough she saw 
 that in his eyes. 
 
 "You don't like me," she said at once and felt a 
 martyr to his anger because, she told herself, the 
 thing had never been. 
 
 "I'm not saying that," said he. 
 
 "No but I know that's what you think. Yet 
 after all why should a man be like that? It's not 
 natural, is it? He wasn't meant for it. It's all 
 right for a priest." 
 
 He looked at her seriously, knowing that here she 
 was saying things which should be spoken of in 
 the confessional, yet finding himself, as often he had 
 done before, giving her the absolution of his sym- 
 pathy for sins she had never committed. 
 
 "Ye make the great mistake," he said at last, 
 "the way ye think that celibacy is a matter of the 
 body and not of the mind at all. Is it impossible 
 for ye to conceive of a man, without his vows to the 
 church being taken, who needs to lift his mind above 
 the things ye set such a pass on? Love's a great 
 thing, I'm not saying it's not, mind ye; and a good 
 many people would be the better for knowing what 
 it was. But can't ye imagine a man making that 
 ideal of it, the way he'd sooner see the end of him- 
 self than bring it down to earth?" 
 
 "Well?" said she and in that one word conveyed 
 a thousand things. For suddenly her mind had 
 leaped to the wonder and beauty of such a love as 
 that; suddenly she had caught sight of the possibility 
 of such a love for her in that young man she had 
 
 152
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 met in the mountains; suddenly she had realized 
 that to such a love, she could find the answer to all 
 her needs of life. And realizing it, in that one word, 
 she had swiftly conveyed to him that this was what 
 had happened in the past, because of her sure an- 
 ticipation of it in the days to come. 
 
 As readily he was caught by the suggestion of 
 that delicate inflexion in her voice. 
 
 "Is that what happened?" said he. 
 
 She nodded her head. 
 
 "Well, then," he continued, "ye know what the 
 best of love can be like in a man and ye may go the 
 whole length of yeer life and ye'll never find it 
 again. Did he never say a word of it to ye?" 
 
 "No not a word." 
 
 And now to his questioning, with all the eager 
 fancy of her imagination, she was presaging her own 
 Romance with Anthony Sorel as she conceived it 
 well might be. 
 
 "I don't know then," said Father Nolan presently, 
 "that ye do yeerself justice when ye admit that 
 ye robbed the man of his mental advantage. It 
 seems to me that he must have got away with it safe 
 and sound and every rag of spiritual supremacy 
 whole on his back, though, mind ye, there's one thing 
 I can't understand." 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 He set his eyes with all their shrewdness straight 
 to hers. 
 
 "I can understand," said he, "how ye knew he 
 was in love with ye shure a woman sees that with 
 
 153
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 her two eyes shut but will ye tell me how it was ye 
 let the pore fella go an' he not breathing a word 
 of it to satisfy the mere human vanity of ye? Can 
 ye tell me that?" 
 
 She could meet his eyes. In the determination 
 of what she meant her Romance with Anthony Sorel 
 should be, she could resist the full scrutiny of his 
 glance. Almost the swift flame of indignation was 
 there in her face as the fine whip of his assumption 
 fell across her conscience. 
 
 "I shouldn't rob a church," said she and threw 
 her head back to face his eyes. "Don't you know 
 that about me?" 
 
 "I do indeed," said he. "Ye'd never rob a church, 
 I know that; but ye'd make love to the priest inside 
 of it" 
 
 There was one instant when her anger might have 
 overwhelmed him; when there might have been no 
 more dinners at the big house for him for many a 
 week to come. He knew that. His eyes twinkled 
 with the danger of it, knowing, as he did, that you 
 must not speak truth to a woman. But he had taken 
 his chance, well aware of the woman he dealt with. 
 That was only one instant, for the next her eyes 
 were full of laughter. He was the only man who 
 could have dared to give her truth like that. He 
 was the only man who could have known it. 
 
 The laughter in her eyes came tumbling to her 
 lips. There were so many things he did not know, 
 that in that moment she could decide how little it 
 mattered that he knew so much. 
 
 154
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Oh you're a dear thing," she said between her 
 laughter. "I wouldn't let another man in the world 
 know so much about me." And so persuaded him 
 to the belief he had all there was to know. 
 
 "Well an' all that," said he, "doesn't tell me 
 why ye let the fella go." 
 
 "He hasn't gone," said she. 
 
 "Not gone?" 
 
 "No he's in love with me still he'll always be 
 in love with me." 
 
 For this was how she saw the devotion of An- 
 thony Sorel, lasting her life through; a great and 
 imperishable passion she could feed her soul upon 
 when the years had long taken the beauty from her 
 eyes. 
 
 "An' don't ye want him ever to speak of it?" he 
 asked. 
 
 Her eyes looked wistful. It was all so new to 
 her, this sudden fancy of Romance. 
 
 "I don't know," she said speculatively "I don't 
 know. Sometimes I believe I don't sometimes I 
 believe I do." 
 
 "Are ye going to marry him?" he whispered. 
 
 She took alarm at that. 
 
 "Oh I don't believe I shall ever marry!" she 
 exclaimed. "That 'ud spoil it all." 
 
 "Well, then, don't let him speak," said he, "an' 
 he'll probably fall humanly in love with some good- 
 natured creature, the way he'll cherish an ideal for 
 the rest of his days." 
 
 "But I don't want him to fall in love with any- 
 11 155
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 body else," she retorted quickly. "I suppose that's 
 wrong of me is it? Say it isn't wrong." 
 
 For a long moment he looked at her. 
 
 "Ye can't hold the world in yeer hand and have 
 it at yeer feet," said he, and then he went into the 
 hall for his old silk hat. She followed, watching 
 him as he thrust it on his head. 
 
 "You haven't said it wasn't wrong," she said as 
 he moved to the door. 
 
 "D'ye want me to?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well I suppose if I said it was wrong, I should 
 be finding fault with one of the laws of Nature." 
 
 "And you don't do that do you?" 
 
 "I do not." 
 
 "Oh I'm so glad." 
 
 She said it again, as she closed the door behind 
 him. For this was her confession and here was his 
 approval. It is true he knew nothing of that office 
 of confessor which had been forced upon him. But 
 then so she had determined it and, that night, lay 
 her head down on her pillow with a conscience warm 
 in the thought that she had told him everything there 
 was as yet to tell. Her eyes closed quite peacefully 
 as she went to sleep. Romance was before her. 
 There is not much more a woman asks for amongst 
 the glittering prospects of life.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 IT wa the morning of May Eve when next Anna 
 Quartermaine passed by Feagarrid on her way 
 up into the mountains. The sun was a burning 
 light through the mist as she rose above the valley, 
 following the rough cart-wheel tracks across the 
 moors. Now again, as always when she walked 
 the countryside alone, she unpinned the hat from her 
 head and shook the hair loose upon her forehead. 
 This was freedom and the sense of it through every 
 pulse. In moments the humming below her breath 
 became the uttered song in her voice, then fell to the 
 muted note once more. 
 
 There is fearlessness and there is joy in the heart 
 of a woman when she sets out in pursuit of Ro- 
 mance. Everything is to be gained and not a little 
 to lose, wherefore her heart beats high as in one 
 who comes upon the hour of his fateful venture. 
 
 From that evening of her confession to Father 
 Nolan, her mind was set upon meeting the young 
 man again in the mountains. Another month of the 
 Spring there was and a whole Summer yet before 
 her when, in the uneventful course of life, she would 
 have spent her days in her garden or walking the 
 moors in a happy freedom, demanding the joy of 
 it in all she did. 
 
 This indeed in her earlier youth had been all that 
 157
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 she had asked of life. Abroad, where others were 
 content with the exotic pleasures of continental exist- 
 ence, she had found no joy but in the wild silences 
 of untrodden ways, wandering alone by herself every 
 day, returning tired at evening with ten and twenty 
 miles on foot to the credit of her strength and endur- 
 ance. In Monte Carlo where she often went, in 
 Biarritz too, it was never for the so-called holiday 
 spent at the Casino, or on the Plage, wearing frocks 
 to bestir the envy in others. So she might have 
 occupied herself had she chosen; but it was the passes 
 in the mountains behind Monte Carlo to Eze and 
 La Turbie and in Biarritz into the heart of the 
 Pyrenees where she walked and walked alone. 
 
 They had their gossip and their stories about this 
 beautiful Englishwoman who at evening would be 
 seen returning across the Plage in a short tweed 
 skirt and heavy boots all whitened with the dust of 
 her travels. She had her lover, they said, and hid 
 him in the mountains. They never would have be- 
 lieved she only found the joy of life in the mountain 
 wind-flowers, the warm valleys and the sloping for- 
 ests of the olive trees. 
 
 Men had loved her. That she admitted and never 
 forgot to remind Father Nolan of it. But it had 
 been in her solitude with Nature, she alone had 
 found the deepest meanings in life. Many were the 
 times she had seated herself on some lofty ledge of 
 the hills, beside some purring stream, in the heart of 
 some sunlit valley and, burying her face in her hands, 
 had let the tears gather slowly in her eyes because 
 
 158
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 she had never found such understanding in human 
 beings as offered itself there on every side of her. 
 
 But now, latterly, as if with the growth of her 
 character, had come the need of and the belief in 
 human understanding. The utmost of it, certainly, 
 she had found in Father Nolan. He, greatly indeed, 
 yet unconsciously to both of them, had been the 
 cause of the change in her. However, as yet, she 
 had sought for it in others and in vain. Many men 
 truly there were, giving her devotion, whole-heart- 
 edly, faithfully and with all the full ardor of the 
 love she stirred in them. Nevertheless and always 
 willingly receiving it, it still seemed to her it was 
 not the thing she asked. For however it might be 
 that these relationships began, they always culmi- 
 nated in one inevitable expression. So well did she 
 know the inception of that passion ultimate in their 
 minds, and so surely did it terminate the higher 
 hopes that had been raised in hers. 
 
 Sometimes there were men in whom the devotion 
 that she sought was not thus expressed in the terms 
 she feared. These clung in her memory, cherished 
 recollections she would not part with, as when a 
 man in the sentimentality of his nature keeps under 
 lock and key a crumpled rose, a piece of faded 
 ribbon. 
 
 Had she stopped to analyze them, she might have 
 realized how the want of opportunity had made 
 them what they were. But quite unconscious of that, 
 they remained memories of those possibilities of 
 Romance which a woman takes into the imagination 
 
 159
 
 of her heart a man too for that matter because 
 they had never attained the full course of their ex- 
 pression. 
 
 These indeed are the strange encounters in life 
 that linger while others, even more definite, are lost 
 in the bewildering flux of time. Such an adventure 
 was one, constant in its recurrence to her mind. She 
 was traveling to the South on the Cote d'Azur Ex- 
 press. In her carriage were three women whose 
 conversation was not slow to find its way to the 
 edges of her nerves. Annoyed at last beyond en- 
 durance by their empty chatter, she had left the com- 
 partment and wandered down the corridor. None 
 of the carriages were empty. Her own sex was 
 everywhere in occupation of some corner and women 
 were not wildly to her liking at any time. 
 
 There was a smoking compartment, however, hav- 
 ing but one occupant a man buried in his paper, 
 chewing the cud of contentment in a well-worn pipe. 
 Here were all the signs of peace. She had pulled 
 aside the door and, as was customary in her with 
 men, had had no hesitation in making an immediate 
 acquaintance. 
 
 "Shall I be disturbing you if I come in here?" she 
 had asked, at which the pipe had been taken out of 
 his mouth, the paper flattened upon his knee, all 
 with an alacrity she expected of men, which more- 
 over she was always ready to repay. 
 
 They had talked of a thousand things, all strange 
 and interesting to her because revealing a new 
 nature. And what was more, there was admiration 
 
 1 60
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 adding fresh light in his eyes each moment as they 
 sped onwards to the South. This was the sun to her. 
 She breathed the joy of life in the warmth of it. 
 There was so much he could have spoken had he 
 dared; so much that circumstance demanded he 
 should leave unsaid. By the time they reached 
 Lyons, he was saying them all with his eyes. 
 
 And here it was, he had told her, that their jour- 
 neys parted. Even she had not hid her regret at 
 that. 
 
 "Think of the blaze of sun there will be in the 
 South," she said when he helped her out on to the 
 windy platform as they went for cups of hot coffee. 
 
 That was her way of showing her regret, by mak- 
 ing him regret their parting all the more. 
 
 For a moment as she sipped her hot coffee in the 
 drafty restaurant a moment of her sudden impulse 
 he left her. Five minutes he might have been 
 gone no more but a long time, she thought, for 
 one who wished to convey he was sorry to see the 
 last of her. She was laying her cup down when he 
 returned and on the platform the guards were crying, 
 "En voiture! En voiture /" 
 
 She had hurried back to her compartment, but 
 before she reached the carriage, he stopped and held 
 out his hand. 
 
 "Bon 'voyage'' he said, "et tout le soleil que votts 
 merit ez." 
 
 "Not even seeing me into my carriage?" she asked 
 frankly disappointed now. 
 
 He took her to the steps of the corridor, then, 
 161
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 lifting his hat, he turned and hurried away, never 
 looking round, though she stood there upon the steps 
 to give him every opportunity. 
 
 When she reached the empty smoking compart- 
 ment there was the seat she had occupied heaped 
 with a pyramid of red roses and on the top of it a 
 scrap of paper. Something was written upon it. 
 She had picked it up and read the words : 
 
 Thank God I am not coming to the South. 
 
 There was a proof of the impulse it had been. 
 He had not even stopped to consider the wrong con- 
 struction being put upon what he wrote. There had 
 been but one meaning in his mind. She knew what 
 it was. While the train was speeding through the 
 little station of Tarascon, she was still sorting out 
 the roses from the forest upon the seat. 
 
 This was a memory she cherished. Had he ever 
 said more than those clumsy words, hastily written 
 on that slip of paper, it had been a thing she might 
 so easily have forgotten. 
 
 Father Nolan had been the parish priest in Bally- 
 saggartmore some two or three years before that had 
 happened. She had told him all about it, half lightly, 
 half with those tender little tricks of recollection as 
 when she spoke of all the men who had loved her. 
 And this incident had been but one, marking the 
 inception of that change in her nature. 
 
 Now, loving the untrodden ways of the world just 
 as well as ever, she had come to find understanding
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 also in human creatures that beat a heart with hers. 
 And so it was there had risen in her mind this wel- 
 come expectancy of Romance, changing the whole 
 prospect of the idle months that lay before her. 
 
 For the first hour, in the sheer joy of that Spring- 
 time of the year, she almost forgot the mission upon 
 which she was bent. But as the still slopes of the 
 mountains rose above her and the green emerald of 
 that valley of the Araglin lay below, her heart began 
 a livelier pulse. The blood came quickly and as 
 quickly went in sudden flushes upon her cheeks. 
 
 Supposing he were not to be found? Was she to 
 count the day and all those miles that lay behind 
 her as wasted just thrown away, dead empty things, 
 from the lap of time? A few years before that 
 would never have been; but now, as the thought 
 reached her, she was conscious of apprehension and 
 the prospect of her chagrin if it should be so. 
 
 The table rock as she came upon the sight of it 
 was no longer occupied. No one was to be seen. 
 Here and there a stray sheep grazed on the falling 
 slopes. The clouds over the Galtee mountains were 
 the only moving things that met her eyes. In count- 
 less broken shapes, like the sails of a fishing fleet, 
 they rode out into the immeasurable blue from their 
 hidden harbor of the hills. 
 
 A wide world she found it was in which to search 
 for one human being. Great though the distances 
 of vision might be, there was many a hidden pass, 
 many a rent and turn in the rolling sweep of the hills 
 where the eye could be cheated in its pursuit. She 
 
 163
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 sat down on a bowlder that had come to rest, half 
 embedded in a mound of earth. Now she realized 
 how, without the generosity of chance, it were almost 
 a futile hope to think of meeting him. 
 
 Yet there she remained for an hour and more, 
 taking in with her eyes that broad prospect of the 
 hills she supposed he fed his mind upon. There 
 were the lapwings, tumbling and turning in their 
 seemingly senseless flight above the green fields of 
 the valley. Not more than a few yards from her a 
 lark rose up, scattering the notes of its song as it 
 lifted into the air. Stone-chats were chirping in their 
 sudden invisible flights from one rock to another. 
 Now and again a bee with muted thunder would rush 
 by her ears. A stoat crept out of the brush of the 
 heather on to the little beaten path. He lifted his 
 sharp nose suspiciously and sniffed the air. Though 
 she never stirred, she could see how well aware of 
 her he was. Every movement of his sinuous body 
 as he crept away was apprehensive and alert. 
 
 That short hour brought to her mind the knowl- 
 edge that there is no real solitude in the world; it 
 showed her too the utter peacefulness with which his 
 mind must live. And then, while she was still sit- 
 ting there, her eyes picked out the figure of a man 
 climbing slowly up the path from the valley by which 
 she had come. 
 
 Whatever the first impression may have been, 
 stirring her blood to a sudden motion, she soon real- 
 ized that it was not the figure of him for whom 
 she had been seeking. It was an elderly man 
 
 164
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 one, nving in a cottage, no doubt, in the neighbor- 
 hood of those hills. As soon as she realized by his 
 apparent direction, he must pass her way, she sat 
 there waiting, her mind already determined upon 
 what she would do. 
 
 In time he turned a corner of the path, when at 
 once his little wrinkled eyes took sight of her. She 
 thought again of the stoat she had seen as she 
 watched him approaching. There was the same 
 sharp suspicious air about him as he came slowly 
 to where she sat. When he was but a few paces 
 off, she spoke. 
 
 "There's a man living up here alone in the moun- 
 tains," she said. "Could you tell me where his cot- 
 tage is?" 
 
 "There's more than one man livin' alone in the 
 windy corners of these hills," said he, stopping and 
 resting on his stick as he peered at her. "Shure 
 don't I live meself over there in that little cabin 
 below Crow Hill where ye can see the shmoke twist- 
 in' up out of it now?" 
 
 She smiled, telling him he was not the man she 
 meant. "He's younger than you," she added. 
 
 She felt he knew well enough of whom she was 
 speaking and only with the cunning of a child was 
 assuming ignorance in order to discover something 
 about herself. She had not been born, nor had she 
 lived, amongst these people without knowing some- 
 thing about them. 
 
 "An' is it yeerself has come all the ways from 
 Lismore to see him?" he asked. 
 
 165
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "I might have come from Lismore," she replied 
 and smiled again. "But telling you where I come 
 from won't help me to find out what I want to know. 
 He told me that his cabin was on Knockshunahal- 
 lion that's Knockshunahallion, isn't it?" 
 
 She pointed to the highest peak in the range which, 
 even on so clear a day as that, caught the fleece of 
 the little clouds as they drifted by. 
 
 "Oh shure 'tis him that calls himself Anthony 
 Sorel," said he, finding further evasion impossible. 
 
 "Isn't that his right name?" 
 
 "It is, of course. Wasn't it the name he wrote 
 on Michael Quinn's piece of paper and they comin' 
 to a wordy agreement about the cottage the way 
 ye'd think Michael was selling him a king's palace 
 in four walls?" 
 
 "How far is it from here?" 
 
 " 'Twould step about a mile." 
 
 "Do you think I should be likely to find him 
 there?" 
 
 He pushed back his hat and scratched his head. 
 
 "Well " said he "I saw him walkin' the road 
 into Lismore last Tuesda' an' would he be back 
 by now, I dunno. 'Tis three days he'd be away 
 every month, like a thing come and gone out of the 
 mist." 
 
 She felt that Fate was preparing her for disap- 
 pointment, yet even so, curiosity was still to be fed. 
 Having come so far, at least she wanted to see 
 where he lived. Her companion was going that 
 way and undertook to show her. 
 
 166
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 For some little way, they walked then in silence; 
 she on the trodden path, he through the heather at 
 her side. 
 
 " 'Tisn't often we see the fine gentry from Lis- 
 more in these lonesome parts," he said presently. 
 
 "I suppose not," she replied. 
 
 "Not unless they be gentlemen and they wid their 
 guns and the dogs barkin' across the face of the 
 
 moors." 
 
 "Does Anthony Sorel come up here for the shoot- 
 ing then?" she asked and found the name lingering 
 on her lips as one who tries the taste of something 
 in his mouth. 
 
 "Shure, he does not. Doesn't he live here the 
 year round." 
 
 "What does he do then?" 
 
 He looked up at her as though that were a strange 
 question to hear. 
 
 "What would a man be doin' in the mountains," 
 he asked, "and he havin' the songs of all the four 
 winds to be tellin' himself?" 
 
 "Is he a poet?" 
 
 "He is indeed, an' 'tis women with the beauty in 
 their face would be sittin' through the long night to 
 hear the music of the words that come out of him 
 an' he speakin' the sorrows of Ireland an' the shad- 
 ows of death till the tears would bring salt to the 
 drought of yeer lips." 
 
 He stopped and pointed to a little whitewashed 
 cabin that hung on the side of the hill above them. 
 
 "There he lives," said he and then he added enig- 
 167
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 matically: " 'Tis a woman with the fall of night in 
 her eyes will come one day knockin' at his door an' 
 he stretchin' out his arms the way she'll find the 
 world in them." 
 
 This he said, standing there like a prophet on the 
 slope of the land, and then he left her. 
 
 With a strange feeling in her heart, outgrowing 
 curiosity, she climbed upwards to where the cabin 
 stood. A wall of sullen rock rose up behind it. It 
 was perched there upon the mountainside looking 
 down through a gap into the far valley below, like 
 a bird leaning against the wind. 
 
 The door was closed, the window shut and there 
 she stood, her whole mind drawn in some mysterious 
 attraction to the thought of the man who lived there. 
 With what she knew herself, with what the old man 
 had just told her, there was little to set the imagina- 
 tion upon. And yet never had she felt life to be so 
 palpitating with possibility as then. 
 
 As if to set it in motion and before she could turn 
 away, the door of the cabin had opened and there 
 stood Anthony Sorel, cut clear against the blackness 
 within.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 IT may have been in those moments as they stood 
 looking at each other that Anthony Sorel saw 
 some swift vision of the destiny before him; and 
 Anna Quartermaine no less than he of her own. 
 Certain it was a long passage of time at such a junc- 
 ture before he spoke. And then, when his voice 
 came from him, it was as one who speaks, thinking 
 he sees the spirit rather than the substance. What 
 with confusion and astonishment, she was as much 
 disconcerted as he. 1 
 
 "What do you want?" he said at last, just as if 
 she were a ghost that had come to trouble him. 
 She looked up at his eyes and answered in the same 
 uncertain voice. 
 
 "I don't want anything," she said and could not 
 fasten her mind upon the actual fact of her being 
 there or why she had come, but was obsessed only 
 by the absorbing strangeness of him and of his life. 
 He had told her that he lived alone there in the 
 mountains, yet only now, as he came out of the door 
 of his cabin, had she realized how much alone and 
 how absolutely aloof he was. 
 
 1 As Malachi described her to me, recounting this moment of his 
 story: "She stood there eyein' him, with the wind tossin' her hair, 
 and her two feet like shtones on the mountain, the way the blood 
 was drawn out cold in them, an' she countin' the leps of her heart 
 like one countin' their beads in the fear of death." E. T. T. 
 
 169
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Why do you come here then?" he continued. 
 Without any harshness in his voice, the question yet 
 had some odor of reproof. She felt somehow pow- 
 erless to resent it, however, as if a priest had accused 
 her of trespass in the sacred and secluded cloisters 
 of a church. What was more, as if to a priest, she 
 found herself answering the simple truth. 
 
 "I wanted to see where you lived," said she. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "I was curious, I suppose." 
 
 He threw wide open the door he had half closed 
 behind him and the gesture, simple and undramatic 
 as it was, had the fullness of power to her. She 
 could not have misunderstood it; she could have 
 needed of it no other explanation. Without a word 
 she accepted the invitation and walked into the cabin. 
 
