For the next few weeks Costello had no lack of news of Oona, for now
a woman selling eggs or fowls, and now a man or a woman on pilgrimage
to the Well of the Rocks, would tell him how his love had fallen ill
the day after St. John's Eve, and how she was a little better or a
little worse, as it might be; and though he looked to his horses and
his cows and goats as usual, the common and uncomely, the dust upon
the roads, the songs of men returning from fairs and wakes, men
playing cards in the corners of fields on Sundays and Saints' Days,
the rumours of battles and changes in the great world, the deliberate
purposes of those about him, troubled him with an inexplicable
trouble; and the country people still remember how when night had
fallen he would bid Duallach of the Pipes tell, to the chirping of
the crickets, 'The Son of Apple,' 'The Beauty of the World,' 'The
King of Ireland's Son,' or some other of those traditional tales
which were as much a piper's business as 'The Green Bunch of Rushes,'
'The Unchion Stream,' or 'The Chiefs of Breffeny'; and while the
boundless and phantasmal world of the legends was a-building, would
abandon himself to the dreams of his sorrow.
Duallach would often pause to tell how some clan of the wild Irish
had descended from an incomparable King of the Blue Belt, or Warrior
of the Ozier Wattle, or to tell with many curses how all the
strangers and most of the Queen's Irish were the seed of the
misshapen and horned People from Under the Sea or of the servile and
creeping Ferbolg; but Costello cared only for the love sorrows, and
no matter whither the stories wandered, whether to the Isle of the
Red Lough, where the blessed are, or to the malign country of the Hag
of the East, Oona alone endured their shadowy hardships; for it was
she and no king's daughter of old who was hidden in the steel tower
under the water with the folds of the Worm of Nine Eyes round and
about her prison; and it was she who won by seven years of service
the right to deliver from hell all she could carry, and carried away
multitudes clinging with worn fingers to the hem of her dress; and it
was she who endured dumbness for a year because of the little thorn
of enchantment the fairies had thrust into her tongue; and it was a
lock of her hair, coiled in a little carved box, which gave so great
a light that men threshed by it from sundown to sunrise, and awoke so
great a wonder that kings spent years in wandering or fell before
unknown armies in seeking to discover her hiding-place; for there was
no beauty in the world but hers, no tragedy in the world but hers:
and when at last the voice of the piper, grown gentle with the wisdom
of old romance, was silent, and his rheumatic steps had toiled
upstairs and to bed, and Costello had dipped his fingers into the
little delf font of holy water and begun to pray to Mary of the Seven
Sorrows, the blue eyes and star-covered dress of the painting in the
chapel faded from his imagination, and the brown eyes and homespun
dress of Dermott's daughter Winny came in their stead; for there was
no tenderness in the passion who keep their hearts pure for love or
for hatred as other men for God, for Mary and for the Saints, and
who, when the hour of their visitation arrives, come to the Divine
Essence by the bitter tumult, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the
desolate Rood ordained for immortal passions in mortal hearts.
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