The Greatest Works of Abraham Merritt. Abraham Merritt

gazed back at them fearlessly. Olaf drew a deep breath, gazed steadily too, the hardness, the despair wiped from his face.

      Now Lakla drew closer to the dais; the three pairs of eyes searched hers, the woman’s with an ineffable tenderness; some message seemed to pass between the Three and the Golden Girl. She bowed low, turned to the Norseman.

      “Place Larry there,” she said softly —“there at the feet of the Silent Ones.”

      She pointed into the radiant mist; Olaf started, hesitated, stared from Lakla to the Three, searched for a moment their eyes — and something like a smile drifted through them. He stepped forward, lifted O’Keefe, set him squarely within the covering light. It wavered, rolled upward, swirled about the body, steadied again — and within it there was no sign of Larry!

      Again the mist wavered, shook, and seemed to climb higher, hiding the chins, the beaked noses, the brows of that incredible Trinity — but before it ceased to climb, I thought the yellow feathered heads bent; sensed a movement as though they lifted something.

      The mist fell; the eyes gleamed out again, inscrutable.

      And groping out of the radiance, pausing at the verge of the dais, leaping down from it, came Larry, laughing, filled with life, blinking as one who draws from darkness into sunshine. He saw Lakla, sprang to her, gripped her in his arms.

      “Lakla!” he cried. “Mavourneen!” She slipped from his embrace, blushing, glancing at the Three shyly, half-fearfully. And again I saw the tenderness creep into the inky, flame-shot orbs of the woman being; and a tenderness in the others too — as though they regarded some well-beloved child.

      “You lay in the arms of Death, Larry,” she said. “And the Silent Ones drew you from him. Do homage to the Silent Ones, Larry, for they are good and they are mighty!”

      She turned his head with one of the long, white hands — and he looked into the faces of the Three; looked long, was shaken even as had been Olaf and myself; was swept by that same wave of power and of — of — what can I call it? — HOLINESS that streamed from them.

      Then for the first time I saw real awe mount into his face. Another moment he stared — and dropped upon one knee and bowed his head before them as would a worshipper before the shrine of his saint. And — I am not ashamed to tell it — I joined him; and with us knelt Lakla and Olaf and Rador.

      The mist of fiery opal swirled up about the Three; hid them.

      And with a long, deep, joyous sigh Lakla took Larry’s hand, drew him to his feet, and silently we followed them out of that hall of wonder.

      But why, in going, did the thought come to me that from where the Three sat throned they ever watched the cavern mouth that was the door into their abode; and looked down ever into the unfathomable depth in which glowed and pulsed that mystic flower, colossal, awesome, of green flame that had seemed to me fire of life itself?

      CHAPTER XXVI

       THE WOOING OF LAKLA

       Table of Contents

      I had slept soundly and dreamlessly; I wakened quietly in the great chamber into which Rador had ushered O’Keefe and myself after that culminating experience of crowded, nerve-racking hours — the facing of the Three.

      Now, lying gazing upward at the high-vaulted ceiling, I heard Larry’s voice:

      “They look like birds.” Evidently he was thinking of the Three; a silence — then: “Yes, they look like BIRDS— and they look, and it’s meaning no disrespect to them I am at all, they look like LIZARDS”— and another silence —“they look like some sort of gods, and, by the good sword-arm of Brian Boru, they look human, too! And it’s NONE of them they are either, so what — what the — what the sainted St. Bridget are they?” Another short silence, and then in a tone of awed and absolute conviction: “That’s it, sure! That’s what they are — it all hangs in-they couldn’t be anything else —”

      He gave a whoop; a pillow shot over and caught me across the head.

      “Wake up!” shouted Larry. “Wake up, ye seething caldron of fossilized superstitions! Wake up, ye bogy-haunted man of scientific unwisdom!”

      Under pillow and insults I bounced to my feet, filled for a moment with quite real wrath; he lay back, roaring with laughter, and my anger was swept away.

      “Doc,” he said, very seriously, after this, “I know who the Three are!”

      “Yes?” I queried, with studied sarcasm.

      “Yes?” he mimicked. “Yes! Ye — ye” He paused under the menace of my look, grinned. “Yes, I know,” he continued. “They’re of the Tuatha De, the old ones, the great people of Ireland, THAT’S who they are!”

      I knew, of course, of the Tuatha De Danann, the tribes of the god Danu, the half-legendary, half-historical clan who found their home in Erin some four thousand years before the Christian era, and who have left so deep an impress upon the Celtic mind and its myths.

      “Yes,” said Larry again, “the Tuatha De — the Ancient Ones who had spells that could compel Mananan, who is the spirit of all the seas, an’ Keithor, who is the god of all green living things, an’ even Hesus, the unseen god, whose pulse is the pulse of all the firmament; yes, an’ Orchil too, who sits within the earth an’ weaves with the shuttle of mystery and her three looms of birth an’ life an’ death — even Orchil would weave as they commanded!”

      He was silent — then:

      “They are of them — the mighty ones — why else would I have bent my knee to them as I would have to the spirit of my dead mother? Why else would Lakla, whose gold-brown hair is the hair of Eilidh the Fair, whose mouth is the sweet mouth of Deirdre, an’ whose soul walked with mine ages agone among the fragrant green myrtle of Erin, serve them?” he whispered, eyes full of dream.

      “Have you any idea how they got here?” I asked, not unreasonably.

      “I haven’t thought about that,” he replied somewhat testily. “But at once, me excellent man o’ wisdom, a number occur to me. One of them is that this little party of three might have stopped here on their way to Ireland, an’ for good reasons of their own decided to stay a while; an’ another is that they might have come here afterward, havin’ got wind of what those rats out there were contemplatin’, and have stayed on the job till the time was ripe to save Ireland from ’em; the rest of the world, too, of course,” he added magnanimously, “but Ireland in particular. And do any of those reasons appeal to ye?”

      I shook my head.

      “Well, what do you think?” he asked wearily.

      “I think,” I said cautiously, “that we face an evolution of highly intelligent beings from ancestral sources radically removed from those through which mankind ascended. These half-human, highly developed batrachians they call the Akka prove that evolution in these caverned spaces has certainly pursued one different path than on earth. The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish. There was nothing inherently improbable in Wells’ choice. Man is the ruling animal of earth today solely by reason of a series of accidents; under another series spiders or ants, or even elephants, could have become the dominant race.

      “I think,” I said, even more cautiously, “that the race to which the Three belong never appeared on earth’s surface; that their development took place here, unhindered through aeons. And if this be true, the structure of their brains, and therefore all their reactions, must be different from ours. Hence their knowledge and command of energies unfamiliar to us — and hence also the question whether they may not have an entirely different sense of values, of justice — and that is rather terrifying,” I concluded.

      Larry shook his