 Had she expected much, little was there to fulfill 
 her expectations. But she was not conscious of hav- 
 ing expected anything. His personality was there, 
 making all that atmosphere about her. The sim- 
 plicity of everything, the plain bed, in which old 
 Heggarty had died, with its patchwork quilt covering 
 the bedclothes, the simple furniture he had bought 
 in Fermoy, the Russian crucifix in the chimney cor- 
 ner, it was all no less wonderful to her than if the 
 room had been as the imagination of Shauneen Troy 
 had seen it. It was the man and his life that colored 
 everything she saw. The chairs upon which he sat, 
 the bed on which he slept, the table at which he ate 
 his meals, associated themselves in her mind with 
 the strange loneliness of his being. She stared at 
 
 170
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 them all and round about the room as though every- 
 thing, valueless in itself, were of absorbing and 
 peculiar interest. 
 
 When she brought her eyes back, looking to him, 
 he took her gaze to be inquiry and said, "This is 
 all " as though he supposed she had expected more. 
 
 It was not easy after that to break into usual con- 
 versation such as would have been possible under 
 more ordinary circumstances. She felt she ought to 
 apologize for her curiosity; had come so far to it 
 as the framing of the words upon her lips but could 
 not utter them. The formality of that apology 
 seemed ludicrous as she contemplated it. So, still 
 she stood, looking first at him, then at the room 
 about her, in that way as when a child is discovered 
 in its guilt and awaits the proclamation of punish- 
 ment. This was the strange power of his presence 
 beside her. All that she thought of seemed folly to 
 say. 
 
 When he broke the spell of that and spoke, it was 
 only to add another, the mysterious quality of his 
 voice. She had been aware of it before, when they 
 had spoken on the mountainside. Now, within 
 those four walls, it was intensified. She found her- 
 self listening for the sound of it as she might be 
 listening to music, sensitive to the note of its quiet 
 restraint. 
 
 "Now you have seen all that is to be seen," he 
 said. 
 
 The suggestion of resentment in that, not in his 
 voice, but in the mere words as he used them, urged 
 12 171
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 her at least to dispel it. He was dismissing her and, 
 with so little accomplished, she refused to be dis- 
 missed. 
 
 "But I understand nothing at all that might be 
 understood," she replied, half concealing the au- 
 dacity of that in the gentleness of her voice, soften- 
 ing it in the light of her smile. 
 
 He succumbed to neither. There had been no 
 resentment in him. Of such a humor as this, his 
 conscience was wholly free. In those two years of 
 his solitude, his mind had found that quietness which 
 is not easily stirred to impulsive reaction. He 
 scarcely even asked himself, beyond those questions 
 he had put to her, why she had come so far into the 
 mountains and with this paltry pretext, just to see 
 where he lived. He did not even realize how de- 
 liberately beautiful she was, but stood there in those 
 first moments, merely wondering when she would go. 
 
 She understood nothing, she said. Well what 
 was there to understand? He asked her that. What 
 was there to understand? 
 
 "Why you live here," she answered and reminded 
 him how he had invited her curiosity when they had 
 first met. She recalled the words to his mind. "You 
 asked me to think over it," she said "whether you 
 were queer or not." 
 
 "Well?" said he. 
 
 "Well I have thought about it and perhaps 
 you're not queer but all the same I don't under- 
 stand. I suppose it's because you're a poet and 
 want to be close to Nature but why do you ignore 
 
 172
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 human nature? Why do you cut yourself so abso- 
 lutely adrift from the world?" 
 
 "Who told you I wrote poetry?" he asked. 
 
 "An old man coming across the mountains." 
 
 "Old Malachi." 
 
 "He didn't tell me his name." 
 
 "It was Malachi," he repeated. "But he's more 
 of a poet than I shall ever be. I've tried to take 
 down some of the things he says to me, the tales 
 he tells of the faeries and all the strange things 
 that happen in these mountains and when I come to 
 read them over afterwards, I know that they are 
 more instinct with the sense of poetry than anything 
 I shall ever do unless I succeed." 
 
 She was quick to know that in his hesitation he 
 had spoken of something that was secret to himself. 
 If he succeeded that was the first confession he 
 had made. At once she asked him what he meant 
 by that but his answer only confused her the more. 
 
 He told her indefinitely of desires to overcome 
 the despotism of life, as one who rises against estab- 
 lished government and flings his soul into the tumult 
 of revolution. Nothing that she called humanity, 
 the humanity she had accustomed herself to deal 
 with, was to be found in him as yet. He spoke of 
 motives that only bewildered her; but notwithstand- 
 ing, as he made them glowing with words, she felt 
 behind it all some mystery of meaning full of an 
 absorbing interest it was impossible to deny. 
 
 This effect it had upon her, that now she was 
 determined to understand it all. The very sen- 
 
 173
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 sitiveness of him enticed her. The element of mys- 
 tery in him urged her on. She put forth all those 
 powers of sympathy of which the will of a woman 
 is capable; at one moment a child eager to learn 
 and again maternal in her readiness to hear. 
 
 So long had he lived apart from the ways of 
 women, that Anthony Sorel drifted into confession 
 as one who succumbs to the peaceful narcotic of a 
 drug. When she asked if she might hear his poetry, 
 he rose, like a child, and went to a drawer of the 
 dresser that stood against the wall, bringing out a 
 sheaf of papers covered with that same illegible 
 writing they had deciphered with such difficulty on 
 Michael Quinn's agreement. 
 
 One after another he read them to her until the 
 sound of his voice and the beauty of the words be- 
 came as one in her ears and had with them all the 
 charm of music that nurses and thrills the emotions 
 from sleep to wakefulness. She knew she was fast 
 falling under the spell of romantic enchantment. 
 Here it truly seemed was a man who could be all 
 things. In the spirit of him was all the ring and 
 adventurousness of life. In a fierce tumult, she felt 
 he could ride out into the hour of battle, yet turn 
 to such gentleness as she had never experienced be- 
 fore. 
 
 With a passive willingness, she let the spell of 
 it surround and envelop her until, as she listened, 
 there was one poem that he read, to which the swift 
 heat of a jealous apprehension brought sudden reac- 
 tion. 
 
 174
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "I gave my spirit to a bird in flight, 
 And watched it soaring ever out of sight; 
 Till, like a fountain's spray in summer heat, 
 All palpitating fell its singing at my feet. 
 
 "There in the arch of the abundant sky, 
 Where other spirits are forever passing by, 
 My soul leaned out into the amazing blue, 
 And found the imperishable soul of you." 
 
 She let him read on, but with a bitter conviction 
 that the enchantment was ended. The mind that 
 had conceived those words had fixed a gulf between 
 itself and her. There was some woman how could 
 she ever have doubted it? laying her claim to him. 
 A glance at his face, sensitive and emotional, how- 
 ever stern and ascetic it might be too, had promised 
 enough in their first meeting to convince her of the 
 passionate and relentless lover he could be. With 
 quick intuitive calculations, she surmised the roman- 
 tic purpose of his solitude, counting herself before 
 a far more formidable rival than this celibate asceti- 
 cism with which he had dammed the stream of Na- 
 ture in his being. 
 
 Nevertheless, she let him finish before she spoke, 
 saying to herself, as she had said to Father Nolan, 
 that it was not she who would rob a church, yet 
 thinking bitterly no less of the woman who gave 
 him sanctuary. 
 
 "I gave my spirit to a bird in flight; 
 Its wings are caught now in a passion's plight 
 
 175
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 And gone are all the truths I ever knew, 
 And gone is the immeasurable soul of you." 
 
 She looked up, as he looked up, resetting in that 
 single instant all her surest calculations; seeing him 
 bereft of sanctuary, no longer the church she would 
 not rob, but now, as Father Nolan had said, the 
 priest whose love her nature must command. 
 
 "Have you lost her long?" she asked gently. 
 
 "Lost whom?" 
 
 He put the paper down and stared with question- 
 ing eyes almost as children look. 
 
 "The woman you loved?" 
 
 One by one he picked the papers up and took them 
 to the drawer of the dresser and stood there, arrang- 
 ing them as he put them back, with that hesitation 
 of movement which shows the deep preoccupation 
 of the mind. 
 
 But she would not be denied. If he had chosen 
 silence to avoid her question, it availed him noth- 
 ing. 
 
 "Is that why you live here?" she asked and with 
 that note of sympathy which soothes, invites, 
 caresses. There was no need to bring it to her voice. 
 There it was. She felt sympathy drawn from her to 
 the silent figure of him struggling, as she knew he 
 was, against himself, to keep the virtue and the vigor 
 of his solitude. 
 
 "Didn't you come here, up into the mountains," 
 slie persisted gently, "because you wanted to for- 
 get her? Wasn't that it?" 
 
 176
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "And gone were all the truths I ever knew, 
 And gone was the imperishable soul of you." 
 
 She could quote the lines without hesitation or 
 mistake. The sound of them in her voice brought 
 him round to her. Nothing had made him realize 
 her sympathy so well as that. 
 
 "There was no woman," he said, "no woman, like 
 that." 
 
 "Why did you write it then?" 
 
 "Because I believed that of myself at the time. 
 I believed I should one day love like that and 
 lose like that. You didn't understand me a little 
 while ago when I talked of the despotism of life. 
 That's why I'm here. I'm trying to forget all 
 women, not one. When I first came here I could 
 not have given my spirit to a bird in flight. My 
 nature is emotional. Perhaps you know that al- 
 ready. But emotions like everyone else's, that bring 
 lead into my feet and make a servant of me, not a 
 free man. Last time you saw me, I was watching 
 the larks rise out of the heather well, one of these 
 days, I shall get freedom like that. It's only up 
 there where the lark rises and the clouds ride in the 
 sky that you see things beautiful for the beauty they 
 have. Here, a thing is only beautiful for the emo- 
 tions it brings you." 
 
 He stopped suddenly with a gesture of despair as 
 though he knew he was speaking the everlasting 
 riddle of the universe. With that same gesture 
 of despair, he closed the drawer of the dresser and 
 
 177
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 strode to the door, standing there and looking across 
 the mountains where the little spring freshets were 
 falling white like strands of silver hair between the 
 bowlders. 
 
 She let him keep his silence now, knowing that 
 he must speak again in such time as the course of 
 his thoughts had run. But when he turned, she 
 was unprepared for what he had to say. 
 
 "Why did you come up here again," he asked, 
 "reminding me of the things I had forgotten?" 
 
 "What things?" 
 
 "This this life here the solitude, the loneliness 
 of it." 
 
 Suddenly he left the door and came back into the 
 room, moved by restlessness now. He found a seat 
 in the dim light of the chimney corner and sat there 
 staring into the fire. As suddenly then, breaking 
 his silence as, on an instant's determination, a man 
 might break a sword across his knees, he launched 
 forth into an endless confession of his innermost 
 self the speech of a man in whom the pent-up 
 silences have broken down, flooding in a torrent of 
 words no resistance of the spirit can stem. 
 
 He told her of his life in London and abroad, 
 before he came to Knockshunahallion the confes- 
 sion of a child, unsparing and relentless in its cruel 
 honesty. 
 
 By slow degrees she saw the thing he had been, a 
 creature driven by emotions, yet finding none to 
 feed his soul upon, struggling in the drifting sands 
 with eyes blinded as he turned them ever to the 
 
 178
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 unapproachable wonder of the sun. It was the 
 admission of a life no man she had ever known 
 would ask blame for, indeed a greater spirit than 
 she had ever met, battling against the unaccountable 
 odds. 
 
 It was only when he came to the setting forth of 
 his philosophy that she lost sight in the swift and 
 upward flights he took. Here he came into the re- 
 gions of his mysticism, an atmosphere too rarefied 
 for her to breathe. Now he was talking of the 
 faeries as a man speaks with familiarity of those 
 about him in a strange land. She could see visions 
 in his eyes as the words came tumbling from his 
 lips. Indeed it was of visions he talked as well, but 
 not as one versed in occult practices, burning strange 
 incense to numb the senses, seeking for signs, self- 
 hypnotized, in a crystal globe. He spoke gently, 
 almost with awe, as one who has seen and heard 
 and can never forget. This was where she lost 
 knowledge of him. This was where she made the 
 fatal error in her soul. 
 
 Why, she asked herself, as she listened, why does 
 he wish that I had never come again? She could 
 not but believe that this outpouring of his mind, 
 bringing echoes of life into those pent-up silences, 
 was healthful, as they would tell her was confession 
 for the soul. 
 
 For now, as with a lark in flight, soaring into the 
 blue zenith of the heavens, her mental vision could 
 not keep sight of him. He had left her standing 
 there on earth, listening only to the words he said 
 
 179
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 with but the faintest comprehension of their mean- 
 ing. 
 
 He had chosen this life of a recluse to gain a 
 calm, a vigor and a strength of his emotional imagi- 
 nation. There, living as a solitary in those moun- 
 tains, he was striving to achieve the conquest of mind 
 over the sensations of his body. 
 
 The ambition baffled her. She could not follow 
 its ultimate gain. There was Nature in her, as in 
 all women; she saw no other law. This was the 
 madness in him he had bid her seek for when he had 
 left her that first day of their meeting. Now she 
 had found it, but instead of repelling, it attracted 
 her. There was a fascination in all the wild mys- 
 ticism he talked. This celibate asceticism he upheld, 
 little as she understood it, set her heart beating in 
 a tumult of Romance. 
 
 Here was the error that she made, fatal for him ; 
 the fatal error ultimately for herself. 
 
 With her knowledge of men, how could she be- 
 lieve him when he told her that it was in the soul 
 of all men to seek this pathway to the mysterious 
 stars ? 
 
 "The celibacy of men is a voluntary celibacy," he 
 said to give her proof of it; but with the men she 
 had known and the ultimate expressions of their 
 emotions, she could but smile reminiscently at that, 
 forgetting her Father Nolan in his shelter of the 
 church. 
 
 "This is a phase," she told herself as she listened, 
 1 80
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 clinging to Nature, unshaken in her belief of it. 
 But it was a phase she had never met in a man 
 before. At least there was no pretense in it. For 
 two years he had been alone there in those mountains 
 a Buddha, fasting in the wilderness. But how 
 could she believe him when he told her that all men, 
 before the despotism of life had made them slaves, 
 would so struggle, so endure? 
 
 "Why don't they then?" she asked. 
 
 "Life seizes a man too swiftly," said he. "Before 
 the mind is awake in him the body has tasted the 
 easy joys of a pleasant servitude. How many think 
 in time? Bring children up in the world of faeries 
 these poor people live in," he declared, "and watch 
 the youth of a man before he touches life. His 
 ideals are like swallows flying swift and high. Never 
 the earth for them." 
 
 He would say no more; indeed he had no powers 
 of speech in argument. She would have driven him 
 to silence had she asked him more. 
 
 "There are meanings the mind has no concern 
 with," he said. "Facts have meanings and facts 
 die." 
 
 He could only speak to her sympathetic listen- 
 ing, and then with halting phrases, of the visions 
 his soul encountered. When she would reason with 
 him this or that, it was like bringing a bird to earth 
 with a broken wing. He would turn and look at 
 her in helpless silence. 
 
 "But why " she said at last "why did you wish 
 181
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 I had not found my way here again? What harm 
 have I done? Haven't I been sympathetic? Do 
 you deny yourself even that?" 
 
 He stretched out his hands over the fire as if in 
 that there were more of human understanding. 
 
 "Who are you?" he said suddenly. 
 
 She told him, but he listened as though it made 
 no matter who she was. Almost before she had 
 finished, he was speaking quickly again, telling her 
 that she was the despotism of life, reminding him of 
 his loneliness, reviving in him the hunger for sym- 
 pathetic companionship which in those two years he 
 had almost taught his mind to renounce. 
 
 "But are you always going to renounce it?" she 
 asked. 
 
 "Who knows what any man is always going to 
 do?" said he. "Buddha lived the life of a hermit 
 and found that truth was not to be learnt in lonely 
 places ; then he came out into the world. But it was 
 in the lonely places he had first found the calm and 
 vigor of his soul. Do you think I ever thought when 
 I came alone here into the mountains to find the 
 dominion of myself, that I should meet with you? 
 Do you think I should have come if I had?" 
 
 "What difference do I make?" she whispered. 
 
 He stood up from his seat by the fire and walked 
 again to the door, flinging it wide open, upper and 
 lower half of it, so that the sunlight was cut in one 
 square patch of gold upon the floor. 
 
 "Come out and walk," he said, forcing his voice 
 to quietness. "Let's walk up there to where that 
 
 182
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 buzzard is circling high above the peak. All thought 
 runs to despotism in cramped spaces like this room. 
 Come with me, high up above all this. Then you'll 
 understand." 
 
 She went obediently to his side and by his side 
 walked up the untrodden paths until they stood 
 where even the stone-chats would not follow and 
 far below them the larks rose out of the heather 
 soaring to reach them where they were.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 TIMES without number she had been in the 
 mountains of Europe, altitudes beside which, 
 in comparison, this Knockshunahallion was 
 a little hill, yet never did it seem to her she had been 
 so high above the world as then. 
 
 Clear as was the day, there were veiling clouds, 
 thin scarfs of mist that passed beneath them, now 
 hiding the far-off valleys, now revealing them in the 
 glamour of the sun. The little cabins and the tiny 
 farms were like scraps of white paper, the faintly 
 distinguishable trail of life in a paper chase of the 
 giants. From those heights she saw the world with 
 new eyes and, however dimly, yet there in the faint 
 consciousness of her mind came the suspicion of 
 what he learnt in his solitude. 
 
 Far away beyond the valley and across the moors 
 a thick cluster of trees marked the direction of Bally- 
 saggartmore on that living map of green. She 
 touched his arm and stretched out her hand, point- 
 ing, it seemed to her, across the continent, and said, 
 "That's where I live." 
 
 His eyes went out to the line of light winding 
 through the trees. This was the Blackwater, thread- 
 ing emeralds on a string of gold. 
 
 These were the first words which had been spoken 
 since they had left his cabin. Then silence sur- 
 
 184
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 rounded them again, a stillness that was a tangible 
 thing, a quiet like the hush of children, waiting with 
 minds on tiptoe for a story. 
 
 She stood beside him, conscious of the wish to put 
 her arm in his, moved by some sense of gratitude for 
 the world he showed her. Once her hand moved, 
 tentative to do the thing that she desired, but re- 
 membrance of his wish that she had never come, 
 the knowledge of the struggle that still was a tumult 
 in his mind, dropped it again in generosity to her 
 side. 
 
 "I must make him forget that I am here at all," 
 she told herself. By that means only, she knew she 
 might find leave to come again. This was the first 
 time in her life she had ever subdued the egotism 
 of her personality. He was the first man who had 
 wakened in her that instinct of passive subordina- 
 tion, the surest weapon Nature can give into a 
 woman's hands. So it was not she who would break 
 the silence now. The wind played gently through 
 her hair, a chill wind as it came across the shadows 
 of the mountains which even the open sunshine could 
 not wholly warm again. Still she did not speak. 
 
 She listened, as she knew he was listening, to the 
 sounds of the world that rose so faintly to their 
 ears. The song of a lark, the intermittent cry of the 
 buzzard wheeling over their heads, the burring mur- 
 mur of the mountain streams that tumbled like a 
 shower of crystals, shining white into the valley's 
 lap, these were all mingled into a whispering song 
 the depth of air had muted as it came to them. But 
 
 185
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 it was more his listening she listened to than the 
 sounds themselves. 
 
 Yet she too could feel now the dwindling paltri- 
 ness of the common life in such an altitude as that; 
 knew what he meant when he had told her how in 
 the first few months of his solitude he had striven 
 against the fear of loneliness and dreaded the anger 
 of the mountain storms. 
 
 "Then," he had said, "as the days went by and 
 I had shaken off the weight of life we carry on our 
 shoulders, then I heard such music in the storms at 
 night, as no orchestra of a thousand instruments 
 could ever play." 
 
 Standing there with him then, she could believe 
 how that was true, yet thought with a clinging pleas- 
 ure of the warm room in which at such times she hid 
 herself, pulling the heavy curtains and shutting out 
 the importunate agonies of the wind. That was 
 what he would call the despotism of life. Slowly 
 she was beginning to know that his was the higher 
 truth, but came no nearer to departure from her 
 own. For even then, in a sudden moment of emo- 
 tional belief, she said, 
 
 "Up here, I think I could almost believe in 
 faeries." 
 
 And forgetting all the generous intentions of her 
 mind but those few moments ago, she slipped her 
 arm impulsively, warm and close in his. Only when 
 she shivered did she remember what she had done, 
 but once there and feeling the warmth of it, she 
 could not bring herself to take it away. If that 
 
 186
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 were the slavery of life, it was, as he had said, a 
 pleasant servitude. High though his truth might 
 be, she needed no loftier exaltation than that which 
 she already had. 
 
 It may have been a thought for her, for though he 
 shivered when her arm touched his, he did not move 
 away. 
 
 "This is May Eve," he said "the night the fae- 
 ries ride out and dance and play their music in all the 
 nooks and crevices of these hills. Any stranger 
 that knocks at a cottage door to-night, if they should 
 unbolt the latch, will be faerie man. or woman to, 
 those within. They will shut the door against him 
 or bid him enter according to the fear and the emo- 
 tions in their hearts." 
 
 Her own belief which was emotional became doubt 
 again when she saw the deeper belief in him. So 
 long had she regarded this belief in faeries to be a 
 country superstition, declaring her faith in them only 
 in moments of childish exhilaration, that when she 
 came to the real faith such as his, all that exhilara- 
 tion left her for the reasoned doubt again. 
 
 She looked up into his eyes, questioning with her 
 own but still keeping hold upon his arm. 
 
 "Do you really mean to say," she murmured, 
 "that faeries do come to people's doors; that there 
 are people who actually see them, speak with them, 
 give them shelter or turn them away? Surely isn't 
 it all a superstition? Isn't it the unbalanced rea- 
 son of a terrible ignorance that makes people see 
 these things?" 
 
 13 187
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "Those are only words," he answered her. "Ig- 
 norance, superstition, they are only words with rela- 
 tive meanings. You are ignorant of the ways of 
 the world, but you may have great knowledge of the 
 ways of God; you are ignorant of the meaning and 
 beauties of music but none may know better than you 
 what the curlew means when he cries through the 
 mist across the lonely bogland. None better than 
 you may hear the music in his mournful note. You 
 are utterly ignorant of the emotions that fret and 
 drive your soul, but none may know better than you 
 the power of faeries in the solitary corners of the 
 world. In a few hours when the evening falls I 
 will bring you down into the valley and show you 
 one who knows nothing of the fatal emotions that 
 beset her but whose ears hear plainer than ours the 
 sound of faerie music which is the very spirit of the 
 Fate that hangs about her. Will you come ?" 
 
 "Shall I be afraid?" she asked. 
 
 "Fear is worse than ignorance," said he. "Will 
 you come?" 
 
 She closed her fingers on his arm and bent her 
 head.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 WHEN the sun was falling behind Kilworth, 
 and as the dropping light of it cast those 
 first, soft, long rays of the glowing gold 
 of evening along the green banks of the Duag val- 
 ley, Anthony Sorel brought her down the mountain 
 side to Gorteeshall. Then the shadows were length- 
 ening lengthening into giant arms that stretched 
 lingeringly over the breast of the earth before it fell 
 asleep. 
 
 "I will show you an adventure where the faeries 
 are concerned," he had said and when below them 
 the valley spread out its fields of green, bound with 
 that twisting ribbon of the river Duag, he pointed 
 to a white-washed cottage from which the blue smoke 
 rose above the thatch in one straight column to the 
 evening sky. 
 
 "There," he said, touching her arm, so that she 
 stood beside him "there in that cottage lives a girl 
 with more beauty in her face than they have ever 
 seen in these mountains for many a day." 
 
 She looked at him quickly. 
 
 "Do you think she's beautiful?" she asked. 
 
 Perhaps he did not see that look; certainly he 
 never knew its meaning. 
 
 "I think her beautiful yes," he replied. "I 
 think sometimes it is the most beautiful face I've 
 
 189
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 ever seen. Often I've stood watching her at the 
 cross roads where she used to dance with the other 
 girls and young men about. They know little of 
 the grace of dancing, which after all is only a grace 
 of the body not a grace of mind. It's their minds 
 have grace. But she had elegance of movement 
 too." 
 
 "You were attracted to her?" she said, half in 
 question, half in the way women make statements 
 of those things that women know. 
 
 He took no notice of that and continued speaking. 
 She could not be sure if it were that he had avoided 
 answering or if it were simply that he had not heard. 
 
