Part 30 (1/2)

Because Shane had hated to see the fine boat drawn up, he had put _Righ nam Bradan_, the _Salmon King_, Alan Donn's great thirty-footer, into commission, and raced her at Ballycastle and Kingstown, losing both times. He had ascribed it to sailing luck, the dying of a breeze, the setting of a tide, a lucky tack of an opposing boat. But at Cowes he should have won. Everything was with him. He came in fifth.

”I can't understand,” he told one of Alan's old crew.

”Man,” the Antrim sailor told him bluntly, ”ye have na' the gift.”

”But, Feardoracha, I'm a sailor.”

”Aye, Shane Campbell, you're that. For five times seven years you've sailed the seven seas. But for racing ye have na' the gift. Alan Donn had it. And 'twas Alan Donn had the gift for the golf, and the gift for the horses. Just the gift. You must not blame yourself, _Shane na fairrge_, there's few Alan Donns.”

And thinking to himself in the lamp-lit room, Shane found what the old man meant. Beneath the bronzed face, the roaring manner of Alan Donn, there was a secret of alchemy. Rhythm, and concentration like white fire. To the most acute tick of the stars he could get a boat over the line with the gun. Something told him where breezes were. By will-power he forced out the knowledge of a better tack. As to horses, where was his equal at putting one over a jump? At the exact hair's-breadth of time, he had changed from human being to spirit. It was no longer Alan Donn and his horse when he dropped his hands on the neck. There was fusion. A centaur sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with matter.... And Alan Donn was dead six years ... and yet he lived....

He lived because he had been of great use. He was a standard, a great ideal. Children who had seen him would remember him forever, and seek to emulate the fire and strength of him, having him to measure by as the mariner has the star.... In foreign countries they would tell tales of him: There was once a great sportsman in the North of Ireland, Alan Donn Campbell by name....

His father, too, who had been dead so long--mortality had not conquered him. Once in Ballycastle Shane had seen a shawled girl look out to sea with great staring eyes and a wry mouth, and, half whispered, staccato, not quite sung, her fingers twisting her shawl, came a song from her white mouth:

_Tiocfaidh an samhradh agas fasfaidh an fear; Agas tiocfaidh an duilleabhar glas do bharr nan gcraobh.

Tiocfaidh mo chead gradhle banaghadh an lae, Agas bvailfidh se port ciuin le c.u.mhaidh 'mo dhiaidh._

The summer will come, and the little gra.s.s will grow; And there will come a green thickness to the tops of the trees.

And my hundred loves will arise with the dawning of the day, And he will strike a soft tune out of loneliness after me.

A queer st.i.tch came in Shane's heart--a song his father made! And following the st.i.tch came a surge of pride. Those songs of his father!

The light minor he had heard, and the others--the surge of _An Oig-bhean Ruaddh_, the Pretty Red Maiden:

”_Se, do bheatha is an tir seo”_.... A welcome before you into this country, O sea-gull more lovely than the queen, than the woman of the West, whom Naesi, son of Usnach, held in the harbor. I could destroy all Ireland, as far as the Southern sea, but in the end I would be destroyed myself, when my eyes would alight on the white swan with the golden crown....

Or the despairing cry of his poem _Ig Cathair nan g Ceo_: ”In the City of the Fogs”--he meant London--

”_A athair nan gras tabhair spas o'n eag domh_--O Father of the Graces, give me a little respite from death. Let the ax not yet strike my forehead, the way a goat or a pig or a sheep is slain, until I make my humility and my last repentance.”

Shane wished to G.o.d he had known his father, that the man had been spared a little until he could have loved him.... He had the only picture of him left.... Great throat and pale, liquor-harried face, burning eyes, and black tossing hair.... The bald-headed bankers might shake their heads and say: He was no good ... he was a rake ... he drank ... his relations with women were not reputable.... And old maids purse their thin-blooded lips.... But when the little money of the bankers was scattered through the world, and even their little chapels had forgotten them, and the stiff bones of old maids were crumbling into an unnecessary dust, his father's songs would be sung in Ireland, in Man, in the Scottish Highlands, in the battered Hebrides. So long as sweet Gaelic was spoken and men's hearts surged with feeling, there would be a song of his father's to translate the effervescence into words of cadenced beauty.... He had an irreverent vision of G.o.d smiling and talking comfortably to his father while the bald-headed bankers cooled their fat heels and glared at one another outside the picket-gates of heaven.... The world had gained something with the last Gaelic bard....

And he had found out, too, that his other uncle, Robin More, had a great importance in a certain circle. In Dublin he met an old professor, a Jesuit priest, who seemed intensely excited that a nephew of Robin More Campbell's should be present.

”Do you know, by any chance, what your uncle was working on when he died?”

”I'm afraid I do not, sir.”

”You know his ma.n.u.scripts.”

”Just casually, sentimentally.”

”You don't know much about your uncle's work, then?”

”Not very much.”

”Did you know,” the old priest said--and his urbanity disappeared; there was pique in his tones--”that your uncle was the man who definitely decided for us that the Highlanders of Scotland migrated from Ireland to Scotland? Did you know that?”

”No, sir, I did not.”