Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/103

 our day. We are both poor men together. If my castle has been broken, his abbey has no two stones resting one upon another. He does well to come to me. We stood a long league apart in our good days. We can sleep back to belly now, under the common cloak of calamity. They would hang us together, on one limb of a tree, those heretic English wolves."

The more forward of the two priests held up a ﬁnger. "He knows nothing of it all," he murmured. "We have held it from him. No man of us dared to utter the smallest word of it to him. It is you who must tell him. You are his kinsman, and he will take it from you. He is a cold man with his priests, but he is warm to his own blood."

Turlogh laughed, then stared with round eyes at the speaker, and laughed again.

"He has no knowledge of it all, you say?"

"Since we set sail with the Genoese captain in Rogation week, from Cyprus, he has heard no word about Ireland. He has too proud a stomach for bad tidings, and no other came to us at any halting-place."

Four men, dripping out of the salt water, stood before Turlogh now, as he would have spoken further. They bent and drew short breaths under the stress of what they bore in their arms—a swollen, black-swathed bulk, shapeless as a sack of corn. Turlogh gazed at it in the deep shadows thrown by the men on the moon-side, and was in doubt. Then outlines shaped themselves, and he saw the gross, unwieldy ﬁgure of a short man grown unduly fat, with cowled head tipped forward to hide the face. In its hands this shrouded form held a small casket, laid with gold and precious stones. The faint glimmer of these in the moonlight led his eye to a blaze, as of a planet in the obscurity, emitted by a jewel at the side of the box.

The