 "What came to her," he went on, "happened 
 about two weeks ago, over there at the spot where 
 you see those roads cross like ropes tying the fields 
 together. She says for some moments, as the light 
 of the evening was dying she heard music other 
 than that which the old man was playing for the 
 dancing on his fiddle. Her feet got caught in it, 
 she said, so that she could not keep time with the 
 fiddler's music. Indeed the young man who was 
 dancing with her at the time assured me that she 
 was all out of step not a fault she could ever be 
 accused of. Then, as the darkness came on, she 
 saw a light in the field that moved in and out amongst 
 the cows that were grazing there. It was not curi- 
 osity she felt, she told me, but, so well as I can 
 gather, an irresistible impulse that induced her to 
 follow it. She left the dancing and went into the 
 field and the light danced before her, always some 
 
 190
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 few yards away. It must have dazzled her eyes 
 and so preoccupied her that she could not see where 
 she was going, for she fell down a gravel pit that 
 had been dug a few days before for some purpose 
 or other and, falling, she broke her leg. At first, 
 she said she felt no pain. She was only distressed 
 because the light was no longer visible. But after 
 a time, when she heard an end to the music at the 
 cross roads, the pain became almost unbearable. She 
 cried out and so it was they found her lying there. 
 There she is now, in a bed in that cottage where her 
 mother lives with her and when I've told you all 
 about her, I'll take you down there. You shall see 
 her. You shall see the concerns of faeries." 
 
 "Was it faerie music then? Was it a light of the 
 faeries too?" 
 
 She asked now with the voice of one eager to be- 
 lieve. The way he spoke conquered her incredu- 
 lity. There was a spell in the strange music of his 
 voice ; she felt it growing upon her as a hidden mo- 
 tive in a symphony steals into the consciousness of 
 the mind. 
 
 "That is what they say," he replied "what they 
 believe. Youth and beauty are ever in danger of 
 being taken by the faeries and the old woman, her 
 mother, so they tell, has speech with them. The 
 people about here have no love of passing her cot- 
 tage after dark. But listen to what happens now. 
 Mary's leg is so badly broken that the doctor 
 from Clogheen has said that it must be amputated 
 or she is sure to come by her death. He is not cer- 
 
 191
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 tain enough of his skill to guarantee that even this 
 will save her life though he knows it is the only 
 possible thing to do. But there is a spell upon Mary 
 ever since she heard that music and saw that light. 
 She declares she will not have her beauty spoilt. 
 The doctor has tried to insist that the amputation 
 must be made, whereupon Mary's mother has de- 
 creed that she will prosecute him if the operation 
 is not successful. This has frightened him. He has 
 not the courage of his skill to persevere and there 
 she lies on a bed of terrible suffering in that cot- 
 tage, listening to the music she still hears and 
 doomed to die, the doctor tells me. Nothing can 
 possibly save her. That is how the faeries have 
 concerned themselves with Mary Coyne." 
 
 She stood there beside him on the slope of the 
 mountain, looking now at the cottage with its col- 
 umn of dim blue smoke, now at his face, set across 
 the far line of the valley, now at the cottage again. 
 
 It did not occur to her to ask him if he believed 
 the story he had just told her, but, as they went on 
 again down the hillside, she asked him, with that 
 same note of tentative restraint in her voice, what he 
 understood of it all. 
 
 "She has the emotions of her own beauty," he 
 said. "They are bringing her death. That is how 
 these mountain people come near the truth. They 
 have the power of vision to see the symbols of their 
 own emotions. Her beauty is her own destruction. 
 I have seen that in her eyes as she looked at me." 
 
 In the blindness of her mind, she understood his 
 192
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 answer, though none of it was clear to the conscious- 
 ness of reason. 
 
 The music that Mary Coyne had heard in her 
 ears, the dancing, luring light she had seen, these 
 were symbols of her own fatal emotions. This was 
 what Anna Quartermaine dimly divined he must 
 mean, but could not have put it into words and so 
 kept silence as she walked beside him. Whether 
 he thought the light and the music were real things 
 of faerie she could not have said. She could not 
 have been assured that she did not believe them 
 real herself. 
 
 The golden light of the evening had died through 
 purple grays to darkness as they reached the cot- 
 tage door. Anthony Sorel knocked upon the panel 
 and, after a few minutes, the upper half was opened, 
 when they could see an old woman, with short gray 
 hair clipped close around her neck, looking like a 
 halo about her pale face with its sharp and almost 
 aristocratic features. It was not difficult to see that 
 she had been beautiful once herself. But it was 
 her eyes more than her beauty which, in that first 
 moment, drew all the attention of Anna Quarter- 
 maine. 
 
 With a glance too swift almost to be seen, the old 
 woman had recognized Anthony Sorel and then her 
 gaze had fallen upon his companion. So Anna 
 Quartermaine could fully see her eyes, the vivid 
 penetration of them, but lit with no ordinary light 
 of reason or curiosity. Indeed they seemed to be 
 searching for thoughts and substances which were 
 
 193
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 beyond the mind to comprehend. Could that look 
 have been translated into words, to Anna Quar- 
 termaine it must have been some foreign tongue she 
 could not understand. 
 
 Anthony Sorel bid her good evening. At the 
 sound of his voice she withdrew the gaze of her 
 eyes, opened the lower part of the door and made 
 way for them to enter. 
 
 It was a cottage just as any other you will see in 
 the south of Ireland. One further room, a bed- 
 room, there was, beyond the kitchen into which they 
 came. The door of it was open. There was the 
 bed on which Mary Coyne lay dying. Anthony 
 Sorel walked quietly into the room and stood beside 
 her. Anna Quartermaine followed him. For an 
 instant she had half turned, hesitating, but with a 
 quick understanding, Mrs. Coyne had urged her, 
 muttering she was welcome. 
 
 So she stood at the foot of the untidy bed, look- 
 ing down at the face on the crumpled pillow. It 
 was indeed, even in those moments, intensely beauti- 
 ful, so beautiful that she did not even in her mind's 
 eye need to re-dress the disordered hair or think 
 how much improvement she could make in it with 
 the addition of faintest color to the cheeks. For 
 as well as beauty there was in her eyes the strange 
 and wild exhilaration of death, as if it were a lover 
 about to take her for the first time into the pas- 
 sionate embrace of his arms. The look of expec- 
 tancy was there and, shy in the anticipation of it, 
 she almost held her breath. 
 
 194
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Instinctively she looked at Anthony Sorel. His 
 eyes were steady and emotionless as though he knew 
 of the approach of death and heard its footsteps 
 in the room beyond. She sought for the look of ad- 
 miration she expected or for that agony which must 
 be seen in his eyes as a man gazes upon beauty that 
 he loves when it joins hands with death. But no 
 such expressions were there. His face was calm. 
 His eyes bent steadily on those of Mary Coyne 
 and she looked up at him as though saying, "Am I 
 not beautiful, even more beautiful so near to death?"" 
 
 "Is the music still playing for you, Mary?" he 
 asked presently. 
 
 "I heard it last night," she said, "an' it callin' 
 me through the window beyond, the way I'd be set- 
 tin' me foot to ut if the leg wasn't broken on me." 
 
 "What was it like?" 
 
 "Like the strings of a fiddle that would be made 
 of woman's hair an' weren't all the sorrows of the 
 world in ut like the wind that scatters the thistle- 
 down and sobs under the warp of the old door?" 
 
 "Do you feel any better in yourself?" he asked 
 her then. 
 
 She turned over with much pain upon her side 
 and moaned softly as she did so. 
 
 "I do not," said she, "an' if death is to be comin' 
 to me, wouldn't it come swift in the night while I'd 
 be hearin' the music, the way I'd be havin' all the 
 beauty I had with me again an' I not cramped here 
 on the bed like an old hag lettin' the last gasps out 
 of her." 
 
 195
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He turned away from the bedside and motioning 
 to Mrs. Coyne she followed him with Anna Quarter- 
 maine into the other room. When he had closed 
 the door of the bedroom, he returned and stood be- 
 side the fire. 
 
 "Mary will die," said he to the old woman, "and 
 'twill be her beauty killed her." 
 
 Mrs. Coyne wrung her hands but there were no 
 tears in her eyes. She wrung her hands in a hard 
 passion of grief. 
 
 "Haven't they set their spell on her," she cried, 
 "and what could I be doing for the girl if they've 
 put their minds on takin' her!" 
 
 "Insist on the doctor doing his operation," he 
 replied quietly. "That is the only hope of saving 
 her. Any day, any moment it may be too late. 
 Come, come we all know there are faeries and this 
 is the work of faeries no doubt but people say you 
 have the power to deal with them. If she does lose 
 her beauty and has to be walking the world with 
 crutches to help her, isn't that better than to be los- 
 ing her?" 
 
 Anna Quartermaine listened but all her senses 
 were now faint and subdued in her as though she 
 breathed an atmosphere heavy with sleep. The 
 sound of his voice was like a far note continuous in 
 her ears, but it was with difficulty she could reason 
 what he said. Did he know then, she asked herself, 
 did he know there were faeries or was his speech 
 only to humor the woman? She looked up at him 
 standing there and it seemed to her as if the strength 
 
 196
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 and calmness of his mind was stronger than all the 
 common power of men. This was more than the 
 mere adventure of Romance she had sought for, to 
 pass the hours of Spring into the long days of Sum- 
 mer. Her heart was not beating quickly, but the 
 heavy throb of it was loud like a hammer in her 
 pulse. 
 
 Had there been a sign of his admiration for that 
 dying girl within she would have known he was yet 
 the same as other men. But no such sign had there 
 been. He had spoken of her beauty; he had looked 
 at it as though it were a flower he had found on the 
 mountainside a thing he would resist the pluck- 
 ing to wear for his own adornment. Even when 
 Mrs. Coyne returned her answer to his urging, Anna 
 Quartermaine kept her eyes set on Anthony Sorel's 
 face, hearing, only as if it were in the distance, what 
 she said. 
 
 "Why would I be lettin' the doctor use his knife 
 to her," she began. "Isn't she a sick enough one as 
 it is? Shure, wouldn't they take the leg away wid 
 them to be doing tricks wid it there in Clogheen, 
 the way they bought Tim Coughlan's body for the 
 hospital in Dublin an' paid his woman two pounds 
 for it an' she drinkin' every penny of it to drown 
 the shame it brought her? Glory be to the Almighty 
 God, wouldn't I sooner see herself goin' wid the 
 faeries, than standin' up on the last day wid one leg 
 to her an' she shamed of her beauty before God 
 Himself!" 
 
 In this strain, slowly working upon her own un- 
 197
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 bridled emotions, it seemed she talked without .end- 
 ing and all the while Anna Quartermaine watched 
 Anthony Sorel's face. It was full of a sensitive mo- 
 bility, and to all that the old woman said, the expres- 
 sion of his lips and eyes reflected her words as one 
 plays upon some instrument his hand was born to. 
 
 Then gradually in the growing passion of her 
 words, the note in the old woman's voice became a 
 note of frenzy. At the sound of it, but with no sense 
 of fear, Anna Quartermaine turned to look at her. 
 Saliva was gathered in a froth of bubbles at the cor- 
 ners of her wrinkled mouth, her eyes were flashing 
 with the daring confidence of prophecy. They were 
 fixed upon Anthony Sorel's face as if with just the 
 light in them she would burn out his soul. 
 
 It was not till then that a consciousness of fear 
 took the mind of Anna Quartermaine. With a sud- 
 den movement, she caught Anthony Sorel's hand 
 and held it fast. , 
 
 "Let us go," she whispered "please let us go." 
 
 For swiftly it had come to her mind that the old 
 woman was mad. It was no uncommon thing 
 amongst those people with the loneliness of their 
 lives and hers was not an unnatural dread of it. 
 
 "Let us go," she whispered again and stood up 
 beside him. 
 
 "You've nothing to fear," he replied quietly and 
 took a closer hold upon her hand. "Let her go on, 
 she speaks with authority." 
 
 "An' wouldn't I speak well with the gift of 
 sight," she cried, "an' on this night when the hosts 
 
 198
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of them do be ridin' out with their horses gallopm 
 thunder over the heather! Wouldn't I know ye well 
 as ye sthand there, wouldn't I know ye well to be 
 eaten up with wisdom an' still not be wise, to be ever 
 watching with yeer quiet eyes an' still be blind, to 
 be listenin' the way of a dog an' he huntin' an' still 
 be deaf? I would indeed ! Is it that sort of wisdom 
 ye'd be preachin' to herself in there? Yirra, 'tis not 
 that sort of wisdom will be sthandin' to ye an' ye 
 taken by the faeries yeerself where the roads are 
 crossed an' the night comes batterin' with the wind 
 across the mountains at yeer little door. Hear what 
 I say, young man, before ye preach the cunnin' ways 
 of thim doctors to me, for isn't there the speech 
 of knowledge in me this night an' wouldn't I 
 be walkin' the hills with me two feet bare on me 
 before I'd know the words again I'd be sayin' to 
 ye now?" 
 
 With a sudden movement and still in her frenzy, 
 she turned her eyes on Anna Quartermaine who in- 
 voluntarily clung the closer to Anthony Sorel's side. 
 
 "Who are ye?" she asked. "Who are ye, comin' 
 with yeer own beauty to spy out the face of herself 
 beyond in the room on her little bed?" 
 
 Knowing it was the truth, Anna Quartermaine 
 shuddered, fearing the things she still might say. 
 
 "I brought this lady," Anthony Sorel replied. 
 "She did not come of herself. I brought her. Your 
 sight is failing you. Your moment is going. Get 
 back to your daughter and do what I advise you 
 or send for the priest if you need him." 
 
 199
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 At that she beat her hands upon her head and 
 stamped her foot upon the hard mud floor. 
 
 "The sight is not gone from me!" she cried. 
 "Haven't I vision now can see the comin' of the days, 
 an' the break of mornin' when death will be comin' 
 to herself sthandin' there an' she dreamin' the world 
 away of a lover with his arms around the soft white 
 breast of her. Let ye go out the both of ye an' 
 dare the faeries that do be dancin' everywhere this 
 night. 'Tis ye have wisdom an' are still not wise 
 'tis ye look strainin' with yeer eyes an' cannot 
 
 see." 
 
 This was the last effort of her speech. As though 
 a hand had been pressed against her lips she stopped 
 suddenly in speaking; as though some hidden power 
 had seized her, she dropped with her frenzy spent 
 upon the floor. 
 
 Without a word Anthony Sorel lifted her in his 
 arms and carried her to her bed in the other room. 
 When he came back, Anna Quartermaine could see 
 that his face was white. Indeed, she felt the blood- 
 lessness in her own. Then he took her arm and led 
 her to the door. They passed out into the dark- 
 ness that the moon was faintly glimmering with 
 light. He fastened the latch and so they turned up 
 the mountainside again. For a long while he spoke 
 no word and then he said, 
 
 "Mary .Coyne will die this night." 
 
 After that between them nothing else was said 
 until he set her on the road to Ballysaggartmore.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 IT was as he walked back across the moors and 
 up the half-trodden pathways again into the 
 mountains that Anthony Sorel knew some 
 change had come upon him that day. 
 
 At first he was slow to realize what it was or how 
 it had happened. Ideas moved strangely in his 
 mind but he could not trace their passage, or know 
 whence they had come. It was long he found the 
 way back to his cabin and his eyes that had grown 
 so accustomed to those gray lights before the moon 
 had risen were now restless because everything 
 seemed dark. The far edges of the hills cut sharp 
 metallic lines against the purple sky; the snipe that 
 rose with a quick cry and a rush of wings out of the 
 bracken as he crossed the moor set the heart beat- 
 ing suddenly within him. It seemed a vast world, 
 that black space into which it flung itself as it dis- 
 appeared in search of another bed to sleep in undis- 
 turbed. 
 
 When he reached his cabin, he opened the door 
 and went in, for long minutes standing there with 
 the catch still in his hand looking at the chair Anna 
 Quartermaine had occupied. There it remained, 
 turned to the fire, just where she had sat and lis- 
 tened to the wandering story he had told her. With 
 the long habits of solitude, his mind drifted with- 
 
 201
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 out direction in countless channels. Then his eyes 
 were looking inwards, as when a man is 'caught 
 between the worlds of belief and imagination. 
 
 At last, closing the door, with an abstracted care, 
 he set the room to rights, yet still was restless, with 
 no thought of sleep. The fire was burnt out to the 
 dim glow behind white ashes. Another night he 
 would have got to his bed, letting it die and be bur- 
 ied in its own cold embers; but now he sat beside the 
 bellows-wheel and blew the ashes into a flame of 
 more cheerful companionship. Even then there 
 passed an hour by before he lay himself down with 
 eyes turned to the wall, where the firelights danced 
 until it seemed they were a ring of the children of 
 faerie dancing around him, nearer and nearer until 
 their little feet had closed his eyes. 
 
 In the morning the sun wakened him and the 
 knowledge of that change was with him still. It was 
 not that he was watching the movements of his mind, 
 for the change seemed without him, rather than 
 within. He looked around the room of his cabin 
 and was conscious of the four walls that contained 
 it. As though he were an onlooker from some 
 more distant place, he stood aside and could see 
 himself living there alone, from one day, from one 
 night to another, through the seasons, through the 
 years always alone. 
 
 What had brought that change in him? He was 
 too ignorant of himself to tell. It was not in his 
 emotions, for the sensation all through his body, 
 even to his mind, was as if he moved, saw, felt, all 
 
 202
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 in a trance. Yet at moments his heart beat quickly 
 as when he wondered to himself why Anna Quar- 
 termaine had come across the moors and up 
 those mountain paths to see the place in which he 
 lived. 
 
 He blamed himself for talking as he did; for let- 
 ting his mind be so disturbed with thoughts of her. 
 Yet continually he was knowing that through all he 
 had said, she had made him feel the higher inten- 
 tions of his soul's endeavor. As her face stood there 
 in his memory, for not one feature needed the call- 
 ing to his mind, he knew that, even in her gentle 
 disbelief, she had brought strength and vigor to 
 his loftiest purpose. 
 
 And so his thoughts were cause as the day wore 
 on, no longer for him to regard himself with blame, 
 but a growing joy that now he could look into a 
 woman's eyes without the tumult of emotion he had 
 known before, but binding the uplifting of his spirit 
 to the noblest of ideals. 
 
 This, in those two long years, was the first test of 
 what solitude and fasting of his body had brought 
 him. So it was not the sudden change he had found, 
 but the gradual transformation she had discovered 
 for him in himself. This was what indeed he had 
 become, for now he knew his mind was calm above 
 the distress and hunger of desire. Never might he 
 see her again and yet the beauty his imagination 
 made in her, far passed the deliberate beauty in her 
 face. So he knew a man might love a woman, when 
 earthly beauty had long left her and no distressing 
 14 203
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 hand of Death could rob her of the beauty that he 
 saw. 
 
 In an ecstasy at the thought that so he too might 
 love Anna Quartermaine, he threw open his cabin 
 'door, strode out into the light of day and climbed 
 through the banks of sunshine to the peaks where 
 they had stood together. 
 
 "There's where I live," she had said and still he 
 could see the whiteness of her hand that looked so 
 small and yet so strong to point across the world be- 
 neath them. 
 
 That was where she lived and there, seating him- 
 self on the tough mountain grass, he turned his eyes 
 and gave that spirit he had written of, to a bird in 
 flight, that bore him upwards and upwards until 
 his soul leaned out and found such beauty in these 
 new-found thoughts of her, as made death seem a 
 little thing beside. 
 
 Each day he went there to the summit of Knock- 
 shunahallion and now was spurred to energies his 
 mind had never known for all the days of those 
 two solitary years. Lying out there, sometimes the 
 peak an island alone above the sunny mists that 
 drifted past below, he wrote his songs and spoke 
 them out as though she in her valley could hear his 
 voice across the moors. 
 
 A day will rise in the golden dawn, 
 When the mists swim into the sea of morn, 
 And the naked sun under Knocknashoul 
 Will steep his limbs in the mountain pool 
 On such a day will my love be born. 
 204
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 A day will come, though the days are late, 
 When I hold your hand as those that wait 
 With bell and monstrance and Holy Bread, 
 Who take God's cup to the Altar head 
 And lift it high at the Holy Gate. 
 
 A day will dawn when I may gaze 
 Beyond the day of other days, 
 And looking deep within your eyes 
 Shall find the world were ne'er so wise, 
 Knowing death cannot part our ways. 
 
 This he wrote, and many of the love poems com- 
 piled in that one book of songs he made. 
 
 It was on the fourth day, when the evening drew 
 in about him and he saw the light kindled in Mala- 
 chi's cottage on Crow Hill, that he gathered all the 
 songs he had written and came down the mountain, 
 leaping over the bowlders and striding heedlessly 
 over the hidden paths, for the joy of life that was 
 in him. 
 
 To his knocking on the door, Malachi came and 
 let him in, and closed the door behind him and drew 
 out the chair from by the dresser where he was used 
 to sit and he reading his songs in the night-time. 
 
 It was not until he had heard them all and had 
 turned the tobacco in his mouth and spat three times 
 into the fire that Malachi spoke. 
 
 "Isn't it the plovers go winding over the fields 
 and the moors," said he, "and they crying out their 
 songs on the windy nights till they'd be finding a 
 mate would make her nest wid 'em? Yirra, Glory 
 
 205
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 be to God, hadn't I hopes of ye and ye makin' yeer 
 songs out of the wonders of the western world? 
 And now 'tis herself, and didn't I see her and she 
 coming out of great places in Lismore looking for 
 ye, 'tis herself has set the spell of her eyes on ye the 
 way ye'll be swimming the waters and walking the 
 land to get to her. And won't she bring the silence 
 into yeer voice that would sing like a blackbird in 
 a thorn bush when the white blossom is dhropping to 
 the ground? Won't she be persuading ye 'tis the 
 world in herself, and ye looking in her eyes like a 
 young calf hungry for its mother and all the strength 
 in ye goin' out like water dhropping." 
 
 He put away the verses he had gathered and 
 swore his oath to Malachi that it was not so. 
 
 "Is it the way ye'll never see her again?" Malachi 
 asked and his voice was bitter as the taste of aloes is. 
 
 He could not give promise to that. He had left 
 her alone on the road that night. He had strode off 
 into the darkness and never a word of good-bye had 
 he said because of the fear of the thing he had 
 learnt that day. But now he knew, and gave his 
 oath, that he loved almost as he had wished for love 
 and every thought in him was above desire and his 
 heart would be strong until that day when he could 
 give her the mastery of himself. 
 
 "I shall say good-bye," he said, "and she will 
 know why I go and the day when I shall come back. 
 And the thought of her will be about me through the 
 nights and I shall come the faster through her to 
 the end of my servitude." 
 
 206
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Malachi stirred the fire with an iron rod. Then 
 he took the handle of the bellows-wheel in his hand 
 and for long moments they watched the sparks gath- 
 ering out of the peat and flying upwards into the 
 black heart of the chimney. 
 
 "Let ye not be goin' down from the mountains to 
 herself," said he at last. "That word of parting is 
 not a word the women will listen to. Won't it set 
 the eyes of her more surely on ye and she stretching 
 out her hand in the darkness and her voice crying 
 out to ye across the windy places of the hills? For 
 once ye say that word to a woman doesn't it put the 
 badness in her blood would burn and starve her soul 
 till not the winds nor the storms nor the lonesome- 
 ness of the way would be keepin' her from ye?" 
 
 "Still I must go," Anthony Sorel replied, "for 
 then I shall know what strength there is in me and 
 how near I may be to the hour when I can love 
 with fulfillment that is not the satisfied hunger of 
 desire. I shall say good-bye and I shall come away 
 and then one day when the tumult of life is gone 
 from me, I shall come down the mountain again to 
 find her." 
 
 " 'Tis not a woman will wait for that," said 
 Malachi. 
 
 "Then at least I shall know I have loved," said 
 Anthony Sorel "and can a man know more?" 
 
 Malachi stood up and beat his fist upon the wall. 
 
