High up among the dusty rafters of Aughagree Chapel dangles a thin
shrivelled thing, towards which the people look shudderingly when the
sermon is of the terrors of the Judgment and the everlasting fire. The
woman from whose dead body that was taken chose the death of the soul
in return for a life with the man whom she loved with an unholy
passion. Every man, woman, and child in that chapel amid gray miles of
rock and sea-drift, has heard over and over of the unrepentant
deathbed of Mauryeen Holion. They whisper on winter nights of how
Father Hugh fought with the demons for her soul, how the sweat poured
from his forehead, and he lay on his face in an agony of tears,
beseeching that the sinner whom he had admitted into the fold of
Christ should yet be saved. But of her love and her sin she had no
repentance, and the servants in Rossatorc Castle said that as the
priest lay exhausted from his vain supplications, and the rattle was
in Dark Mauryeen's throat, there were cries of mocking laughter in the
air above the castle, and a strange screaming and flapping of great
wings, like to, but incomparably greater than, the screaming and
flapping of the eagle over Slieve League. That devil's charm up there
in the rafters of Aughagree is the death-spancel by which Dark
Mauryeen bound Sir Robert Molyneux to her love. It is of such power
that no man born of woman can resist it, save by the power of the
Cross, and 'twas little Robert Molyneux of Rossatorc recked of the
sweet Christ who perished that men should live--against whose Cross
the demons of earth and the demons of air, the malevolent spirits that
lurk in water and wind, and all witches and evil doctors, are
powerless. But the thought of the death-spancel must have come
straight from the King of Fiends himself, for who else would harden
the human heart to desecrate a new grave, and to cut from the helpless
dead the strip of skin unbroken from head to heel which is the
death-spancel? Very terrible is the passion of love when it takes full
possession of a human heart, and no surer weapon to the hand of Satan
when he would make a soul his own. And there is the visible sign of a
lost soul, and it had nearly been of two, hanging harmlessly in the
rafters of the holy place. A strange thing to see where the lamp of
the sanctuary burns, and the sea-wind sighs sweetly through the door
ever open for the continual worshippers.

* * * * *

Sir Robert