 "Ye have the songs and all the beauty of the 
 world," said he, "and there are voices in the silence 
 of the hills for ye and there are truths a man can't 
 
 207
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 see but he walks about from one place to another 
 till his days be over him and yeerself would go to 
 the call of a woman an' she beckonin' ye to the white 
 gentleness of her breast where men sleep and wake 
 with all truth gone out of them. Haven't I seen it 
 the world over and didn't I set my heart on ye and 
 ye straining yeer ears to the cries of 'em, like the 
 Greeks sailing between the islands and they with the 
 wax in their ears the way they'd hear no voices of 
 women bringing them to destruction. Cry the good- 
 bye to her and ye standing up there on the tilt of 
 the mountains and let yeer voice go out with the 
 wind that blows over the valley in the ways of her. 
 But let ye go down and may the God Almighty be 
 at the right hand of ye for 'tis not a woman will take 
 that word from the lips of a man her eyes are set on. 
 Let you go down and all the nights after will be full 
 of the voice of her, for 'tis women have the ways of 
 Hell when a man shall set his soul against 'em." 
 
 "Still I shall go," Anthony Sorel replied in the 
 quiet confidence of his voice. 
 
 And there they sat talking between the silences 
 .until the night was worn by their words into the day.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 SHE had spoken, as they parted that night, of 
 some hope that one day he would come down 
 from his mountains and visit her in her val- 
 ley. And now one morning, when a week had 
 gone by, as she was tending to her garden, training 
 the tendrils of her seedlings of sweet-peas in the 
 way they should go, she looked up at the sound 
 of footsteps and saw Anthony Sorel coming to- 
 wards her between the long green lines of thick-set 
 box. 
 
 He might have seen her glance at the rough gar- 
 dening apron that she wore, the swift look at her 
 hands which in a garden were clean enough, the 
 quick motion putting back the loose hair that had 
 fallen over her forehead as she stooped; countless 
 other little things he might have observed as he 
 came down the garden path but his eyes were not 
 for these. They were for her eyes and the thoughts 
 that lay behind them. 
 
 Another woman might have excused herself, have 
 complained of the untidy apron, mourned over her 
 hands, holding them with the mold upon them that 
 he might have known their beauty notwithstanding. 
 Indeed to any other man, Anna Quartermaine might 
 have done this herself. To Anthony Sorel she stood, 
 merely expressing her surprise, conscious again of 
 
 209
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 that deeper pulse in her heart which beat but did not 
 flutter in its emotion. 
 
 "I have been wondering should I see you again," 
 she said, and in that reserve expressed all the 
 thoughts that had persistently occupied her mind 
 from the moment of their parting. 
 
 "I didn't wonder," said he "I meant to see you 
 again " and thereby, without reserve, in such a 
 way as a child might tell the simple truth, showed 
 her without his knowing it, his thoughts had been 
 of her. 
 
 Knowing him so little and in an eagerness for his 
 gift of admiration, she asked him why why had 
 he meant to see her again. 
 
 "Because," he said "because I had not properly 
 said good-bye. There are no such things as man- 
 ners between a man and himself. You live here 
 and expect them. Didn't I turn on my heel and 
 walk away across the moors, leaving you the rest of 
 your way home alone and at night? It didn't oc- 
 cur to me till two days had gone by that I should 
 have seen you to your house, that you would natur- 
 ally expect it, not that it wasn't safe but but " 
 he smiled "Oh just manners. I don't meet with 
 people like yourself and so I have no need of them." 
 
 This was why he had meant to see her to say 
 good-bye. Had she thought it was that, she might 
 not have asked him. There was but little effort in 
 her to hide her disappointment. She stood there in 
 silence, pulling on her garden gloves as though that 
 interest of her flowers at least was left her. She 
 
 210
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 stooped and picked up from the path the box filled 
 with the supports for her seedlings. Then she 
 looked at him. 
 
 "See my garden first," said she and wondered to 
 herself why she so quietly accepted parting at his 
 hands, when in such a mood, she would under some 
 pretext have refused it at another's. 
 
 With his eyes he consented. Indeed it was with 
 his eyes he spoke more often than with his lips. She 
 knew him best and thought of him most for the si- 
 lence of his voice. 
 
 The Darwin tulips were in bud, some burst in 
 flower. The great clusters of their formal green 
 buds were full of simple conception like the decora- 
 tion that a child might make with patient fingers for 
 its task, capable only of artless repetition. 
 
 He knew nothing of the names and ways of flow- 
 ers. They were only colors out of the earth to him, 
 jewels, as when a woman opens her treasure store 
 and spreads out her gems wondering and debating 
 which she will wear. And there were colors in gen- 
 erous plenty for him in her garden. 
 
 The scent of late violets, lingering on, was soft in 
 the air. Wallflowers were still just in bloom. It 
 was that moment of a garden in Spring when Na- 
 ture gives with both hands before the arms of Sum- 
 mer are full of roses. He could have chosen no 
 better time for apology for his manners. 
 
 She stole sharp glances at his face as they walked 
 in silence and knew, as in moments when he stood 
 still, like some creature drinking water on a parch- 
 
 211
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 ing day of thirst, that, despite himself, emotions 
 were moving in him and so secretly that he had no 
 thought of their control. 
 
 Down one path they wandered and up another. 
 Here there were windflowers turning to the sun; 
 there the aubretia was mingling purple and mauve 
 with the forget-me-not and its blue. With the aid 
 of her gardeners, she had not spent those years 
 upon her garden in vain. In one of those glances 
 as she looked at him, she felt she knew the pur- 
 pose it had been. 
 
 Yet she waited for him to speak, leaving him all 
 the warmth of emotion that filled his long silence. 
 Here she stopped to pick a faded blossom from its 
 stalk, there she pulled a weed as though each bed 
 of flowers was a bed where children slept, needing 
 tenderness. Once she plucked a violet and fastened 
 it in the bosom of her dress. And still he was silent, 
 with his eyes drinking the colors in and the sun 
 heating the air until it seemed as if they scarcely 
 walked on earth at all. 
 
 Then in the midst of a path between a wilder- 
 ness of roses laden with their little swelling buds, 
 he stopped again. At last he spoke. 
 
 "Why did you want me to see your garden first?" 
 he asked. 
 
 With him she was deprived of all consciousness 
 in her motives and could not answer why. Unless 
 it was that she loved her flowers with the proud love 
 gardeners have, usurping almost the agency of God, 
 talking of their roses as if the earth had never fed 
 
 212
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 them. Unless it were that, she told him. She knew 
 no other cause. 
 
 "Don't you love my garden?" she added. 
 
 He stretched out his arms as though he had been 
 asleep, when dreams of impossible things had dis- 
 turbed the even measure of his mind. She felt that 
 he was urging himself to awake to his old deter- 
 minations. 
 
 "It's full of emotions," he said. "Colors always 
 are." 
 
 She looked at him curiously. 
 
 "Why do you despise emotions so?" she inquired. 
 
 He made a gesture as though he were shaking 
 himself free of sensations that oppressed him. He 
 turned his head and looked straight into the light 
 of the sun until there must have been a dazzling 
 blindness in his eyes. 
 
 "I don't despise them," he replied "they despise 
 me have despised me all my life." He looked 
 at her suddenly, his sight all blinded by the glare of 
 sun so that she knew he could scarcely see her face. 
 "Don't you understand why I live as I do?" he 
 asked and with more emotion in his voice than she 
 had yet heard. "When I told you to think over to 
 yourself whether I were queer or not, didn't you 
 come at some idea of meaning about me?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 She spoke under her breath. Her voice was as 
 still as the air the violets were softening with their 
 scent. 
 
 "Didn't I tell you the other day up in the moun- 
 213
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 tains that I was trying to find calmness and strength 
 for my mind? Didn't you understand what I 
 meant?" 
 
 "I thought I did," said she "then, I thought 
 I did. Now, I don't understand at all." 
 
 "Well, then," he said suddenly "I'm thirty- 
 three half of my life gone, nearly all my youth. 
 One learns about oneself by the mere actions of one's 
 life, without the need for self-analysis. I've learnt 
 about myself. First emotion deceives and then de- 
 spises me. That is what I have learnt. Now I'm 
 learning, up in those mountains alone, how I can. 
 invigorate my mind without the sensations that emo- 
 tion sets at havoc and keeps in endless tumult. Life 
 need not be made up of sensations, I used to think 
 it was nothing else. Everybody does more or less, 
 according to the strength of their emotions. Not 
 once, but many times, I've thought I knew what love 
 was. Emotion has deceived and then despised me. 
 If that is myself then I must rise above myself; for 
 what it is in me I don't know, but something con- 
 vinces me that love and all the great emotions in 
 life are not of the body, but only of the mind; are 
 not sensations, beating you like a storm at sea, 
 but visions, such as the prophets saw before the 
 world was fettered with its civilization. They are 
 the miracles of life which modern culture has re- 
 duced to mere sensations. What in days gone by 
 they saw in their minds, we see in our eyes; what 
 they felt in their souls, we feel in our bodies. When 
 they fought with the sword, rightly or wrongly, they 
 
 214
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 fought for ideas. But now when we fight, rightly 
 or wrongly, we fight for the welfare of our bodies. 
 Can't you understand? I want to see the miracu- 
 lous in life; I want my emotions to become visions 
 of the highest things in this world or the next, not the 
 sensations that cast me into despair or fling me high 
 upon a giddy pinnacle of hope. Oh I can't explain 
 it any better than that. It is not meant to be ex- 
 plained. If there is anything that is God in a man, 
 that is what I want to be, not just the ready instru- 
 ment in the hands of Nature. I don't know why 
 I go on trying to explain it to you. I have kept si- 
 lence these last two years and not even tried to ex- 
 plain it to myself. I know what I mean that has 
 been sufficient for me till now. Now I find myself 
 floundering in a bewildering morass of words, en- 
 deavoring to explain to you what cannot be explained 
 with words, what indeed words can only serve to 
 conceal." 
 
 He might not know why he tried to explain it all 
 to her, but instinct as swift as it was sure gave 
 her sight of it. She stood there looking at his face 
 in the sunlight, the half-timid sensitiveness of it and 
 yet, above all that, the nervous strength of endur- 
 ing purpose, and then her mind fastened itself on 
 one of those prophetic determinations women so 
 often came upon. She would not lose him, she de- 
 clared to herself. Whether it were emotion or the 
 laws of Nature, or any of those factors he was en- 
 deavoring to master in himself, for herself she rec- 
 ognized that essence of inevitability which admits 
 
 215
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 no argument but moves to its purpose as irrevocably 
 as the clouds across the sky. Once with the knowl- 
 edge of that determination, she set out to show him 
 how inevitable it was by those methods of conceal- 
 ment with which only a woman knows how to di- 
 vulge the secret she would wish made known. 
 
 "Your words don't confuse it to me," she said 
 gently. "I know what you mean now. But I don't 
 know why you should say your youth is almost gone. 
 Aren't those wonderful ideas the privilege and very 
 spirit of youth? Now I understand why you believe 
 in faeries. Aren't they some of your miracles in 
 life?" 
 
 "Very earthly ones," he replied "those faeries 
 in the mountains. I know of no faerie that is a sym- 
 bol of great and uplifting ideals. Wherever there 
 are faeries, you will only find them to be symbols 
 of the emotions known to those people by whom they 
 are seen. All the same it is only a consciousness 
 of the inner life which makes them visible. That is 
 why you find them in Ireland, but even then, only in 
 those lonely places where civilization has not passed 
 its hands across the eyes of the mind still eager to 
 see. There is a saying which has been converted to 
 the use of many you must have heard it. We only 
 get those Jews that we deserve. I've heard it put 
 to that use in England. Here in the mountains we 
 might well say a man only sees the faeries he de- 
 
 serves." 
 
 "Have you ever seen a faerie?" she asked. 
 "I've seen lights across the hills," he replied. 
 216
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Often I saw lights from the window of that little 
 cabin of mine often I heard sounds and once in the 
 darkness a voice spoke to me. That was when I 
 first came to Knockshunahallion. Now I have no 
 light of fear to see, no voice of desires to hear. 
 If ever a faerie comes to me, I shall know that I am 
 failing in the strength and calmness of my mind." 
 
 Much as a knowledge of him was coming to her, 
 she could not contain the wonder in her eyes. 
 
 "I'm sure you're the strangest man I've ever met," 
 she said. "I can quite understand now, how you 
 believe that was faerie music in Mary Coyne's ears. 
 Almost I can believe it myself. Is she any better? 
 Is she going to have the operation done? I suppose 
 she will when she rfcally comes to realize how seri- 
 ous it is." 
 
 He smiled as he told her there was no belief in 
 her as yet. 
 
 "Don't you remember," he said, "how I told you 
 that Mary Coyne would die that night?" 
 
 "Yes you said so." 
 
 "Well she died." 
 
 All her understanding of him in that moment 
 seemed to leave her. She stood there on the path 
 beside him, understanding and but dimly only her- 
 self. 
 
 "How did you know she would?" she asked. 
 
 "She meant to die," he answered. "Of course 
 they say the faeries have taken her, and of course 
 they have. She has been taken by the faerie she de- 
 served. Her beauty killed her." 
 
 217
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Now without doubt he had passed her understand- 
 ing. What did he mean? What was it he believed? 
 The night in Mrs. Coyne's cottage came rudely back 
 to her. Of a sudden she remembered all the things 
 that the old woman had said before her frenzy was 
 spent. She remembered how he had let her speak, 
 saying she had authority. At the time, she had be- 
 lieved he said it merely to humor the old woman's 
 madness; but now, superstition, which is the begin- 
 ning of faith, was troubling her mind with the 
 thought that there was truth in her prophecy. 
 
 "Do you mean to say " she asked "do you 
 mean to say you believe in what that old woman 
 said that night? That you would be taken by the 
 faeries and that I should come by death in my 
 dreams?" 
 
 The very words as she said them fell on her ears 
 with all the sound of their improbability, yet it was 
 the apprehensive fear in her which comes with su- 
 perstition that brought them without hesitation to 
 her lips. 
 
 "Do you believe?" she said again because she saw 
 in him the moment's hesitation to reply. 
 
 "What is the good of my saying?" he asked. 
 "Visions mean nothing to you. Here's your life 
 here in this garden. We don't even look at those 
 flowers alike. You know all about the nature of 
 them, their names, the soil they love, the soil they 
 starve in. It's in their material sense they have 
 meaning to you. I don't say that in contempt. Good 
 heavens ! their material meaning is beautiful enough. 
 
 218
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 But it's not the beauty I want to see." He held out 
 his hand as though he were thrusting it into the flame 
 for ever to be burnt. "Please let me go," he said. 
 "I've been building a Tower of Babel when I talked 
 the other day with you up in my cabin; I've been 
 building it ever since, been building it this morn- 
 ing while I talked to you again. Now it has come 
 about my ears. We talk in different tongues. Don't 
 you see that? Beside you I'm abnormal, odd, queer. 
 I am queer; but no less than you are to me. But 
 yours is the great stream where almost all swim- 
 mers seek the current. I'm floundering in a far sea 
 where the tides are treacherous and from which no 
 swimmer has ever returned to make his chart of the 
 way. Please let me go. Good-bye." 
 
 She would not take his hand. However incom- 
 prehensible he was, she yet had made her determi- 
 nation. She would not lose him so. 
 
 "Tell me," she insisted. "I must know. Did you 
 believe what that old woman said?" 
 
 "I believe she saw what she said," he replied 
 "But no man's Fate is irrevocable. So I may be 
 steering, but the rudder is in my hands and I know 
 the rocks that threaten. Don't you realize that that 
 is why I am going now?" 
 
 "I shan't say good-bye," she replied. 
 
 He dropped the hand to his side. 
 
 "Then I must go without," he replied and turned 
 on his heel down the path between the thick-set box. 
 
 She tried to call him back, but it was not only her 
 unfamiliarity with his name that stifled the words 
 15 219
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 on her lips. She could not speak. He had destroyed 
 the power of it on her tongue. Even when he had 
 turned out of sight beyond a bed of flaming tulips, 
 she still stood there in silence where he had left her.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THAT evening Anna Quartermaine sent one of 
 her brief invitations to Father Nolan. The 
 day of sunshine it had been, had turned 
 to showers of heavy rain. He came notwithstand- 
 ing. Rain was not the excuse she would permit him. 
 His old umbrella stood in a pool in a corner of the 
 hall to prove what he had come through. He looked 
 at the pool; wistfully at the muddy bottoms of his 
 trousers and then he was shown into her little bou- 
 doir where, against all precedent, she was ready to 
 receive him. 
 
 This was a new mood, a strange mood. He took 
 her hand warmly that warmth always allowed him 
 and held it there, looking inquiringly into her eyes. 
 She let him look and tried her best to smile. But 
 she never meant it to be a success. She meant him 
 to see the effort and fully intended he should see it 
 fail. 
 
 The whole matter was that she wanted sympathy 
 and needed it to be given without the trouble of ask- 
 ing. The failure of her smile, that was the utmost 
 expression of her request. 
 
 He patted her hand in the fatherly way he had 
 with him and asked her what the matter was. 
 
 "Come and eat your dinner," said she, for it was 
 not to be told so readily as all that. There being 
 
 221
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 some matter on her mind, she required at least that 
 it should be humored out of her. The joy of telling 
 was not to be found in point-blank confession. In- 
 deed she ordered her life so that even her depres- 
 sions afforded her some enjoyment. The contempla- 
 tion of his doing his utmost all through the meal 
 to find out what was distressing her, distressing him- 
 self in the effort, perhaps spoiling his dinner which, 
 though she did not wish it exactly, yet could not be 
 helped this was the enjoyment she sought for in 
 her mood. 
 
 It may be supposed she found it with the charm 
 of the ways she had. There never was a more 
 sympathetic nature than that of Father Nolan; and 
 when it was a woman in distress and that woman 
 was Anna Quartermaine, he could take almost the 
 color of her mood, turning himself to that exact pitch 
 of receptivity when confession becomes the natural 
 instinct of the mind. 
 
 His dinner was spoiled. That had to be. She 
 could not properly have enjoyed her mood unless. 
 It was essential to the whole condition of things that 
 she should see him fretting over her. All those who 
 had any affection for her were willing enough to do 
 that. Father Nolan was one of them and if he 
 needed any consolation for the spoiling of his meal, 
 found it cheerfully enough in the fact that it was 
 Friday a proper day for such a sacrifice. 
 
 Not until they were back again in her little room, 
 taking their coffee out of Lowestoft cups china, the 
 character of which had many resemblances to her 
 
 222
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 not until then, did she begin to yield to the gentle 
 pressure of his questions. 
 
 She was unhappy, she said, because she had heard 
 from her celibate this was the comprehensive way 
 she named him to Father Nolan that she was not 
 going to see him again. 
 
 "He writes good-bye," said she, "and that's a 
 word that depresses me more than anything else. 
 Why are men so frightfully, frightfully stupid? I 
 hate losing people. Don't you know that about me? 
 I hate it." 
 
 "You're going to lose him then?" 
 
 "Indeed I'm not," said she and, had it been the 
 moment to laugh at her, he would have laughed at 
 her then. But it was no such moment. His face was 
 a picture of solemnity as he returned her look of set- 
 tled determination. 
 
 "What brought about the writing of this letter?" 
 he asked presently. "Why suddenly does it come 
 over him, the way he must say good-bye after all 
 this time?" 
 
 "He doesn't explain," she replied. "He gives me 
 no reasons just says good-bye. As if things could 
 end like that. Aren't men fools!" 
 
 "Why fools?" said he. 
 
 "Well because it was so wonderful as it was. 
 He was so absolutely different from anyone 
 else." 
 
 "Is it the way you don't like him now at all?" 
 
 "No can't you see I'm in love with him now. 
 That's what's making me so miserable. Oh, aren't 
 
 223
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 men fools ! As if any woman would say good-bye 
 to them, once once " 
 
 Her eyes, the expression of her lips, the way she 
 clutched one hand upon another, all finished that 
 sentence for her. He knew what she meant and 
 now could afford to relax that solemnity he had as- 
 sumed. It was not exactly a moment for laughter, 
 but he knew she would expect him to be amused. 
 
 "Oh yes you can smile," she said at once, "and 
 so can I but it's not a smile. It's only a grin." 
 
 Suddenly then her whole manner changed. She 
 had let him win her out of her mood and at no 
 greater cost than the enjoyment of his dinner. Many 
 a man had had to pay more than that for the privi- 
 lege. She even had let him make her smile. But 
 now the mood was gone and, half with the suspicion 
 of tears in her eyes, she was showing him her real 
 self. 
 
 Leaning forward in her chair, she laid a hand on 
 his and tightened her fingers about it, hoping to see 
 him wince because the pride of her hands was that 
 they were strong. He did wince; just a twitch of 
 his eyelids. It was enough for her to see. She felt 
 no disappointment to hinder her emotions. 
 
 "Do you think I shall lose him?" she whispered. 
 "You're a man you're a celibate you know what 
 men feel when they get these ridiculous notions into 
 their heads." 
 
 Never did she stop to think how her words re- 
 flected upon him. These ridiculous notions! He 
 could smile at her then, knowing how little she un- 
 
 224
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 derstood, yet realizing how deep an impression those 
 very ridiculous notions had made upon her. 
 
 "What does he gain out of life?" she went on, 
 still too emotional to choose her words. So inti- 
 mately as this she might have spoken to another 
 woman, but that women meant little or nothing to 
 her. Father Nolan had long discovered that being 
 spiritual adviser to Anna Quartermaine entailed ca- 
 pacities which demanded the utmost resources of his 
 nature. He was a celibate priest and there he was 
 expected to sit quietly beside her, telling her what 
 were the feelings of a man who got these ridiculous 
 notions of celibacy into his head. Without a vivid 
 sense of humor he might well have stopped at that. 
 But her judgment of him took that quality for 
 granted. He must give a satisfactory account of his 
 own attitude of mind. Nothing short of that would 
 content her. 
 
 "Well what does he gain?" she persisted, for 
 with every intention in the world to reply as best 
 he could, he was yet slow of answering. "It seems 
 meaningless to me. Life is life. We've been given 
 our emotions; why should we be ashamed of them? 
 Why should we suppose that they do nothing but de- 
 ceive us?" 
 
 "Is that what he supposes?" 
 
 "That's what he says. Have you ever felt that? 
 Have you ever felt that your emotions destroyed 
 your own power of yourself?" 
 
 "I'm a priest," said he in self-defense, half hop- 
 ing that the reminder might give her pause to think. 
 
 225
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 She took no notice of it. Thoughts were too swift 
 in her for arrest such as that. 
 
 "I know I know," she said. "That's why I'm 
 asking you. You've had your vows taken all these 
 years." 
 
 "Yirra, we won't say how many," said he. 
 
 "Well did you become a priest because you were 
 afraid of your emotions?" 
 
 "I did not," said he. "I became a priest because 
 me father put a stick across me back when I said I 
 didn't want to go to Maynooth and I've remained 
 a priest " his voice altered "because 'tis the way 
 a priest can have a clearer mind for understanding 
 the ways of God than him that is being swept this 
 way and that with the desires that do be in him." 
 
 "You mean that?" she asked. He heard the note 
 of trouble in her voice. 
 
 "I do," said he. 
 
 "That's what he said." She took her hands from 
 his hands and leant back again in her chair. "That's 
 what he said that there was something of God in 
 a man and he was living to find it in himself." 
 
 "You'd better tell him," said Father Nolan, 
 "that the priesthood is open to him. Wouldn't he 
 be wasting his time in this world with ideas like 
 that?" 
 
 "He's not a priest," said she. "He'd never be a 
 priest. Some of the things he says would make the 
 hairs of orthodoxy stand up on your dear old re- 
 ligious head." 
 
 "That doesn't make him any the less of a priest," 
 226
 
 he replied, "no more than falling in love with him 
 the moment he's gone from ye makes ye any the less 
 of a woman." 
 
 She was not prepared to see the twinkle in his eye 
 just then and asked him simply if he did really 
 think that was so unlike a woman. Receiving no 
 answer, she looked up quickly and then she knew. 
 
 "Oh no don't make fun of me," she begged. "I 
 am unhappy I'm really terribly unhappy. I say I 
 won't let him go. But you don't know that look in 
 his eyes as I do. What shall I do if I never see 
 him again? What shall I do?" She was not ask- 
 ing for an answer to that; did not wait for it. From 
 one attitude, from one aspect to another, her mind 
 was racing and, leaping back now to what he had 
 just said, she asked him what he meant by his allu- 
 sions to the priesthood. 
 
 "Why isn't he any the less of a priest?" she 
 wanted to know. 
 
 "Because what I can gather of the young man," 
 said he. "Is he a young man?" 
 
 "About thirty-five." 
 
 He thought of his own twenty years added to that 
 and declared it was a fine age for a man to have 
 such knowledge of himself. 
 
 "But from what I can gather of him," he went on, 
 "he's the type priests are made of. Mind ye, 
 they are not all priests that take the collar. They 
 are not. And there's many a man in a hateful red 
 tunic or a jaunty Caroline would be better dressed in 
 a stole and cassock. Shure 'tis the Church gives 
 
 227
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 a man the collar that he wears, but isn't it God Al- 
 mighty that makes the man what he is? It is in- 
 deed. That young man is a priest not because his 
 father has never laid a sthick across his back, but be- 
 cause God put the spirit of it in his heart. One 
 like himself will never be desthroyed by a woman, 
 or if he is, 'twill break the heart in him." 
 
 "Yes that's all very well," said she, in arms at 
 once against the attitude he took, "but how about 
 me? Don't I count at all? Am I to be absolutely 
 put aside?" 
 
 "And who's putting you aside?" he returned. 
 "Did Major Allen put ye aside? Did all the other 
 men who've ever been in love with ye and God 
 knows how many fingers I have on my hands and 
 what good they'd be to me did they put ye aside? 
 Glory be to God, me dear child, it is not love ye're 
 after wanting." 
 
 "What is it then?" 
 
 " 'Tis that thing whatever it may be that ye can't 
 get. And that's the truth I'm telling ye. Faith, 
 ye're one of those women whose spirits are too high 
 for the body God has given ye beautiful though it 
 
 is." 
 
 She touched his hand. It was just thanking him 
 for that, even though he never noticed it. 
 
 "I suppose there's a call for ye," he went on, 
 "though the Almighty God knows what it is. I 
 wouldn't hazard a guess meself, unless it was that 
 ye're sent into the world to make life difficult for the 
 men who are meant to rise by reason of the difficul- 
 
 228
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 ties they encounter. Unless 'tis that, I can't see the 
 good of ye at all." 
 
 She looked up at him with puckered lips. 
 
 "You don't think very much of me then?" she 
 said as she could say it, not too childishly, but with 
 big eyes, genuinely wistful. 
 
 "If ye look like that at the young man," said he, 
 "he'll need all the priest that's in him by Nature. 
 Maynooth 'ud never save him if ye look at him like 
 that." 
 
 She more than touched his hand. Now she took 
 it in hers again. 
 
 "Well say then," she said eagerly, "say that 
 you don't believe what you said about him before?" 
 
 "What was that?" 
 
 "That he idealized me but that he might go 
 away and marry someone else." 
 
 "Wouldn't it be happier for him?" said he. 
 
 "Oh I don't know whether it 'ud be happier 
 perhaps it would. But say he won't." 
 
 "Well now I wouldn't say that at all." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Because he might. But ye can be satisfied in 
 yourself that it wouldn't be anyone ye'd be jealous 
 of. That sort of man when he does marry, needs 
 a creature that doesn't begin to know the sort of 
 husband she's got and is no more a part of his real 
 life than the coat he lays on his back." 
 
 "Do you mean a sort of peasant woman?" She 
 thought of Mary Coyne with her undeveloped mind 
 the wonderful beauty of her face. Did he mean 
 229
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 such a woman as that? She thought of Anthony 
 Sorel at the cross roads where often he had told her, 
 he stood and watched the girls and young men danc- 
 ing. Did he mean a woman as one of those? A 
 dread swept into her heart that it might be true 
 when "Oh what a shame that would be!" she 
 cried. "Surely a man like that couldn't be wasted 
 in such a way." 
 
 "I don't know would it be a waste?" said Father 
 Nolan slowly. "With such a woman as that, ye 
 might scarcely say he was married at all. She'd 
 never stand in the pathway he's walking in. I dunno 
 would it be a waste. It might be the only thing for 
 him. Then he'd keep ye in his mind the ideal un- 
 touched for the remainder of his life and maybe 
 he'd be telling the good girl he was married to all 
 about ye." 
 
 "Tell her how much he loved me and she'd listen, 
 never saying a word." This she joined in with, 
 seeing the picture far clearer than he. "But, Oh my 
 goodness!" she exclaimed. "Don't you call that a 
 waste ! What's the matter with me ?" She im- 
 pelled him now to look at her. "What harm should 
 I bring to him? You talk about me as if I were a 
 thing to be avoided. Am I as horrible as all 
 that?" 
 
 He shook his head backwards and forwards as 
 one who gave up all hope of understanding. Even 
 here, he could see the net she was spreading to catch 
 him. Was she as horrible as all that? What a 
 question ! Yet he set out boldly to answer it. 
 
 230
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Ye have the laws of Nature in the bones of ye," 
 said he, "and a man of his kind would be doing 
 well for himself if he went to the other ends of the 
 earth than be meeting ye. Don't ye know that your- 
 self? Isn't this young fella after saying there is 
 something of God in a man and shure it isn't that in 
 him would be any good to Nature at all. 'Tis not 
 marriage he's wanting, which is an earthly sacra- 
 ment death can put an end to ; 'tis something which 
 denies death, something which the life ye'd bring 
 him would only destroy with the fear of death. 
 Surely to God the less ye lay hold on life in this 
 world, the easier it is to let it go in the hour of 
 severance. But the laws of Nature are quick in 
 yeer veins, the way ye'd have him bind up his life 
 with your own and the children he'd bring ye, so 
 that the fear of death would come quick to him 
 at night while ye lay suffering on a bed of child- 
 birth. That young man's a priest, I tell ye, and 
 whether he wears the collar or not he'll strive as 
 much as any man of the Church to keep the distance 
 of ye." 
 
 He had spoken now in the fearlessness of what he 
 believed, feeling, despite his friendship for her, 
 all his sympathies given out to this young man; 
 knowing the difficulties of the way he had chosen 
 and believing how nothing but the sanctuary of the 
 Church could save him when once she had set her 
 heart upon his capture. 
 
 He rose to his feet now and looked wistfully again 
 at the muddy bottoms of his trousers. 
 
 231
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Tell him from me," said he, "that only the 
 Church'll save him. That young man ought to be 
 a monk in Melleray and never speak to a woman 
 again, if 'tis the way he would keep to the path he's 
 walking in. The world is no place for him. 'Tis 
 there he can keep ye the ideal woman in his 
 mind and be silent for the rest of his life. Tell 
 him that from me," he added and turned then to 
 
 go- 
 
 "You're only thinking for him you don't think 
 for me at all," said she. 
 
 "Faith, I've never met anybody could do their 
 own thinking better than ye can yeerself," he replied. 
 
 "Aren't ye thinking now as hard as yeer brain'll let 
 ye, the way ye can bring him back to ye? Isn't that 
 what ye're thinking?" 
 
 "He shan't go and throw himself away on a peas- 
 ant woman," she declared. "I'll save him from 
 that." 
 
 "I'd trust ye for that," said he. "That young 
 fella has chosen a path no woman has ever let a man 
 walk in yet. I shall be marrying the two of ye one 
 day and I've no doubt he'll have the sense to bless 
 me for it for the rest of his life. But he won't be 
 the man he was and he knows it now." 
 
 He went to the door and opened it, then turned 
 again. 
 
 "Yeer gardener Michael told me ye had a 
 young man seeing round the garden to-day. Is it the 
 way ye're going to take another man's advice about 
 yeer own garden?" 
 
 232
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "I might," said she. 
 
 "Michael will never forgive ye if ye do," said he. 
 "Oh yes, he will," she replied "Why, everybody 
 forgives me even you."
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ANTHONY SOREL came back to his cabin in 
 the mountains as a man returns from his 
 pilgrimage to a holy shrine. 
 
 A new vigor was in him, a higher exaltation than 
 he had ever reached. The very earth he trod was 
 buoyant underneath his feet. With every lark that 
 rose out of the heather, his heart went with it up into 
 the burnished sky. 
 
 There was victory in sight of him. In those two 
 years of solitude, he now believed he had found the 
 mastery of emotion. He could look at the thing he 
 loved without desire of that bodily sensation of pos- 
 session. He could put her out of the immediate de- 
 mands of his life as, coming to the hour of his la- 
 bor, a man might put down a child from his knees. 
 Another lonely year perhaps with that ideal before 
 his eyes and he might have knowledge of his soul 
 to claim the thing he loved without fear that his 
 emotions would deceive him. 
 
 Yet so swift had it been, that there still were mo- 
 ments when he sat alone, in which he doubted of 
 himself. Her beauty, not in each separate feature, 
 but that beauty he saw in all her face, meaning the 
 beauty to him he found within her mind, came back 
 again and again to him in his meditations. 
 
 Then one night he dreamt he stood beside the lake 
 234
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 that lies in that depthless hollow of Knockshunahal- 
 lion and, as he watched the water, black as the ash- 
 tree buds, there rose out of the deep fathoms, bub- 
 bles, that quivered to the surface and became her eyes. 
 Then, as they looked at him, her whole face rose out 
 of the water's edge and last of all, her body gleam- 
 ing wet. With beckoning finger she called him to 
 her. He stepped down into the water to her side. 
 
 It was not cold, the water, as it closed around 
 him, but warm and heavy like a viscous stream. The 
 warmth of it rose to his brain, stifling the will in him 
 to yet turn back. But still her finger beckoned him 
 and still with the heavy water like chains about his 
 limbs, he struggled on to reach her side. Then, 
 when he was so near he could stretch out his hand 
 and touch her, she lay her arms about his neck and 
 slowly caught him down below the surface of the 
 lake; down, down, and down into the deep dark- 
 ness where the water was chill as melted snow. 
 There, winding his own arms about her, he clung 
 to her for the warmth her body gave. And still 
 they sank, until the light of sky was blotted out 
 above their heads and darkness came as a thing that 
 falls with a loud voice, deafening in the ears. 
 
 He awoke, his body trembling as he lay upon his 
 bed. It was only a dream, he said, but until the 
 dawn broke out across the hills, he could not shake 
 off the warm touch of her arms from round his 
 neck. 
 
 So came the doubt of himself out of the essence of 
 that dream and all these things he told to Malachi 
 16 235
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 one night as they sat together over the smoking fire 
 of peat. 
 
 Malachi sat knotting his fingers and at intervals 
 spitting into the fire as he listened. When he had 
 made an end, telling him this and that, how he had 
 said good-bye to Anna Quartermaine in the garden 
 at Ballysaggartmore, the dream he had dreamt and 
 all its lingering insistence in his mind, Malachi took 
 the old iron rod that served him to poke the fire and 
 stirred the smoldering peat. The crackling sparks 
 leapt up into the blackness of the chimney and left 
 a glow of light on both their faces that seemed to 
 linger about them after the flame had gone. 
 
 "Wasn't it I tellin' ye," he said at last "wasn't 
 it I tellin' ye the nights would be full of the voice of 
 her and ye going to the South to set yeer eyes on 
 her once again. 'Tis no woman will take the part- 
 ing words from a man wanst the heart has gone 
 out of her, an' she lookin' east and west in the 
 night for the sight of him." 
 
 Anthony Sorel stretched out his hands to the blaze 
 of the fire and shivered, for the night had come 
 about them chill in the mountains there with the 
 late frosts of May. 
 
 " 'Tis not she has come back to me," said he de- 
 spondently, "but the call of my own self crying back 
 out of the years that are behind me. And if it comes 
 to me more, shan't I open my ears to it, till the sight 
 and the touch of her grow to the hunger in me and 
 all the great hope that I've had in my soul be de- 
 stroyed?" 
 
 236
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He buried his face in his hands when, like a 
 father watching over his child, Malachi sat by the 
 chimney corner, never taking his eyes from the 
 stooping figure sitting there, motionless and de- 
 jected. 
 
 " 'Tis yeerself has as much knowledge of women," 
 he said after a while, "as I'd be having meself of 
 the four corners of heaven, or God Almighty Him- 
 self in His golden chair. Shure, isn't there the devil 
 in all women and wouldn't they hold a man the way 
 he'd be sthrainin' and pullin' like Dorgan's jennet 
 is spanceled and tied to the root of his elder tree?" 
 
 So they sat and so they talked, as men talk of 
 women, when the fear of a woman is upon them and 
 only courage comes to them as they sit alone. 
 
 "Am I never to know a woman again?" asked 
 Anthony Sorel presently. "Is love always to be a 
 thing of passionate emotion that makes me slave 
 instead of master of myself? Have I lived here in 
 the mountains these two years for nothing?" 
 
 Malachi cut another quid of tobacco in the horny 
 palm of his hand. The click of the knife as he shut 
 it was like the report of a pistol in that lonely si- 
 lence. 
 
 "Would ye leave yeer cabin up there?" he asked 
 bitterly as he thrust the tobacco in the accustomed 
 corner of his mouth. "Would ye leave yeer cabin 
 up there and go down to the mad diversions of the 
 town land and get lost like John Troy is traipsing 
 the big cities of the western world an' he with the 
 songs dead in him could sing like a mating thrush?" 
 
 237
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He shook his hand above his head with prophetic 
 gesture. "I tell ye this," said he, "that the day ye 
 come down from the windy hollows of those hills is 
 the day ye come down from the heights yeer soul has 
 climbed to and may the Almighty God keep my eyes 
 from the light of that day, for there's no such man 
 since I came here living on the starving land could 
 catch the music out of the wind or make a song to 
 try the heart in me." 1 
 
 With the swift impulse of youth and the swifter 
 impulse of a sudden exaltation of his heart's de- 
 sire, Anthony Sorel stretched out his hand and took 
 the horny fingers that felt like knotted wood as he 
 held them in his own. 
 
 "I won't come down from the mountains," he 
 said slowly. "Not until I can stand here before 
 God and swear I am the master of myself. When 
 that day comes 'tis more than music I shall catch 
 out of the mountain winds; 'tis more than trying 
 the heart in you my songs will be doing then. Now 
 her voice shall cry no longer to me in the still night. 
 I'll put the wax in my ears and bind my limbs to my 
 cabin door and you shall see the months go by and 
 I coming alone to the spirit of mastery in my soul. 
 That's my oath to you and I " 
 
 He stopped with a jerk of a sudden in his voice, 
 for out of the penetrating silence of the surround- 
 ing hills, there came upon his ears the sound of a 
 
 1 This was the only occasion in all his narrative when the old man 
 showed me in so many words how deep was his affection and admira- 
 tion for Anthony Sorel. E. T. T. 
 
 238
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 woman singing in the night outside. He glanced at 
 Malachi, when he knew that to him alone the voice 
 was audible. The old man stood there in the dim 
 light of the peat fire, no more than expectancy upon 
 his face as he waited for Anthony Sorel to make 
 an end of what he was saying. 
 
 It was evident, Malachi had not heard, yet the 
 voice was drawing nearer and the sound of her sing- 
 ing was vibrating like far echoes in his ears. It was 
 then, as he listened, there came suddenly to his mind 
 the words of Mrs. Coyne she had spoken to himself 
 and Anna Quartermaine that night in Gorteeshall. 
 
 " 'Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin' 
 to ye," she had said, "an' ye taken by the faeries 
 yeerself where the roads are crossed and the night 
 comes batterin' with the wind across the mountains 
 at yeer little door." 
 
 And not those words only, but the words he had 
 said in the garden to Anna Quartermaine herself, 
 
 "A man only sees the faeries he deserves. If ever 
 I see a faerie, I shall know that I am failing in the 
 strength and calmness of my mind." 
 
 Then what was this he heard, this voice of a 
 woman, that came out of the hills where never a 
 woman at that hour would dare to walk alone? 
 Mary Coyne had heard the music of the faeries, 
 had seen their enchanted fires, had followed them 
 until they and death had overtaken her. Was it 
 this, at the very moment of its highest confidence, 
 that was to come to him? 
 
 He stood by the fire with his hand half lifted, his 
 239
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 eyes, his ears, every sense in him brought to the 
 service of listening to that voice. 
 
 "Yirra, what's on ye?" asked Malachi. 
 
 "Can't you hear?" he replied. 
 
 Malachi turned his head to one side. 
 
 "There are no sounds coming out of this night 
 to me," said he. "What is it ye're after hearing 
 yeerself ?" 
 
 "A woman's voice, singing out there on the side 
 of the hill. Now it's nearer and now nearer. 
 Can't you hear? Listen I She must be coming this 
 way." 
 
 The cry of a curlew flying up from the moors, 
 broke the stillness in Malachi's deaf ears and then 
 he too heard the faint notes, now dropping to si- 
 lence, now rising again, the voice as of one who 
 picked their way on a strange and venturesome path. 
 
 The fear of the unknown that comes to so many 
 of us and swiftest of all to those who live in its soli- 
 tude amongst the mountains and in the tenantless 
 corners of the world, came like a rushing and a chilly 
 wind upon Malachi then. He stood in the quiver- 
 ing half-lights of the still peat fire and his knees 
 shook together and his eyes sought out in fear 
 through the little window where the light of the 
 moon was a silvered daylight on the sloping hills. 
 
 Anthony Sorel stood there beside him, no trem- 
 bling in his limbs, but a chill whiteness about his lips. 
 His eyes, too, were set upon that window square 
 where the moonshine made the day of night and the 
 pupils of his eyes were large and black and his lips 
 
 240
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 were parted and he breathed as they breathe in a 
 room of death. 
 
 And nearer and nearer came the singing of that 
 voice, rising and falling, dropping to silence as a 
 mountain stream that finds a level bed, lifting to 
 music as when it tumbles to the tiny cataract. 
 
 Not one word passed between them while they 
 waited, waited with that unspoken belief as one 
 thought between them, in the sure knowledge she 
 must pass that way. 
 
 At last, at the moment when they must see her 
 go by, Malachi gripped his hand upon Anthony 
 Sorel's shoulder. 
 
 " 'Tis Queen Maeve herself," he whispered 
 "an' she drawin' the souls of men would be leaving 
 the sides of their fires to be followin' her." 
 
 Then, through the window, the figure of a woman 
 cut a black outline against the whiteness of the 
 moon. For a moment she stopped and looked within. 
 Both saw her face thrust close against the pane. 
 Her eyes distinguished them in that faint darkness. 
 They stood as black as her against the fire. 
 
 " 'Tis Mary Coyne," whispered Malachi. " 'Tis 
 Mary Coyne an' she coming back from the faeries 
 to tread her feet once more on the sides of the 
 hills." 
 
 " 'Tis not Mary Coyne," Anthony Sorel replied 
 below his breath. For in that instant's sight, he had 
 seen the look of Anna Quartermaine in the hooded 
 face. Such a peasant girl as Mary Coyne doubtless 
 she was; but there was that look of Anna Quarter- 
 
 241
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 maine's eyes, of Anna Quartermaine's lips as he had 
 seen and felt them in his dream. 
 
 In another moment she had gone and then he 
 knew the faerie he deserved had come to him. This 
 was the symbol of his besetting emotion and deep 
 as it struck the fear into his heart, he yet found his 
 feet being drawn from him to the door. 
 
 "Where are ye going, Anthony Sorel?" cried 
 Malachi in a trembling voice. 
 
 "Out on the hill," he replied and there was all the 
 sound of dreams in his voice "out on the hill there 
 to bring her back." 
 
 As swift as his shivering limbs would let him 
 move, Malachi ran to lay hands upon him then. 
 
 "For the love of God," he begged, "leave her 
 be ! Isn't there desthruction in the singing of her 
 voice, and wouldn't the eyes of her be takin' ye out 
 of the world? For the love of the Almighty God 
 leave her be!" 
 
 But his words fell like drops of water that splash 
 upon the stones. Anthony Sorel had flung open the 
 door and, as the moonlight rushed in, he had slipped 
 out into the night.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE moonlight lay wide and white across the 
 hills. It cast strange shadows behind the 
 stunted thorn trees, the prevailing wind had 
 swept out like a woman's hair. In the distance, 
 down the twisting path that wound through the 
 clumps of heather, Anthony Sorel could see the fig- 
 ure of the peasant woman as she passed away to 
 the moors. 
 
 Her head was covered with a shawl, as they wear 
 it everywhere in the South; her skirt was short; her 
 feet were bare. Now and again she stumbled as she 
 walked, but still she was singing and the notes of 
 her voice rose up into the height of the hills through 
 the clear silver of the air as the song of a lark wings 
 upwards into the heavens. 
 
 He stood outside the door of Malachi's cabin, 
 watching her, listening to her song, struggling yet 
 within himself to the obedience of Malachi's im- 
 portuning. But back, again and again, came the 
 sight of her face, her lips, her eyes, as when she 
 had peered through the window. If this was indeed 
 a faerie, the symbol of his overwhelming emotion, 
 was it strength, was it not fear in the heart of him 
 holding him back from the deliberate encounter? 
 
 The very emotion she had stirred in him, inter- 
 preted his hesitation thus. But once he had so con- 
 
 243
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 sidered it, he left no time to waiting. With quick 
 strides he was after her down the mountain path. 
 There was her dark green shawl, the sway of her 
 short skirt but half-a-mile before him. When there 
 was but scarce that distance left between them, she 
 stopped and turned. He could see her face in the 
 moonlight, the glint of her white feet against the 
 dark ground. 
 
 She was waiting for him to come up with her and 
 now, as he drew nearer, fear shortened the length 
 of his stride. All the eagerness of pursuit that had 
 stirred the blood in his veins was now gone from 
 him. There was a chill at his heart and over and 
 over again through his mind ran the prophetic words 
 of Mrs. Coyne, " 'Tis not that sort of wisdom will 
 be sthandin' to ye and ye taken by the faeries where 
 the roads are crossed." 
 
 Where the roads were crossed ! And there stood 
 that dark figure with its pale face and still white 
 hands there it stood at the edge of the cross roads 
 that lead down into the valley and stretch across the 
 whole length of the mountains' feet. 
 
 As he came within some twenty yards or so of 
 her, he stopped altogether as though consciously 
 upon the edge of that enchanted faerie circle encom- 
 passing her about. There he stood and through 
 the moonlight stared at her, his lips set closely, his 
 eyes kindled with the unknown fear that was in 
 him. 
 
 For some moments in silence they stood thus, the 
 moonlight and the mountains all about them and 
 
 244
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 those white, silvered ribbands of the roads unrolling 
 away at either side till they became mere threads 
 the distance wound upon a vanishing reel. 
 
 With a conscious effort at last, he forced the 
 sound of his voice into the dry hollow of his throat. 
 He felt the words awkward and stumbling on his 
 tongue and the sound of them in that still air of 
 the night was like the voice of one who speaks out 
 of dreams far off in sleep. 
 
 "Who are you?" he asked. 
 
 " 'Tis aiqual to God who I'd be," said she, "and 
 ye followin' me in the lonesomeness of these hills 
 are steeped and drowned in silence, the way I could 
 hear ye steppin' over the heather like thunder comin' 
 on me." 
 
 Her voice was as still and gentle as the winds that 
 come in May. It might have been Anna Quarter- 
 maine herself speaking to him, for even to her voice, 
 though in the deep richness of that inland brogue, 
 there was the same fatal resemblance he had seen 
 as she looked through the window-pane into Mala- 
 chi's little room. 
 
 "What are you doing out here on the mountains, 
 now at this hour of the night?" 
 
 He put his questions in all the uncertain note of 
 fear. She stood there by a gap in the loose stone 
 wall that edged the road and there was laughter in 
 her eyes because of his fear as she looked at him. 
 
 "Come close to me now," said she, "if ye'd need 
 to be knowin' so much about me. Shure what's 
 the fear on ye? Come close to me now and I only 
 
 245
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 a woman is sthandin' here in this lone corner of 
 the hills." 
 
 "I'll not come closer," he replied. "Don't I know 
 you've come out of the lake up there in Knockshuna- 
 hallion? Didn't I see your eyes and your face com- 
 ing up out of the water to me in my dreams these 
 two nights gone and didn't you draw me with your 
 body into the water till all the blackness of it was 
 closed over us and I in your arms sinking down into 
 the depths till the darkness was thunder in my 
 ears?" 
 
 "Did I do that?" said she, peering with her eyes 
 into his face that was turned from the moon and 
 black in the darkness of its own shadow. 
 
 "You did," he replied, "but I've had the warn- 
 ing of you that comes now shouting in my ears." 
 
 "Ye've had warnin' of me? There's not one in 
 these mountains would be knowin' the sight of me 
 this night." 
 
 " 'Twas not in knowledge of you," he replied, 
 "but the old woman in Gorteeshall who told the 
 faeries would take me and I losing all the wisdom 
 I'd got out of the silence of these hills and the 
 hunger of my own heart for the truth. But she told 
 wrong, for there's strength in me yet can destroy the 
 power of such as you." 
 
 "What would be the power of a poor girrl the 
 likes of me would have over a young fella the likes 
 of ye is sthrong and lithesome wid the power of 
 men?" 
 
 " 'Tis no power of men," said he, "would be 
 246
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 holding to me now. Isn't it the very power in a 
 man is weakness in him that time when the passion 
 in him comes dropping weak like water in his veins? 
 'Tis not because I'm strong and lithesome shall I 
 be able to shut my ears and hear no voice of a woman 
 calling to me across the hollows of these hills, but 
 because there is the truth in me and while there's 
 that, I'll have no fear of all the faeries in the 
 world." 
 
 She looked at him as he turned with his gaze 
 across the sweep of the mountains and the moonlight 
 fell on him. She saw the thin light of his lips and 
 the glittering light of his eyes and she threw back 
 her head, laughing softly for the fear that was in 
 him. 
 
 "Isn't the fear white with ye now?" said she and 
 there was the laughter come into her voice to taunt 
 him. "Come here to me now if there's no fright 
 on ye and tell me the voice of the woman is calling 
 to ye now when the night comes down over the starv- 
 ing land. Come here to me now and tell me 
 that." 
 
 "I'll not stir my feet from where I am," said he, 
 "for you know well the voice of the woman it is. 
 Isn't the light of her eyes in your eyes there and 
 aren't her lips the red of your lips and haven't you 
 stolen the beauty that's in her face to come here 
 tempting me into the mountains?" 
 
 In a sudden change his voice took power and 
 command as he came to the mastery of his fear. 
 
 "Take the shawl off your head," he demanded, 
 247
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "and let me see is your hair the color and softness 
 of hers." 
 
 "How did ye know was her hair so soft?" she 
 asked quickly, "an' ye keeping yeer hands from the 
 touch of her and starvin' yeer eyes in the windy 
 gaps of these hills?" 
 
 "Would it need the touch of my hands?" said he. 
 "Isn't it the most fatal beauty of a woman a man 
 will find in the secret of his heart where the evil 
 that's in him comes singing the songs of passion in 
 his ears? Take off the shawl from your head and 
 let me see all the beauty you've stolen to bring here 
 crying out to me this night." 
 
 "Come yeerself to me now," she answered. "Let 
 yeer own fingers unknot it, if ye have the mind to 
 see." 
 
 One step he took towards her, no more. She 
 stood leaning against the loose stone wall, her head 
 thrown back, inviting him to unloose the shawl about 
 her head. But the fear had come back upon him 
 now. He trembled as he stood and the will in him 
 to resist shook him in its conflict with the desire if 
 only to touch her with his hands. 
 
 "Would ye have fear of a girrl is lost and wan- 
 derin' on the mountain roads? Yirra, glory be to 
 God, wouldn't it be safe I'd be and no harm comin' 
 to me at the fall of night if I could walk these ways 
 and bring such fear to the men would be meetin' 
 me?" 
 
 He looked above him up the twisting path to 
 where the faint light in Malachi's cottage window 
 
 248
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 pricked its point of orange in the silvered night. 
 There he wished he was then and the longing was 
 near to him that he had listened to Malachi's words. 
 For now the desire was strong in him to bend her 
 in the strength of his arms, when all that he had 
 striven for in those years of his solitude would be 
 gone from him as water goes from a leaking pot, 
 and the ideal he had raised of Anna Quartermaine 
 in his mind would be further from him than ever. 
 
 It was the strength of his will he cried for then 
 and the more his eyes fed upon the sight of her, the 
 more faint it grew within him. For in this it was 
 the temptation lay, that she had all the beauty of 
 Anna Quartermaine, yet there in that peasant's 
 dress, with short-hung skirt and pale bare feet, gave 
 him no moment of that quiet mind he had so firmly 
 set his ideal upon. 
 
 Here indeed was the symbol of his besetting emo- 
 tion; for now he knew how those two years of soli- 
 tude had not completed the transfiguration of his 
 soul. There still was the nature in him of the self- 
 conscious man, a slave to the passions the world 
 had born in him. 
 
 With her mind, or with all that which he believed 
 of it, Anna Quartermaine had carried him still higher 
 in the ambition of his soul. But now he had fallen 
 to this, this sudden and most bitter knowledge of 
 himself. He was not fit to love her yet. His dream 
 indeed had shaken the deeper confidence in himself. 
 But now as he stood there on the side of the hill, 
 watching her eyes, her lips, her laughter as she 
 
 249
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 laughed, he knew too well how long the way 
 must be before he should reach the mastery of him- 
 self. 
 
 With a giant effort of his will in that moment, 
 he summoned strength to him and held out his hand 
 before him as though to keep distance between them. 
 So he steeled the sight of his eyes, willing himself 
 to see only with the clearer vision of his soul. 
 
 "If it were fear of you," he said slowly at last, 
 and measured his words to keep the needful bal- 
 ance of his mind, "if it were fear of you, should I 
 be standing as I am with only the night between 
 me and the thing I feared?" 
 
 "What fear is on ye then?" she asked in her 
 gentlest voice. "Shure wouldn't I be putting me 
 arms about ye and holding ye like a babe has the 
 hand of Death on its little throat?" 
 
 " Tis fear of myself is on me," said he, "the 
 fear of a man when he comes to the evil that's in 
 him and sees vanishing the power of his soul like a 
 ship put out to sea." Then of a sudden without 
 warning, he lifted up his voice and cried out in the 
 pain of conflict in his mind. "Get back into the 
 night," he cried aloud. "Take your eyes away from 
 me and your lips that smile and the songs that you 
 sing. It's not in one hour I'll go back to the man 
 that I was." 
 
 "Is it drive me away?" she whispered, "and I a 
 woman alone in the night with all the length of the 
 roads and the wild hills in the face of me?" 
 
 "It is driving you away," he replied, "and with 
 250
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 the power of God, I shall never set these eyes on 
 you again." 
 
 She turned as though pride had come to her and, 
 stepping through the gap of the loose stone wall, 
 she climbed down into the road. Then she looked 
 up at him once more, standing there black above her. 
 
 " 'Tis more than ever a man has wished of me 
 before," she said, "and 'twill be a mighty thing the 
 power of God will be if yeer eyes never set glance 
 on me again. Keep your watch over the hills and 
 through the slow hours of the night, for the power 
 of God is a mighty thing, Anthony Sorel, but it sets 
 no stay on the life a man must take or leave for 
 himself." 
 
 She knew his name! He heard the sound of it 
 strange as it left her lips and came across the still 
 air of the night to his ears. 
 
 "Who gave you the name I have?" he cried out 
 to her, but only her laughter came back in answer 
 to his cry, her laughter when it turned into the song 
 in her voice once more as she swung her way down 
 the hill road with her bare feet glistening beneath 
 her skirt and her head thrown back in a young joy 
 of the light of the moon. 
 
 A belt of oak trees flung shadows over the road 
 where it turned down to the breadth of the moors 
 and into these shadows as into a house he watched 
 her figure go and, as a door that shuts out the night, 
 they closed about her. 
 
 He still stood with his eyes straining to follow her 
 as she went, but saw her no more again that night* 
 
 17
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 ANTHONY SOREL did not return to Mal- 
 achi's cottage that night, but went back to 
 his own cabin in the silence and the solitude 
 of Knockshunahallion where all the hours until 
 morning came he sat contemplating the thing he 
 had seen and the meaning it was to him. 
 
 Now it seemed as if the spirits of faerie were 
 all about him. An endless music was in his ears 
 which now was low and soft as it might be the wind 
 when it plays about the hollows and the crevices 
 and then was loud and deafening to be heard like 
 the noise of thunder rolling across the sky. He sat 
 at his window and saw strange lights across the hills 
 and there came to the sense of his nostrils soft per- 
 fumes like memories he strove with all the conscious- 
 ness of his mind to recall but could never bring back 
 into the certain presence of his thoughts. 
 
 And all this while till the morning came, he re- 
 mained motionless at the little square of his window, 
 his eyes turned across the moors below towards 
 Ballysaggartmore and sometimes they were closed 
 and sometimes they were open as with one who drifts 
 between waking and sleep yet is never in the clear 
 region of his consciousness. 
 
 At times he would speak beneath his breath and 
 again at times cry out with a loud voice as if in 
 
 252
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 pain; and once he cried the name of Anna Quarter- 
 maine, at which he trembled in himself as the echoes 
 of it beat from wall to wall of his little cabin like 
 a caged thing struggling to be free. 
 
 So the night passed and the next day he walked 
 about in the upper heights of the mountains, cease- 
 lessly moving from one still place to another until 
 all the energy in his body was a dead thing to him 
 and he returned at evening exhausted to his cabin 
 door. 
 
 That night he slept, but the mist of dreams was 
 about his eyes and in the ceaseless industry of his 
 brain. But now he knew the woman it was, who 
 came beckoning to him out of the night of his 
 dreams. In his sleep, though there was no power in 
 him to resist her, he knew that in the morning with 
 his walking, all the power that he had would re- 
 turn. 
 
 The next day, this time when it was scarce sun- 
 rise, he set out upon his wanderings once more. 
 Sleep had brought him no rest but with the daylight 
 had come energy and the still burning vigor in his 
 soul. Taking bread and milk from a cottage here, 
 a cabin there, he went on his way without thought of 
 direction until, as the sun had begun its steady pas- 
 sage down the sky, he found his feet turning on the 
 road to Ballysaggartmore. 
 
 At that realization, all movement in him was 
 brought to sudden arrest; for in that moment had 
 come back to his mind one of those perfumes that 
 had touched his senses like memories which now he 
 
 253
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 could recall. It was the scent of the violets in Anna 
 Quartermaine's garden, of the violets and all the 
 flowers which that morning had flung their odor 
 into the warm air. 
 
 He stood trembling at the thought that his senses 
 and all the conscious instincts of his body had been 
 so much alive, even then. Did it mean that never 
 had he come within sight of the ambition of his 
 soul? Did it mean that all this mastery of his emo- 
 tions had been a foolish, empty dream; that all a 
 thousand years of solitude would never destroy the 
 conscious man in him; that he was the same that 
 day as he had ever been, as every man had been 
 from the beginning and still would be? 
 
 With a cry of pain which no restraint in him 
 could silence or subdue, he swiftly turned upon his 
 heel and set his back towards the place where his 
 ideal lay, fearing the self in him that could destroy 
 the thing he cherished most 
 
 Now he was coming to Ballyduff, where the road 
 turns by a forge and bends up to a mere cart track 
 across the wild acreage of moors. This way he went 
 nor stopped again until he stood knocking on the 
 door of Malachi's cabin on Crow Hill. 
 
 In the act of making his evening tea, the old man 
 heard the falling sound and set down his kettle in 
 the embers. A light of gladness was in his eyes as 
 he went to the door, for he knew well whose knock- 
 ing it must be. 
 
 "God be wid this day," said he as he opened the 
 door and beheld Anthony Sorel standing there and 
 
 254
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 then he saw the light that shone on his face from 
 the damp sweat that was on him. 
 
 "In the name of God," said he, closing the door 
 "In the name of God what's on ye to be sweating 
 like a young stallion is fretting the earth for his 
 mare? What's on ye, in the name of God? Haven't 
 I seen ye beyond over and up in the heights of the 
 hills and ye traveling east and west like a man is 
 pursued by all the devils of the dark places?" 
 
 He took him by the shoulders and sat him down 
 in his own chair and stood over him like a shepherd 
 that stands over the sheep he has found destroyed 
 and exhausted in the black shadows of the glen. 
 
 "What's after ye, Anthony Sorel?" he asked pres- 
 ently, for in the hands that covered the sweating 
 brows and the knees that shook as he leant upon 
 them, the old man could see that agony of spirit by 
 which he was consumed. "What's after ye?" he 
 repeated. 
 
 " 'Tis myself is after me," Anthony Sorel replied. 
 " 'Tis by myself I am pursued. All these days 
 since that witch brought the beauty of the woman 
 in the valley up to me here in the mountains, have 
 I been set upon by the man that is in me and cannot 
 bring him down. From sunrise to the fall of the 
 night I have walked the untrodden tracks of the 
 mountains to kill the thoughts that are in me with 
 fatigue. But in sleep I am not alone." He wrung 
 his hands before him as many a man indeed has 
 done. "What has come to me?" he cried out. 
 "Didn't I say good-bye to her because I knew I could 
 
 255
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 love her with the soul that was in me! And now 
 is this curse of the body I have, to stand between 
 me and the thing I love?" 
 
 He buried his face in his hands again and there 
 came once more the rush of the music to his ears 
 and in the eyes his fingers pressed to blindness, great 
 lights were flashing in a sea of burning red. 
 
 Malachi spat the juice of the tobacco from his 
 mouth. 
 
 "Why didn't ye take the words av an old man," 
 said he, "was after telling ye 'tis not in the ways of 
 a woman to be parting her life from the man her 
 heart is coming to? May the Lord Almighty have 
 mercy on ye for the stricken man that ye are. 
 Haven't ye chosen a road is sore to the feet of a 
 man, must be walking in the light of the day and 
 the drift of the night and won't the soul be 
 desthroyed in ye to leave it? Is it the way ye're 
 going maybe to leave the quiet places of these hills 
 and the wisdom that is come to ye? Is that the way 
 wid ye, Anthony Sorel? Are the soft breasts of her 
 softer than the moss to yeer head when ye'd be 
 sleepin' alone on the hills at night, with the great 
 darkness of the starry skies like the weight of dew, 
 so gentle it would be on the lids of yeer eyes? Are 
 the lips of her sweeter than the lips of a sthone, 
 would be dropping sweet water from a mountain 
 stream? Are the eyes of her brighter than the stars 
 of God are lighting like candles about his golden 
 chair?" 
 
 The note of his voice had fallen to a tone of in- 
 256
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 finite sorrow as he spoke. In all the strange jour- 
 neys he had made, he had seen the souls of men so 
 beaten by the storm, so driven before the winds of 
 passion as Anthony Sorel was driven then. And 
 he knew how man is a man and God is a spirit, yet 
 never had he known the spirit in a man so strong 
 as he had seen it in Anthony Sorel. But now he 
 could tell the end as surely as he had told it in 
 others. 
 
 "Is it caught she has ye?" he went on in the same 
 mournful note of his voice. "Is it caught she has 
 ye in the long delay of her arms? Speak the truth 
 to me now the way ye'd be speaking to the Lord 
 God has ears from the far corners of His lonesome 
 Heaven. Is this the last these old eyes will be seeing 
 of ye on the hungry slopes of these hills?" 
 
 Anthony Sorel came to his feet that still were 
 weak beneath him as he stood, and his head was 
 thrown back and the fire of God was akindle once 
 more in his eyes. 
 
 " 'Tis the last ye'll see of me, Malachi," he said, 
 "but 'tis not to be drowned in her kisses I'm gone. 
 There are further parts of the earth than this, where 
 the winds of God would never find the ears of a 
 man to be fighting his soul. I'll go out far into the 
 barren West where never a goat could find its food. 
 'Tis then when the nights drop still with the summer 
 moon, you'll hear the songs I'd be singing as I come 
 past the man that is in me to the very feet of God 
 Himself. I'll go far from here and in two days 
 these mountains will lose sight of me and 'tis not a 
 
 257
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 woman nor the man that is in me shall destroy the 
 ideal she's set up in my mind." 
 
 He took Malachi's shoulders in his trembling 
 hands and, as he looked in his eyes, there was a drop 
 of sweat that rolled off his shining forehead and 
 split itself upon the floor. And Malachi told him 
 of a charm that would keep the evil faeries off of 
 him and then he went out of the house and came to 
 his own cabin by Knockshunahallion.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 ALL the next day, Anthony Sorel made prepara- 
 tion for his going, but there were not many 
 things that he would take with him, having 
 no worldly goods but the crucifix that he had nailed 
 to the wall, the chairs, the table, the candlesticks of 
 brass and the bed that old Heggarty had died in. 
 
 It was not the preparation of collecting his prop- 
 erty that he made, for all these things he would 
 leave, except the crucifix and that he would carry 
 under the cover of his coat when he went walking 
 the world again to find another resting-place. It 
 was the severance of his mind from the place that 
 had grown upon him which was his occupation all 
 the length of that day. 
 
 In the early morning, while the sun was yet hid- 
 den by the hills like a furnace rising out of the deep 
 hollows into flame, he rose from his bed and went 
 up to the lake where the woman with the beauty of 
 Anna Quartermaine had first appeared to him in all 
 the dreams that were coming to his sleep. This he 
 did to test the strength he had in his going, for there 
 yet were voices calling to him to be staying where he 
 was; crying out that he was born a man and the 
 joys and the pleasures of a man were his by the right 
 of the mother who had borne him. 
 
 It was when he saw the black water and the bub- 
 259
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 m> 
 
 bles rising white to the surface, that in his dreams 
 had been her eyes, he knew how much strength 
 had gone out of him, for his breath came quickly 
 and he felt the warmth of her arms she had put about 
 him and there came again, rushing to his ears, the 
 noise ef the music as the darkness of the water had 
 closed over them. 
 
 By the side of the lake then he sat down and 
 what had been prayers in any other man were 
 thoughts and wonderings in him. And he pressed 
 his eyes to blindness as he had done in Malachi's 
 cabin, but could not shut out the sound of the voices 
 that called to him or the warm lights that brought 
 heat to the blood in his veins. 
 
 He was knowing then how near he had come to 
 the destruction of all that was highest in his soul 
 and he rose from the stone on which he had been 
 sitting and came down the mountain to his cabin 
 again, saying all the time as he walked: "To- 
 morrow must see me gone to-morrow must see me 
 gone." 
 
 But when it came towards evening and the light 
 was paling and the sky had faded to primrose, he 
 looked at his bed and feared the last night that he 
 must sleep upon it for the dreams that might come 
 to him and the warm beauty of the woman they might 
 bring to his side. 
 
 It was the last strength he needed to keep him to 
 the determination his mind was set upon, yet it was 
 the last strength he knew was failing in him then. 
 Another night of his dreams and in the morning 
 
 260
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 he knew that courage might well have gone from 
 him. 
 
 At the square of his little window he sat, looking 
 down the mountain slope and across the moorlands 
 to the cluster of trees that hid the faint roofs of the 
 houses in Ballysaggartmore. And as he looked, the 
 name of the woman whose beauty had brought him 
 both pain and destruction came hesitating to his lips, 
 for fear of the longing it might bring to him. 
 
 But as he said it, there seemed to return to him 
 that strength when he had said good-bye to her in 
 her happy garden. He gave it leave to pass his 
 lips again and then he knew where he could find the 
 strength to face that night alone. 
 
 One moment's sight of her the sight, no more 
 would restore once again the power of his ideal, 
 would equip him with courage to bear the burden 
 of that last and lonely night. 
 
 He rose, quick to his feet, strong in the warmth 
 of his new conviction. She had inspired him to the 
 knowledge of the truth he had learnt in those years 
 of his solitude. Then it was she again who should 
 arm him against the fears and the terrors that beset 
 him now. It was only he who had failed when he 
 had returned from their last parting, only the man 
 in him that had cried out after the beauty of her 
 he had set aside. So near had his failure been, 
 that the faeries had heard the voice of his weakness 
 and nearly had the prophetic words of Mrs. Coyne 
 that night come true. 
 
 But now, seeing her once again, would not she who 
 261
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 had brought him so close to the knowledge of truth, 
 bring him strength until he could put the miles of 
 the mountains, the rivers and the winding roads 
 between them? 
 
 He strode out fast from his cabin door and his 
 feet were swift and sure down the side of the hills 
 to the moor. 
 
 The evening light of primrose was turning to 
 sullen mauve. Across the mountains a summer 
 storm was rolling up the heavy banks of clouds. 
 He had no covering to his head and took no heed 
 of the sudden murmurs of the wind that rose a warn- 
 ing in his ears. 
 
 All that his mind was holding now was the thought 
 of the virtue this sight of her once more would bring 
 him. From the window in his cabin, Malachi saw 
 him go and beat his hands upon his head lest evil 
 might befall him. 
 
 "May the Holy Mother of God and all the saints 
 be guarding the feet of him now," he muttered, 
 "and may the Lord God turn his back to desthruc- 
 tion through the long hours of the night." 
 
 So, with Malachi's blessing that never reached 
 his ears, he went seeking the blessing of her he had 
 placed in the holy place of his soul where men en- 
 shrine the mother they love and those few women 
 of the world who are beyond reproach. 
 
 The clouds were up and about the sky when he 
 came by the mountain footpath into Ballysaggart- 
 more. They wrapped the trees in darkness and 
 all beneath them was a heavy gloom. No rain was 
 
 262
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 falling, but out of the far east came sudden bursts 
 of light that heralded up the rising storm. 
 
 It was never his intention that night to speak to 
 Anna Quartermaine, wherefore, there being none 
 about upon the Lismore road, he climbed a low wall 
 and dropped into the garden where he had walked 
 with her before. 
 
 A light was burning in the room he knew she 
 sat in and, creeping down the garden path, he came 
 to the very window where it was. 
 
 The scent of the flowers, now roses and the lupin 
 tree, was like an incense heavy in the air. He made 
 his way through it as though faintness must come 
 to him before he reached the object that he sought. 
 
 A chink in the blind gave him sight within and 
 there she sat, with hands folded in her lap, her eyes 
 half closed, just watching the quiet progress of her 
 thoughts as comes with idle meditation. 
 
 Never had he seen her dressed as then, in a soft 
 loose gown with shortened sleeves and hanging silken 
 belt that gently bound her waist around and fell 
 down to her feet. 
 
 "How have I dared to love her less!" he whis- 
 pered in his breath and the very softness of the 
 line of her bare arm, the shoulders turned towards 
 him and even the faint color of her skin brought 
 him in wonder and amazement to the sense of sacred 
 things, as when a man looks upon a picture of the 
 Mother of God feeding the Infant Christ at her 
 naked breast. 
 
 So he had meant to think of her; so he thought 
 263 

 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of her still and more than ever when he saw her 
 sitting there. She was the embodiment of all the 
 highest that his soul could reach to, just as that 
 faerie in the mountains was the symbol of the over- 
 whelming emotions whereby he was a man. 
 
 Then, as he watched her, came all the strength he 
 needed to his soul and he would have had courage 
 to speak with her then, for the fear of himself had 
 gone out of him; but because of the grandness of 
 the room where she sat and the fine clothes that 
 were on her and the string of pearls that was about 
 her bare neck, he did not dare, but stood there in 
 silence with watching eyes looking through the chink 
 in the blind. 
 
 It was presently there came a dog barking at him 
 from beyond the house and it stood in the garden 
 some yards from where he was and snarled at him, 
 but he had no fear of it and never took his eyes 
 away from the chink in the blind. 
 
 At the sound of the dog barking, she looked up 
 and, as it snarled outside in the darkness, she rose to 
 her feet and crossed the room to the window where 
 he was standing. 
 
 And it was as if some spell were cast on him 
 where he stood, for, though he had the wish to hide 
 himself from her then, he could not move. So 
 when she pulled back the blind to look out into the 
 darkness, she saw him standing there and he heard 
 the cry that came out of her lips and thought it was 
 fear at the sudden sight of him. 
 
 They were long windows that opened to the 
 264
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 ground and when some moments had gone by, she 
 unfastened the catch and held the window wide. 
 
 "Anthony Sorel," she said and the voice with 
 which she spoke was almost below the sound of her 
 breath. But he heard her say his name and knew 
 then how the faerie in the mountains that night 
 had stolen from her even the beauty of her voice, 
 for the sound of it was like a sword thrust into his 
 heart, so that he could only stand there in silence, 
 with no word that he could say and trembling in 
 himself for the pain that it brought him.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 SHE said no more than his name and stood upon 
 one side so that he must see it was her wish 
 for him to come within. 
 
 It was as one moving in a dream he obeyed and 
 when he was in the room, she closed the window 
 behind him, then turned, standing there until her 
 eyes had made sure of what she saw. 
 
 "Why have you come like this?" she asked at last 
 and came to his side, and waited there until he should 
 answer her. But as yet, he could not speak. His 
 tongue was dead. He could not feel it in his mouth. 
 
 She waited, watching the fear and the wonder in 
 his eyes, and when still he did not speak, she laid a 
 hand on his arm, asking again. 
 
 He found his voice, but it was not the voice he 
 knew of as his own, for it seemed to be far away 
 in him and the sound of it came to his ears as an 
 echo comes that beats back with its hollow note 
 across the hills. 
 
 "I came for the last sight of you," he said simply, 
 "before I go out of the mountains up there and 
 set out further away into the West." 
 
 She took her hand away from him and stood 
 alone. 
 
 "You're leaving your cabin in Knockshunahal- 
 lion?" she asked. 
 
 266
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He bent his head. 
 
 "When?" 
 
 "To-morrow as soon as the sun is up." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 With all the longing that was in him to find the 
 full measure of her understanding, he yet felt it 
 impossible to tell her why. Perhaps a consciousness 
 in the luxury of those surroundings made him feel 
 the strangeness of his own life, the different being 
 he was to her, the separate planes in which they 
 moved and the sudden fear, when he found her thus 
 so far from the touch of the Nature with which he 
 lived, that the ideal he had made of her might well 
 not be the woman that she was. 
 
 "Can't you tell me why?" she asked. 
 
 He looked long at her then, hardly believing 
 her the same woman he had seen those days upon 
 the open stretches of his mountain land, yet clinging 
 desperately in his heart to the one ideal that he had 
 found in her. For now it was her beauty most of 
 all he saw, the soft transparency of her skin, the 
 color of her lips, the deep and peaceful lights that 
 looked out from her eyes; her hair, its dark, warm 
 color too; even the comb of some green jade that 
 nestled there like a snake in hiding in the earth; 
 even that he saw as well. 
 
 He found no blame in her for this, but knew it 
 was the shadow of the spell the faeries had cast deep 
 upon his soul. So he closed his eyes as she stood 
 before him and tried to think alone upon the greater 
 beauty she had brought him first. 
 18 267
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Do you remember the words of Mrs. Coyne?" 
 he asked her presently "that night when I brought 
 you down the mountains to Gorteeshall?" 
 
 "I remember," she replied. 
 
 But though she said she remembered them, he 
 repeated them aloud to her then. 
 
 " 'Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin' 
 to ye and ye taken by the faeries yeerself where the 
 roads are crossed and the night comes batterin' wid 
 the wind across the mountains at yeer little door." 
 
 "I remember them every word," she said again. 
 
 He opened his eyes now and he looked at her. 
 
 "They were true words," said he. "Didn't I say 
 as we listened, that she spoke with authority?" 
 
 Now again she came close to his side and then he 
 knew that the perfumes that had come to his senses 
 were not only the scents of the flowers in her garden, 
 but the scent of the perfume she wore upon her 
 body; that without his knowing it, it had entered 
 into the consciousness of his mind and lain there 
 until such time as when the weakness of his spirit 
 was upon him. 
 
 She saw the trembling that passed through him 
 as she touched his arm and instinctively her fingers 
 tightened in their hold. 
 
 "How have the words come true?" she asked. 
 
 Then he told her how the faeries had come to 
 him and of the woman whose beauty was the beauty 
 she had stolen from Anna Quartermaine to bring it 
 there tempting him into the mountains. 
 
 "Why tempting you ?" she asked. 
 268
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He took her hand from his arm, needing that for- 
 titude to bear the touch of her. She turned with 
 her eyes always watching him as he went to the win- 
 dow and looked out. What he thought of then, 
 she might perhaps have known, but it was the spoken 
 word she wanted and waited for it from his lips. 
 
 And when it seemed he would not utter the spoken 
 word, she would not let him free of it, but asked 
 again. 
 
 "Why tempting you?" said she. 
 
 "Because I am just a man after all," he answered. 
 "These years of loneliness have brought me 
 knowledge of the truth but not the power to grasp 
 it. Why do you ask me to explain? The explana- 
 tion I should give to you might be understood but 
 not by the woman you are to me." 
 
 "What am I to you?" she murmured. 
 
 He drew his breath deep for the want of his 
 words. 
 
 "The thing only a woman can be," said he, 
 "to a man only when he loves. It's so easy a thing 
 to desire and so hard a thing to love, and isn't 
 there all the distance between them, that stretches 
 from the highest heaven to the furthest earth?" 
 
 She told him she saw no difference and he was 
 marveling at that then, thinking that in the ideal he 
 had made of her, he knew her better than she knew 
 herself. 
 
 "Aren't the two things one," said she, "woven 
 so close and interwoven that it would go hard for 
 you to know which was which?" 
 
 269
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He sat down by the side of her where she was 
 sitting and made for her stories that he knew or had 
 learnt from the people in their cottages and they 
 all said the same thing that the heart of a man is 
 as fuel in the needs of his body and that desire will 
 burn out love as peat is burnt on the floor of the 
 open grate. 
 
 And when he had made an end of his stories, to 
 which she had listened in all silence, she looked at 
 him and held his eyes with her eyes so that she 
 might yet know his answer should he not reply. 
 
 And this was what she asked him. 
 
 "Do you love me?" she said. 
 
 He gave some moments to silence before he an- 
 swered, but did not hesitate in the steady glance of 
 his eyes. 
 
 "Yes " he said presently and felt the power and 
 virtue of his manhood that he could say it, in the 
 stillness of his heart, without trembling, as he had 
 been trembling those days, or even thinking of the 
 beauty that was in her face as he had thought of it 
 when he saw it in the face of the faerie woman on 
 the hill. 
 
 "And you are going away?" 
 
 "Right away," said he, "out into'the West where 
 the sounds of the sea are the silences that come 
 into a man's mind." 
 
 "Aren't there silences in the mountains surely?" 
 she asked him. 
 
 And he shook his head. 
 
 "These last still nights, when never a breath has 
 270
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 been whispering in the thorn trees and you could 
 hear the water trickling through the moss between 
 the stones, there has been the babel of voices in my 
 ears, so that the silent hills were ringing with the 
 noise of them. Silence, solitude like love itself 
 all these things are in the wind. To-night I shall 
 go back into the mountains, having seen you this last 
 time, and through all this storm that will howl about 
 my cabin door, there will be such silence in my soul 
 as I have not heard for many days. Then the voices 
 will be still, for it is you can kill the self in me and 
 all the desires that come in a torment in my sleep." 
 
 And now she asked him was it love of her it 
 could be, if it took him away from her and put 
 the miles of the roads and the rivers between them. 
 
 "Can you love me and leave me too?" she asked. 
 
 He reached out for the words that he had, to 
 explain the things that he meant. 
 
 "It's not you I'm leaving," he cried out to her, 
 "but myself. One more night than this in those 
 mountains and because of the weakness and desire 
 that is in me, the words of Mrs. Coyne would be 
 true. The faeriefs would take me and never again 
 should I be the man I have been these two years 
 gone and all the hope of the great things that I had 
 would be lost. Didn't I show you Mary Coyne 
 whose own beauty was the emotion that brought her 
 to the end? Wasn't it the faeries that came with 
 the lights that she saw and the music that she heard 
 and didn't they bring the last destruction to her 
 soul? And can't you see that the Fate of the faeries 
 
 271
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Is upon me as well? By prayer and fasting, by 
 walking this way on the roads and that way on the 
 roads, I have tired the body in me, so that only in 
 dreams has the woman with your beauty that she 
 stole come near to me again. And now to-morrow 
 I shall be gone and all the emotion that over- 
 whelmed me will be put away and I sitting by the 
 rocks that look over the silence of the tempest of 
 the sea." 
 
 "What a wonderful madness it all is," said she, 
 as though with a light from the far illumination of 
 his mind, for she had for the instant caught sight 
 of the ideal for which he strove. 
 
 "And what a wonderful love it will be," he an- 
 swered, "when I can love you as I talk to you now 
 and my heart will no longer be the fuel in the fur- 
 nace of my body." 
 
 She turned away and what moved her she could 
 not think, but she went to the window and stood 
 there looking out into the rushing wind and the 
 lightning that flashed out where no rain seemed 
 promised to assuage the storm. 
 
 At last she turned again. 
 
 "What does this other woman and her beauty 
 mean to you?" she asked. 
 
 "Haven't I told you," he replied, "what all 
 faeries mean that symbol of the emotions by which 
 we are overwhelmed. She is the symbol of my lower 
 self, that cannot love but only knows desire." 
 
 "And with the beauty that you find in me?" said 
 she. 
 
 272
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He bent his head. 
 
 "Then is not that the way you love me too?" 
 
 To which he cried out, "No" and "No" 
 and "No" again. 
 
 "That is the way I love myself," he said. 
 "There's not one word that you could utter or which, 
 as I am, could make me long for you." 
 
 She dropped her hands in a gesture of despair. 
 
 "I I cannot understand," said she. "It sounds 
 very wonderful, that's all that I can say. I've never 
 thought of love like this in all my life and cannot 
 understand it even now the thought has come to me. 
 Why should this faerie woman with the beauty I 
 have, contain such power in her that as I stand here 
 is denied to me?" 
 
 "Some women only have one power," said he 
 "the power to make men love themselves. You have 
 the power with me to make me love the spirit that 
 is all of truth and is not mine or any man's but be- 
 longs to the world of men itself. She has the beauty 
 that my eyes have seen in you, that my body needs, 
 that wake all the storms and tumults of emotion in 
 the silence I had gathered in my mind. That is 
 what I am going to leave behind me and only love 
 of you that I take. And if I am or if I'm not the 
 man that you would ever love, time will bring us 
 proof. If I am not, you'll know that you have been 
 the greatest hope a man has ever striven to secure. 
 And that is love, the thing that makes us know the 
 spirit that we have. I only go, because I must learn 
 the truth that is in me." 
 
 273
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 He moved to the window by which she had let 
 him in. But in the sudden fear of losing him, she 
 caught his hand. 
 
 "Do you hate the other woman?" she asked. 
 
 "No," said he. "I only hate myself." 
 
 He bent and touched the hand that held him with 
 his lips and before she could stay him, had uncaught 
 the window fastening and was gone. 
 
 The black storm of the night took him as a body 
 is sucked down into a whirlpool. For one instant 
 she heard his footsteps on the garden path and 
 then the silence he had spoken of was an emptiness 
 and a pain in her heart.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 ANTHONY SOREL came up into the moun- 
 tains again by the narrow track across the 
 moors where the peat carts would be going, 
 making their two deep ruts in the soft, mossy earth 
 and beating out a smooth pathway where the hoofs 
 of the horses and the jennets would be falling. 
 
 By this way it was passing Crow Hill and Mal- 
 achi's cabin he would be and the storm of the wind 
 was blowing about him with the strength of great 
 waves in a wild sea and sometimes the way before 
 him that was black with the heaviness of the night 
 was lit up by the lightning flashes, and the sound of 
 the thunder was like the rush of the great rocks 
 that sometimes are loosened and would be tumbling 
 down the mountain's side. 
 
 But the noise of the storm, just as he had said, 
 was nothing to him now, for now there was an 
 abounding stillness in the far depths of his mind 
 that no storm of the wind, no thunder or lightning 
 could disturb. 
 
 Whether the ideal he had made of Anna Quar- 
 termaine was the real woman she was or not, meant 
 nothing to him then; whether the surroundings in 
 which he found her so distinct and high above his 
 own had contributed to these lofty and almost un- 
 earthly impressions of her, he did not stop to think. 
 
 275
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Realities were not in the dealings of his mind. She 
 had inspired him to the greatness of his purpose 
 surely. That sight of her had given him the strength 
 he had desired. He climbed up the mountain path, 
 singing as he went for the courage now that was in 
 him. The dread of the night had passed away in 
 the exaltation that he had. Now he could prove 
 to himself that in the sacrifice of love, there was 
 no belittling emotion of desire and when that was 
 proved would he not have the greatest thing a man 
 can possess to offer her? 
 
 At the door of Malachi's cottage he thought to 
 pass, then knocked, saying to himself it was for the 
 last time and with more truth than ever he could 
 have known. 
 
 The old man opened the door and the wind caught 
 it from his hands and flung it wide. 
 
 "Is it still walking the roads ye are," said he, 
 "and ye desthroyed surely the way yeer clothes do 
 be hanging and flapping on yeer bones?" 
 
 " 'Tis not destroyed I am," said Anthony Sorel, 
 "but a new man who can face all the terrors of this 
 night and will be making his way into the West with 
 the morning light of the day." 
 
 "God be wid that day," said Malachi mournfully, 
 "and may ye get the great name by the songs 
 ye'd be singing when there'll be but the bare 
 silence of these hills to wake me and I coming to 
 my sleep." 
 
 He held open the door against the wind, but 
 Anthony Sorel would not come within for the need 
 
 276
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of the sleep that was on him and the weakness it 
 brought. 
 
 "Would I pass your door the last night," said he, 
 "if the pain of sleep was twice as heavy on my 
 eyes? Would I pass your door and not be telling 
 you 'twas the strength I had got by me again, the 
 way I'd be going no more into the valley or the 
 townland where my songs would be destroyed 
 and the soul in me become a warped and a little 
 thing?" 
 
 "Where did ye come by the power of it now," 
 asked Malachi, "and ye wid the sweat on yeer face 
 was weak like a young lamb sucking the dead? 
 Where did ye come by the power of it at all?" he 
 inquired. 
 
 Anthony Sorel told him where he had been and 
 the strength he had found from the last sight of the 
 woman that he loved. 
 
 Before he had finished there was the sound of 
 mirthless, hollow laughter in the old man's voice. 
 He raised his hands above his head and there he 
 shook them in the air. 
 
 "May the Lord God Almighty have the keeping 
 of yeer soul," said he, "for the sense has gone out 
 of ye and aren't the wits lost on ye to be doing a 
 mad thing the like of that?" 
 
 "What madness is there in the thing I've done?" 
 Anthony Sorel asked. 
 
 "Yirra, isn't that the way all men are mad that 
 do be walking the earth the way 'tis in the power 
 of them to leave a woman be and she drawin' them 
 
 277
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 wid her eyes could draw the sthones down the moun- 
 tainsides?" 
 
 "Didn't I tell ye these days gone by, not to be 
 speaking the parting word to herself? And wasn't 
 it the truth I was saying that her voice would be 
 coming to ye in the fall of the night and she crying 
 out with the want of women for the nature is in 
 them? Glory be to God, have they put the sthroke 
 on ye that yeer wits do be gone with walking the 
 hills and crying out there in yeer cabin for the looks 
 she'd be having in her eyes and the wet touch of 
 her lips?" 
 
 He turned away from him as from one that is 
 past all healing, standing by his window and rocking 
 himself to and fro. 
 
 "I shall be gone to-morrow," said Anthony Sorel. 
 "Must I be saying it again? To-morrow I shall 
 be gone and all the twists and the turns of the road 
 and the walls of the hills will be between us. 'Tis 
 herself has given me power to be facing this night 
 alone and our parting said and she knowing the way 
 I'd be loving her and never raising a hand to hold 
 me back." 
 
 "Is it raise her hand she would!" exclaimed 
 Malachi sorrowfully. "Is it the hand of a woman 
 ever held a man yet, when the thoughts she puts in 
 him with the look of her eyes and the kisses she 
 has for him on her lips, are things mightier than 
 her hands would be for the holding? Yirra is it 
 gone he'd be when a man says good-bye to a woman? 
 It is not. D'ye mind me now, for the hours of the 
 
 278
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 night are still before ye and ye sitting alone in the 
 storm in yeer little room and shan't I be praying 
 God on me two knees bended that the light of the 
 day shall be coming fast till ye'd be gone?" 
 
 "She's said good-bye and she's let me go," said 
 Anthony Sorel. "Isn't that enough? And aren't I 
 strong to be going and isn't there power in me I 
 never had these days that are past?" 
 
 And then an anger came into him with his pride 
 that was hurt and he cried out that never would 
 Malachi know the virtue of the love that he had or 
 the exaltation that it brought to his soul. And the 
 old man bent his head, saying he was no maker of 
 songs, nor had he the tongue of the poet in his 
 head. 
 
 "Maybe 'tis the years that are on me," said he, 
 "and I dried up and withered with age, could not 
 remember the blood has gone dancing through me 
 veins. For 'tis easy a man would be forgetting the 
 love that he had in the days of his youth when the 
 thorn trees would blossom for the pleasure of his 
 eyes. Shure the madness of love is a great thing, 
 but when yeer heart is dry with the years that are 
 on ye, then 'tis the way the thorn trees would blos- 
 som in the want of their seed and divil a bit is it 
 for the pleasure of yeer eyes. Let ye go now, An- 
 thony Sorel, and be taking yeer madness away there 
 up into the hills and when the blossoms fall and 
 the seed-pods do be opening their mouths, let ye seek 
 in yeer heart for the words I've said this night, for 
 never to my knowing do the blossoms be parting 
 
 279
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 from the tree till the seeds be set and the winds of 
 God do be scattering them east and west in the 
 soft and fruitful corners of the earth. And where 
 would the songs of a man he'd be singing be then 
 when the blossom was gone and the pleasures be 
 dead in the heart of him?"
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE door of Anthony Sorel's cabin was rat- 
 tling in the storm of the wind and it was 
 when he had reached it and his hand was on 
 the latch that the words Malachi had spoken came 
 with the truth that they had into his mind. So it 
 was he stood there without entering as one who 
 listens for the sound of a voice or a movement 
 within. But the voice was in himself and it was the 
 voice of Malachi and over and over again it was 
 saying, 
 
 "Never to my knowing do the blossoms be parting 
 from the tree till the seeds be set and the winds of 
 God do be scattering them east and west in the 
 soft and fruitful corners of the earth." 
 
 It was they in their youth were the blossoms of 
 the tree, he meant. It was in them the seeds should 
 be set by the winds of God. 
 
 And then again he heard the voice of Malachi 
 and it was saying, 
 
 "The madness of love is a great thing, but when 
 your heart is dry with the years that are on ye, 
 then 'tis the way the thorn trees would blossom in 
 the want of their seed and divil a bit is it for the 
 pleasure of yeer eyes." 
 
 He flung the door open wide and went in and 
 seated himself down on the stool in the chimney 
 
 281
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 corner, and set himself, in anger at his thoughts, to 
 the making of his fire that was black and cold in a 
 bed of white ashes. 
 
 Was it the truth? Was it the truth? Was love 
 the deceiving emotion that only conjured be- 
 fore the eyes of youth? Could no woman be the 
 inspiration of the highest beauty and the greatest 
 truth? 
 
 The wood he had brought to the grate burnt up 
 into flame and he felt the first warmth of it stealing 
 into his blood. 
 
 Surely the tree in its blossoming was a truth in 
 itself a beauty alone, if the eye would but choose 
 to see it. Not everything was a means to an end. 
 His love of the woman from whom he had parted, 
 that was a thing in itself, a blossom from which no 
 seed need come to complete the beauty and the truth 
 that it was. Weren't there emotions other than the 
 emotions of Nature that moved in man? Was there 
 not the spirit in him that stood, alone, as he soon 
 would be standing, when the winding of the roads 
 and the length of the rivers would be set between 
 them? 
 
 The whole object of his life depended on it that 
 it were so, but just when he thought he had found 
 comfort in that, came the words of Malachi back 
 into his mind until they sung in the air about his 
 head and all his senses were tricked by the sound 
 of them. 
 
 He was struggling now to keep back the conscious 
 self in him and every word of Malachi's that re- 
 
 282
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 turned to him, he flung from his mind like a man 
 that is beset on all sides. 
 
 "May never a man be parted from a woman," 
 he cried out aloud, "till the nature that is in them 
 shall come to its own fulfillment! Is there never a 
 blossom that falls from the tree, but what the seed 
 is already set in the hour of its parting! Is pleasure 
 the only reward that a man desires, and the only 
 gift that Nature has to give him!" 
 
 And then the silence came over him, and the 
 warmth of the fire was about him as he sat, and the 
 storm came battering across the mountains at his 
 little door. 
 
 It was presently in a despair that he rose from the 
 persecution of his thoughts and set about making a 
 cup of tea for himself and cut a piece of bread from 
 a loaf that was in the house. And when he had 
 eaten the bread and drunk the steaming liquid, he 
 came back to his stool in the corner of the chimney. 
 
 "The last night," he said aloud and looked about 
 him, at the rafters in the thatch, the smoke-colored 
 walls, the bed he had slept on at nights for the two 
 years that had passed and a sadness came over him 
 to think he must be gone from it so soon. For life 
 seemed a thing to be weary of then, and as he 
 thought of the long roads before him to the West 
 and the nights that he must be traveling and all the 
 days when he would be searching for a roof to cover 
 his head, he could have wished to lie down where 
 he was for the fatigue and the sadness that was 
 over him. 
 
 19 283
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Then when he had said that and the thoughts it 
 had brought had passed away from him, he looked 
 back again into the rich heart of the glowing fire. 
 It was warm to the slumber in his eyes and he saw 
 faces there that smiled at him and they were faces 
 of women he had known before the hope came to 
 him of his own mastery. 
 
 At first he shut his eyes and tried to hide them 
 from his mind where the sacred image of the woman 
 he loved was lying. The thought of them was sacri- 
 lege to be thought of with her. But it was as though 
 their voices were calling him, so that he opened his 
 eyes again. And first one and then another spoke 
 to him with the looks that they had in their eyes 
 and the gentleness of the words they seemed to say 
 with their lips. And he heard their pity for the 
 weariness that was aching in his body, for each one 
 seemed to be saying out of the past: "Lay your 
 head on my breast and sleep and sleep and I will 
 watch your eyes till the morning wakes you." 
 
 These were not thoughts but things that he saw 
 as he sat by the fire and things that he heard as the 
 storm raged across the mountains with beating gusts 
 upon his little door. Often he shut his eyes that he 
 might see no more of them and pressed his hands 
 to his ears that he might hear no more. But his 
 eyes opened and again his hands fell in his lap and 
 he began wishing that the face and the voice of Anna 
 Quartermaine would come in their stead, rather than 
 that he should find comfort in things of the past he 
 had forever put behind him. 
 
 284
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 It was no sooner that he had wished, than 
 the faces melted in the flames and out of the heart 
 of the fire there rose the face of Anna Quarter- 
 maine, and her eyes were more sad than any of 
 the eyes of the women he had just seen and her lips 
 were murmuring softer words than ever they had 
 uttered. 
 
 There was a fear that came upon him then, that 
 he had wished for the thing that was evil in him; 
 but now he could no longer close his eyes and his 
 hands were clutched upon his knees so that he could 
 not press them to his ears. 
 
 So he tried in his mind not to hear what she said, 
 but her voice in all its gentleness was above the roar- 
 ing of the storm and the eyes that looked out at him 
 were brighter than the fire itself. 
 
 And he heard her say, 
 
 "Why do you squander your days in the ceaseless 
 labor of your soul?" and as she spoke, he could 
 not tell whether it was he was thinking the words, 
 or she who spoke them. For after that it seemed 
 that he heard a phrase that came out of the days of 
 his childhood: "Consider the lilies of the field 
 they toil not, neither do they spin " and he won- 
 dered had she said that of herself, or had he thought 
 it, because of Malachi's speaking of the blossom on 
 the thorn trees. 
 
 But because it had seemed to come out of her 
 voice, he answered aloud in his own and it sounded 
 far away, as if it came on the wings of the storm 
 and had been blown to him across the lonely stretches 
 
 285
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of the hills till there was nothing human in it that 
 was left. 
 
 "What is the life of a man," he said, "when it 
 ceases from the endless labor of his soul?" 
 
 And she answered to him out of the fire, 
 
 "The life of a flower that blows in beauty and 
 in beauty droops to the earth and is dead." 
 
 Then he thought it must be the voice of Malachi 
 that was speaking to him still out of her lips and 
 he clung again to the ideal he had of her and his 
 eyes closed with the weight of the slumber and the 
 weakness of resistance that was on him and he 
 swayed on the seat where he sat. 
 
 Then the light of the fire and the sight of her 
 face that he saw, went out of his eyes and it was 
 that he knew he was overtaken by sleep. Yet still 
 he could hear the moan of the storm as it rushed 
 across the mountains and still he could see the light- 
 ning when it lit up the corners of his room. 
 
 And whether it was in a dream or a thing that 
 had happened, he did not know, but it seemed in 
 his sleep that he opened his eyes, when upon the 
 other side of the chimney where he sat, there was 
 an old man whom he knew to be the life that was 
 weary in him. There was in his hands a pack of 
 cards, crumpled and worn and marked with the 
 many hands that had held them and he was counting 
 them through his fingers as one who is waiting to 
 play. 
 
 It was when he saw that Anthony Sorel's eyes were 
 open, that he pulled a chair between them, as though 
 
 286
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 this it was for which he had been waiting and he 
 dealt out the cards from the pack with his hands 
 that were the color of unwashed clay. 
 
 Then in silence they played a game of forty- 
 five and when Anthony Sorel saw the money they 
 played for were the pips out of the core of an apple, 
 then he said aloud as he played: "This is a dream," 
 for he knew that it was the things Malachi had 
 said of the seeds of the thorn trees that had been 
 fixed in the web of his brain. 
 
 And the old man when he had said that answered, 
 "The whole of life is a dream it is only death is 
 the awakening." 
 
 So they played on and it seemed to Anthony 
 Sorel as he shuffled the cards that at all costs he 
 must not lose the seeds of the apple he had in his 
 hand for that they were dearer to him than gold 
 and though in his consciousness he cared nothing for 
 the wealth of gold, it seemed that gold was power 
 to him then and that the seeds were even dearer 
 than power. 
 
 But one by one they were taken from him, for all 
 
 the luck of the cards came to the old man and there 
 
 was skill with him too, so that at last there was but 
 
 one seed left in his hand and he cried out aloud, 
 
 "If this is lost from me where shall I be?" 
 
 And the old man dealt the cards and answered, 
 
 "What are the seeds of life to you?" 
 
 At which in the fear of losing, Anthony Sorel 
 
 threw over the chair that was between them, and the 
 
 sound of it falling opened his eyes from the sleep 
 
 287
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 that he had, when he saw the chair thrown down at 
 his feet. And the things he had thought were the 
 cards with which they played, were a sheaf of his 
 poems that the wind of the storm had gathered 
 and scattered about the room. 
 
 So he wondered how the wind had come in for 
 the door had been closed, but when he looked up, 
 the door was open and there on the threshold stood 
 the woman of faerie with the beauty of Anna Quar- 
 termaine in her face.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 ANTHONY SOREL that was fresh from sleep 
 closed his eyes because in the moment of 
 waking from his dream, he thought the 
 sight had been deceived in him. But when he opened 
 them again, the woman of the faeries was still there 
 and now the door was closed behind her. 
 
 Yet she came no further into the room, but stood 
 there with the distance of the uneven mud floor 
 between them, as if it needed some word from him 
 to give her invitation. 
 
 But he could not speak, for the only words in 
 his mind were the words of Mrs. Coyne when she 
 said, " 'Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthand- 
 in' to ye and ye taken by the faeries yeerself where 
 the roads are crossed and the night comes batterin' 
 with the wind across the mountains at yeer little 
 door." 
 
 Now the night indeed was battering with the wind 
 across the mountains at his cabin door, and there she 
 stood that was come from the faeries themselves 
 and, like a cloud that is big with rain, he felt 
 the hour to be heavy with the fate that was over 
 him. 
 
 " 'Tis a lonely man ye are this night, Anthony 
 Sorel," said she at last in the softest accent of her 
 brogue, "and ye goin' the wild ways of the starvin' 
 
 289
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 roads when day would be come and the sun setting 
 up in the heavens." 
 
 It brought no wonder to him that she knew he 
 was about to depart. Since that first moment of 
 amazement when she had spoken his name on the 
 hillside, he knew that nothing was there that could 
 be hid from her. 
 
 "Couldn't you leave me the peace of these hours," 
 said he mournfully, "when 'tis sleep that I need to 
 be finding the strength of the man that was in me?" 
 
 She made a movement to come to the chair he 
 had thrown down in his sleep, and though he cried 
 out to her to be staying where she was nor come 
 nearer one step to him, she took no heed but smiled 
 gently at the fear in his voice and picked up the chair 
 as it lay and seated herself there by the fire. 
 
 It was then as he looked at her, that his senses 
 swung in a void where there was no power of his 
 will. For the perfume that had been about Anna 
 Quartermaine was now in his nostrils and her voice 
 continued from the moment of her silence like a 
 soft music that destroyed the truth of all sound in his 
 ears; and as he looked in her face he heard the 
 words of Anna Quartermaine that she had spoken to 
 him out of the fire when she said: "Why do you 
 squander your days in the ceaseless labor of your 
 soul?" 
 
 He clenched his hands till the nails were biting 
 of his palms in his effort to regain the balance of 
 his resistance which in that moment had almost gone 
 from him. 
 
 290
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 "Couldn't you leave me in peace?" he said again. 
 
 "Was there peace in the sleep that ye had?" she 
 replied. "Yirra, wasn't I sthandin' at the door and 
 ye moanin' and cryin' out like a dog would be lost 
 on the mountain land? And didn't ye throw down 
 the chair with the fret that was on ye? Shure what 
 rest would ye be getting out of sleep is the like of 
 a tossin' dream? Isn't it the sleep of a babe, do be 
 lying in the hook of its mother's arm, ye'd be want- 
 ing? An' isn't it comin' all these ways over the 
 mountain sthones I'd be, to be bringin' the sleep to 
 yeer eyes an' I with no vamps at all an' me feet cut 
 an'bleedin'?" 
 
 "Wouldn't I sooner be awake all night," said he, 
 "than be sleeping so?" 
 
 She took no notice of his words and it was as if 
 he had not spoken, for without answering, she lifted 
 one of her bare feet and there was the broken skin 
 and the little trickling streams of blood where the 
 stones had cut against her as she walked. 
 
 He followed her eyes with his eyes where she 
 looked and when he saw the pain of the wounds on 
 her ankles and about the soles of her feet, he felt 
 all that pity as he would have felt for a human 
 thing and went to the door that opened at the back 
 of his room and passed out. 
 
 She smiled up at him when he came back with a 
 bowl of soft rain-water in his hands and watched 
 him with a look of gratitude in her eyes as he washed 
 her feet of the earth and the blood that was fast 
 upon them. And when he made an end of drying 
 
 291
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 them with a cloth he had brought as well, she slipped 
 gently a hand on his head as he knelt at her feet, 
 and drew it down upon the softness of her lap and 
 bending down over him she whispered: "Let ye be 
 sleepin' so now and my eyes will be watchin' ye till 
 the mornin'." 
 
 Then, though he knew they were the words of 
 the voices he had heard out of the fire, and though 
 the soul in him cried out that he was losing sight of 
 the ideal that he had, yet for a time he stayed where 
 he was, thinking, in the weariness of his body, of 
 the peace such sleep would be. 
 
 She bent over him presently to see had the sleep 
 come yet to his aching eyes and when she saw they 
 were open and fixed in a staring wakefulness on the 
 glow of the fire, she whispered again in his ear, 
 
 "Why would ye be suffering the pain of a man is 
 wandering the starving land for a bite or a sup while 
 the hunger that is through him would be feeding on 
 his bones? What's this madness ye have on ye?" 
 
 And her voice as she asked him was soft with the 
 voice of women whose nature it is to minister to 
 the needs of men. 
 
 He heard that note it was never her thought to 
 conceal and he looked up into her face from where 
 he sat, wondering why he had never consciously 
 known the beauty of Anna Quartermaine so well as 
 he knew it now in this creature of faerie who had 
 stolen the beauty that she had. For whereas in 
 Anna Quartermaine he had allowed only the spirit in 
 him to be stirred by the light of her eyes, the sound 
 
 292
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of her voice and the beauty of her mind, yet now, 
 with that same beauty before him, it was not the 
 hope in his soul that he thought of, but weariness 
 of his body and the need of his sleep and the sweet 
 danger of the peace that she brought him. 
 
 "Why did you walk all these ways on the road 
 and up the paths of the lifting hills to be coming to 
 me the nights when the man that was strong in me 
 had face? Why did the faeries send you this night 
 of all the nights when the man that was strong in 
 me had dropped to the weakness of water would be 
 trickling willy-nilly through the moss?" 
 
 She stroked the hair of his head with the linger- 
 ing motion of her hand, and with every touch of it, 
 he felt the passage of a stream of blood through his 
 veins that was warm and giving him life while it 
 brought him ease of the pains of weariness that he 
 had. 
 
 "Didn't I know it was beaten and bruised ye 
 were," she answered, "and ye destroyed shurely by 
 the pains of a man is gone to madness with the need 
 would be in him?" 
 
 "And what matter would that be making to 
 you?" 
 
 She passed the touch of her hand from his hair to 
 his forehead that was damp with the sweat that was 
 on him. And when he felt the gentleness of her 
 fingers on his skin, he shivered and closed his eyes 
 as it were more than he could bear. 
 
 "Isn't it the matter with all women," she an- 
 swered him then, "the way they must be the cause 
 
 293
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 of all suffering would be in the very heart of them to 
 appease?" 
 
 "How did you know there was suffering in 
 me?" 
 
 "Didn't I see ye," said she, "and ye walkin' 
 the hills and didn't I know the fear of yeer heart 
 that was on ye and ye talkin' and keepin' the dis- 
 tance of me that night? Will ye lay yeer head down 
 now while my hands would be sthrokin' ye, for isn't 
 it the want of the sleep is killin' ye entirely?" 
 
 He could not think whether it were obedience or 
 not, but laid his head down once more in her lap 
 and wished it were near to the hour of the morning 
 for the powerlessness that had come over him. Yet 
 as he lay there and she stroked his forehead with her 
 hand, he could not close his eyes, but was wondering 
 what Anna Quartermaine would think of ail the 
 fine words of his parting, if she could see him 
 then. 
 
 At last and at the very moment she was smiling 
 because she believed -the sleep had come to him, he 
 leapt to his feet from her lap where he lay and 
 shook off from him all the sensations of the touch of 
 her hand. For now he could no longer bear the ac- 
 cusation of the thoughts that beset him and a wild 
 strength had come to his soul, as when a man fights 
 fiercely at the very moment of his defeat or a candle 
 shoots up the highest flame as it gutters and dies 
 out. 
 
 "This night only this night," he cried out, 
 "there was I saying the parting word to the woman 
 
 294
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 I love and what is this madness of ease has come 
 over me now and what would she say of me to be 
 playing with the danger that I am 1" 
 
 "If 'tis the woman is in her at all," she answered 
 him, "is it plaguing herself she'd be and ye takin' 
 ease from one has her own beauty stolen on her? 
 Wouldn't she liefer see ye sitting down in this place 
 with one had the looks of her and ye thinkin' maybe 
 'twas her own lap had been nursin' ye, than traipsing 
 the hills and contriving the way ye'd forget the sight 
 of her? If 'tis a woman she is, wouldn't she rather 
 be romancin' that way with herself than not at 
 all? Sit down here on the floor at my feet and 
 let ye stretch out now for yeer sleep that has been 
 these long days coming to ye and is behind ye 
 yet." 
 
 If it was pity and consolation she had in her voice, 
 he took none of them from the words that she said, 
 but called upon the name of God to his witness that 
 the woman he loved had kept him alone in those 
 days to the trembling purpose of his ideal. 
 
 "Wouldn't she despise me now for the poor weak 
 thing that I am," said he bitterly, "and she, down 
 there in the valley, thinking I'd be fighting alone the 
 battle that's in me !" 
 
 She rose quietly to her feet and he trembled but 
 did not move away as she came near to him. 
 
 "If 'tis not afraid of her beauty ye are, the way 
 ye can say the parting word when ye're with her, 
 why would ye be afraid of her beauty in me?" 
 
 " 'Tis not her beauty I'm afraid of now," he 
 295
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 answered, "but the fear is of myself. You are the 
 thing in me that brings the fear into my heart. 
 It's not her beauty that you symbolize in the body 
 that you have, but my own fear of myself and the 
 emotions and desires that are overwhelming me. 
 While I am with her, her beauty is nothing. I 
 should not miss it to-morrow if it were gone, for the 
 age of the years might rob her of it and beauty 
 would still be in her mind for me to love. But when 
 I am come away, then the passion that is in me 
 brings her beauty close to my eyes. I grow fright- 
 ened of the thing that I am and the desires that 
 beset me. It is only then, when my emotions are 
 upon me and I grow weak to resist, that my eyes 
 see you, in the living form of the beauty that she 
 has." 
 
 " 'Tis the worst that I'd be in ye so?" said she 
 sadly. 
 
 He bent his head. 
 
 "But shure isn't every woman the good and the 
 bad in a man?" she went on. "And might I not be 
 the spirit of herself would be seekin' the best and 
 the worst in ye, the way no other woman would be 
 comin' the ways of the roads and be stealin' a part 
 of the whole man that she loved?" 
 
 He put his hand to his eyes, for the softness of 
 her voice was becoming the sounds of music that 
 floated about in the air above his head and came 
 between the throbs of his senses and the power of his 
 will. Then he knew how the strength he had gath- 
 ered was fast going out of him and he put out his 
 
 296
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 hands touching her arms, because he knew that in 
 the warmth of them there was the forgetfulness of 
 sleep to be found. 
 
 So she stood there quietly, in a passive obedience 
 to his touch, and only put back her head that when 
 he opened his eyes he might see all the willingness 
 of the beauty that was in her face. 
 
 But it was as if he knew and was afraid to look 
 at her. For then he summoned the faltering power 
 of his will; his fingers tightened upon her arms and 
 slowly and blindly he led her to the door and un- 
 fastened the latch. 
 
 "Where are we going?" she whispered. 
 
 " 'Tis you are going," he answered, "to the 
 shadows of the hills and the mists that drive over 
 the mountains from which you came." 
 
 "Is it putting me out in the storm again?" she 
 murmured, "and I with the bare feet on me would 
 be cut and bleeding with the sthones?" 
 
 "The roads of the wind will be easier walking 
 than the mountain paths," said he. "Don't I know 
 'twas to soften the heart in me you came with the 
 wet blood on your feet? Let you go by the roads 
 of the wind and leave me to the torment of my 
 soul alone." 
 
 She took his hand from the latch and fastened it 
 back and her arms came about his neck when she 
 saw that he meant them to be parted. 
 
 "Ye won't let me be goin' this night," she cried 
 softly in his ear. "Aren't there all the black hours 
 till morning and wouldn't ye be walkin' the floor 
 
 297
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 for the madness that's in ye and never shutting yeer 
 eyes in sleep?" 
 
 In the last effort of his will and the purpose 
 that was flickering in him he raised his voice. 
 
 "For the sake of God, will ye go!" he cried. 
 
 But she clung to him closer and her hands were 
 now upon his face and her fingers were touching his 
 eyes. And the strength then went out from him like 
 water rushing and for the first moment since they 
 were standing by the door, he opened his eyes and 
 looked at her. 
 
 The light of the fire was catching the line of her 
 cheeks. He saw her lips were parted as she breathed 
 and the whole air about them was full of the sounds 
 as of a furnace that roared in his ears. Then he 
 gave up the purpose of his soul and she took him in 
 her arms and kissed the trembling thing that he was. 
 
 So had the words of Mrs. Coyne come to the truth, 
 for the night was battering with the wind across the 
 mountains at his little door when Anthony Sorel lost 
 all the wisdom that had stood to him and was taken 
 by the faeries in Knockshunahallion.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE storm had beaten itself out and purged 
 the heavens of their clouds of rain, the sun 
 was mounted high in a sky of blue when An- 
 thony Sorel awoke and saw the beauty of the face 
 that was lying beside his upon the pillow. 
 
 He had slept indeed without the torment of his 
 dreams and with the peacefulness of rest that comes 
 to the sleep of a child. And now that strength had 
 returned to him, he was left in all the bitter con- 
 templation of remorse. 
 
 There were those he had heard of in the moun- 
 tains whom the faeries had taken, who after some 
 years came back witless creatures with wild and 
 staring eyes to the people and the relations of 
 their former life. Was he to become now one of 
 these ? Had all hope of the purpose of his soul been 
 destroyed in him? Was he to wander, as with those 
 creatures the faeries had stolen, over the untrodden 
 mountain paths, begging here a crust of bread and 
 there a cup of water, until the spell of his own emo- 
 tions had been taken from him and he was a free 
 man once more? 
 
 Yet what would that freedom mean when once it 
 
 had come back to him? After those years, he too 
 
 would be lost in his wits, the songs that he had sung 
 
 would all be dead in him and the children in the 
 
 20 299
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 cottages and the farms would fling their laughter at 
 him in derision as he went by. 
 
 One hope only he clung to, the thought that there 
 still lived in the valley the woman of his ideal, with 
 the strength of whose inspiration he yet might cast 
 away the spell of these emotions that had fallen 
 upon him. 
 
 The faeries indeed had put the stroke of their 
 hand upon him and he knew the mark of it would 
 be there, in the fear of his eyes and the dejection 
 of his heart, for many of the long days that were 
 yet to come. But there was nothing, not even in 
 the power of their mystic hands, that could take 
 from him the ideal he still was clinging to and, step- 
 ping silently from the bed where he lay, he crept 
 across the floor to the light of his window and looked 
 out upon the glory of the rising sun. 
 
 There was the hope for him, a glory of the God in 
 Heaven that surely rose day by day to lift up the 
 light of the earth. He clasped his hands and almost 
 his thoughts became a prayer as he clung to the 
 assurance that it brought him. 
 
 It was only because of himself that he had fallen 
 into the power of their hands. Now that strength 
 had come back to him with the peacefulness of his 
 sleep, his emotions no longer beset him and though 
 he well knew that in those two years he had achieved 
 no mastery over them, there was yet the ideal that 
 he had, undimmed before his eyes. 
 
 He permitted the name of Anna Quartermaine 
 in a whisper to pass his lips and it brought no 
 
 300
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 shame of the love that he had for her, only the 
 shame of his own weakness which in the greatness 
 of her heart he knew she would one day forgive. 
 
 So it was, when hope had risen up above the bitter- 
 ness of shame and remorse in his heart, he turned 
 from the window and set about the gathering to- 
 gether of his things, the crucifix on the chimney wall 
 and the few things that he treasured, for the journey 
 upon the roads that he was going to make that day. 
 
 For some time as he moved about the room, he 
 heard only the gentle sounds of her sleeping on the 
 bed, the soft and indrawn breath between her parted 
 lips. 
 
 Presently, to a noise that he made, she turned and 
 sighed like a child in the happiness of its content- 
 ment. He crossed to the bed and looked down at 
 her, thinking she was to wake and making ready to 
 tell her how soon he would be gone. But the depth 
 of her sleep was still with her. And then as he 
 stood there, his thoughts brought him back to the 
 night when first he had seen her face through the 
 pane of Malachi's window, of the way he had asked 
 her to unloose the kerchief from her head and how 
 she had bid him unfasten the knot himself and how 
 he had feared then to touch her. 
 
 Now, was it only curiosity or again the return of 
 those emotions that he feared, for the longing came 
 over him to untie the knot there as she slept. 
 
 All her hair and the lines of her face were con- 
 cealed by the kerchief that bound her head about. 
 Her eyes and her lips were the eyes and the lips of 
 
 301
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 Anna Quartermaine, and he knew that the likeness 
 of them was the spell cast over him in the imagina- 
 tion of his mind. 
 
 Would that spell be gone and that likeness vanish 
 when once the kerchief was removed? 
 
 With gentle and silent fingers, he softly unfastened 
 the knot and laid the ends of the kerchief back upon 
 the pillow and there was her hair and all the shape 
 of her face as she slept, uncovered for his eyes to 
 see. 
 
 He stared and stared again and the cry that came 
 up to his lips was never uttered. 
 
 It was Anna Quartermaine ! For not only was the 
 likeness complete in every way, beyond all power of 
 his imagination, but there in the warm strands of 
 her hair was the comb of jade her fingers had for- 
 gotten in their speed the night before to take away. 
 
 It was Anna Quartermaine ! And all the ideal he 
 had clung to was broken in a thousand pieces at 
 his feet. 
 
 "Never to my knowing do the blossoms be part- 
 ing from the trees till the seeds be set an^the winds 
 of God do be scattering them east and west in the 
 fruitful corners of the earth." 
 
 These were the words of Malachi come home to 
 him now. The madness of love was a great thing, 
 but the thorn trees only blossomed in the want of 
 their seed and all the reward that a man might ask 
 was the gift of pleasure that nature had to give 
 him. 
 
 She had destroyed the ideal that was in him. He 
 302
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 could never believe in life or in love or in himself 
 again. 
 
 And then he trembled and swayed from the bal- 
 ance of his mind. It was death he saw then the 
 death and the end of all things, and his breath was 
 fast between his lips as he sought for the means to 
 find it. 
 
 A knife was lying on the table under the window's 
 ledge, the knife he had used for his bread the night 
 before. It was this he took in his hand and scarcely 
 knew it was there. 
 
 Death he asked for, which the old man in his 
 dreams had said was the awakening of life. In the 
 madness that had come upon him, he thought that 
 no man could do otherwise. 
 
 And so he brought the knife in his hand and 
 stood looking at her as she lay asleep on his bed. 
 There was no thought of hesitation in his mind. He 
 lifted his arm and thanked God as he struck that 
 the strength was left in him for the striking. 
 
 She quivered, as the knife quivered in her breast. 
 No sound did she make as her eyes opened, and there 
 were the countless questions that flew from her eyes 
 to his before they closed again and were shut in a 
 heavier slumber than that of sleep.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 TO my mind, this is where ends the story of 
 Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine. 
 
 In such a tale of faerie as this, the ugliness 
 of the things that happened after that night of 
 Anthony Sorel's pitiless realization in those Irish 
 mountains, has but little place. 
 
 I know and have already told how he carried the 
 body of Anna Quartermaine out into the heather 
 and laid her there on her last bed with the knife still 
 sunken in her breast. I have no doubt there was 
 in his mind the last tenderness for her thus. He 
 had no wish to hide his deed but would not have 
 them find her on the bed he brought her from. 
 
 For none of the essential part of this story I have 
 written came to be known at the trial in the court- 
 house of the city of Cork. This was the tale and 
 its secret that Malachi told me and after he had come 
 to the death of Anna Quartermaine, his voice and 
 the flow of his words came as it were like a faintly 
 trickling stream that has spent itself in flood and has 
 but a dim echo of the torrent that it was. 
 
 He spoke again indeed with Anthony Sorel as he 
 sat alone waiting for that justice which could 
 never judge him, by the lake near the summit of 
 Knockshunahallion. But what they said of this 
 strange crime of passion, that I shall never know, 
 
 304
 
 THE PASSIONATE CRIME 
 
 for here it was that Malachi became almost inco- 
 herent in his story and the words fell weakly and 
 broken from his lips. 
 
 Of the trial itself, which I have read in detail in 
 the Cork papers of that day, nothing in keeping with 
 this story could be written. Already I have told how 
 he kept his silence throughout all the trial. Except 
 for those few poignant words : "They are mad who 
 look for justice, as those who would hunt for a shil- 
 ling under a stone." 
 
 And that he was hanged for his crime in the jail 
 in Cork, you, who have begun this story at its be- 
 ginning and followed it patiently until the end, will 
 know. 
 
 It has been impossible to re-tell it all in the exact 
 words of that old man Malachi, as he told it to me. 
 The poetic similes he used, the quaint turns of 
 speech, the words that would have been strange to 
 so many would have become bewildering in tran- 
 scription. 
 
 I have tried, and I fear with but ill success, to 
 catch the note of his speech as, hearing one of the 
 thousand sounds in Nature, you try to find its corre- 
 sponding note upon the strings of some musical in- 
 strument. 
 
 If I have succeeded in the ears of some, I shall 
 feel I have not tried in vain to make a living thing 
 out of this tale of faerie which, to those who never 
 heard the secret of it from that old man's lips, has 
 been till now the passionate crime of Anthony Sorel. 
 
 (i)
 
 QOO Q>*
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 1968 
 
 Form L9-Series 4939
 
 A 000 031 870 9