# The Pool of Stars/Chapter 12

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CHAPTER XII
THE DARK OF THE MOON
THE wide circle of open lawn before the ruined house was less dark than the pathway, but the shadows beneath the trees were inky black and the pines themselves were bowing and thundering in the heavy storm. There was no rain, only the boisterous wind whipping the branches and driving great masses of clouds across the sky with now and then a gleam of stars between. Stars glinted now and again in the pool also, long beams of light in the ruffled water, although, as she came near, there chanced to be quiet for a moment so that she saw reflected the irregular circle of light that Miss Miranda had told her was the Northern Crown.
She stood still by the pool for a long minute, her heart beating very loud, the pulses throbbing in her ears as it does after running. Very keenly she was peering into the dark at the long lines of ruined walls, seeing nothing at first, but by and by catching glimpses of a tiny, moving light. It stopped, vanished, reappeared, and moved on before she ​could be certain that she really saw it. At last it came nearer, moving along past the door that David had used, slipped over the tumbled wall, even showed double for a second in the shattered old mirror. She was trying to speak, to cry out, but she could not find her voice, could only stare, fascinated, quaking inwardly with the thought that the light, after all, might be something unearthly. But as it progressed farther toward the end of the house where the fire had raged fiercest, the sense of danger brought her to her senses at last.
"Stop," she cried frantically. "It is not safe there. Stop, come back."
She had called a second too late. There was a sound of rending walls and tumbling bricks, a crash, a startled cry and then a groan. She rushed across the grass, could find no place to climb over and ran up and down wildly, seeking a point of vantage where she might scramble across. A new sound caught her attention, for flying feet were coming up the path.
"Oh, David, David is it you?" she cried, in an overwhelming rush of relief. "I can't climb up, I can't reach him."
"You are not to try it, it is not safe," David ordered sternly, setting his foot on the first big block of stone even as he spoke.
"I am going where you go," she replied and ​evidently he realized it was no time for argument.
"Then this is the best way over. Here, give me your hand, and be careful of that loose beam."
They scrambled over the summit and, amid a shower of sliding bricks, slipped down on the other side. A dark figure lay stretched upon the stones, moving a little and still holding a flickering, lighted candle. It was Michael.
"Yes, Miss Betsey dear," he affirmed cheerfully, when they had at last brought him to recognize who they were, "and I've a broken leg I'm thinking from the way it feels by not having any feeling at all. And will you hold up the candle and see what is running down my face?"
"Oh, Michael, Michael, what were you doing, how could you be so foolish?" Betsey reproached him; "your head is cut and what is running over your face is blood." She began, forthwith, to try to tie it up with her handkerchief.
"Then glory be to all the Saints," was Michael's unexpectedly joyful reply; "there is nothing that will break the charm of ill luck like the letting of blood. It will all go well now."
Betsey looked helplessly at David. Was the poor old man gone out of his wits entirely?
"Don't you know better than to risk your life over such nonsense? Won't you ever learn better, Michael?" David said severely, although the ​pathetic broken figure on the stones was one to call forth only pity.
"Yes," assented the old Irishman meekly, "I know better and the priest is always telling me so. But yet—when there's trouble to them you love and seemingly no way out of it, why, you look back at the old fancies and wonder if they were not true after all, and you feel the need to try this thing or to try that thing, just in case there might be help in it."
"And what were you doing here? " David asked.
"It is on this house that the ill luck lies, for it was in its burning that the evil fortune began and it is only through its building up again that happiness can come back to Miss Miranda. And so—and so—just to make the luck change, it is the old way to take a candle in your hand and to walk through every part of the house saying spells as you go. And the last of the spells must be said in the hour before midnight in the dark of the moon. But Miss Betsey stopped me," he concluded regretfully. "This was to be the last night, yet I did not get the whole of the way."
"She came just in time," David corrected him. "The walls beyond here are weaker even than these, and high enough to bury you completely if they should fall. I was awake and heard the gate swinging, and I was trying to think how it came to be ​open, but it was Betsey that was quick enough to understand in time. When she ran down the stairs I got up to follow her, yet I really did not guess what was happening until I heard you fall. You must thank her that you are still alive."
"But if the bad luck still holds," protested Michael pitifully, "then it will be all to do over again!"
He was silent as though gathering strength for further speech and then began once more.
"And I must tell you that what has been going amiss is, the whole of it, through fault of mine. There was a day, it was before you ever came to the cottage, when Mr. Donald was last here that—that—" His voice faltered, perhaps through weakness, perhaps through reluctance to go on, but he drew a breath and continued bravely. "That very morning, when I was getting my breakfast I spilled the salt dish and I thought to myself, 'Michael Martin, you will be losing your temper with some one this day.' But who was there for me to quarrel with except Miss Miranda and her father and the good Saints know I could never be vexed with them. So I went about my work and thought no more about it.
"But that afternoon I went over to the old house, it was late winter still and I was wishing to gather some pine cones for Miss Miranda's hearth, and, ​for all the cold, I sat down on a stone to smoke a pipe and think about the old times and how happy we all were before the fire came. And there was Mr. Donald, walking about the broken walls, peering here and peering there, but not stepping within for he is of the sort that are always careful of the safety of their precious skins."
He stopped again to rest his trembling voice.
"Don't try to tell us, Michael, if it is so hard," Elizabeth said.
"I must tell you, Miss Betsey," he replied, "I have hid it in my heart too long. He says to me, 'I am just looking to see where the fire really started, it seems that it must have been at this end where the workshop stood.' I says 'Yes, sir,' not being wishful to have any talk with him. And after a little he says again, 'It was a beautiful old place. I can see plainly why Miranda longs for it and cannot be happy where she is.' And this time I says nothing but puffs away at my pipe. It roused my anger, some way, to see him peering about, though I am a slow-witted fellow and had no guess at what he was looking for. At last he speaks once more. 'Why don't they build it up again, Michael?' he says. 'They could if they weren't such a careless impractical pair. They should be living here again, I have no patience with them.' Then my wrath boils up in me and I tells him what I thinks. 'You ​have no patience, have you,' says I, 'with them that took you in and cared for you and bore with those ways you have that no one likes. You're prosperous yourself through their help, if you want them to rebuild their house why don't you give them aid in doing it? Miss Miranda toils and saves and has her garden and her ducks and anything she can think of to make things go forward, so that her father will have what he needs for his work.' All of that I says to him and I wish the Saints had struck me dumb before I spoke.
"'She works so that her father may have what he needs?' he repeats. 'So that is how things stand, just as I had been suspecting. Thank you, Michael, that is all I wanted to know,' he says and goes, leaving me gaping after him as he walks away over the snow. I did not know even then what use he was to make of what I had told him, but I saw well enough that I had done harm. And so I have been doing all I could to make amends," he ended sadly; "I have watched over the house that he should never come near with Miss Miranda not there, though I guessed but little what it was he would do. And when it seemed of no use and I felt helpless and afraid, thinking of the mischief I had done, I have turned to trying to drive away the ill luck in the old fashion, with spells and charms, ​just—just because there might be something in them after all."
He ceased speaking and closed his eyes, worn out by the effort of confession.
"He used to watch by the garden gate long before Miss Miranda's cousin ever showed himself," was Betsey's whispered comment to David. "He was sitting there on the bench in the dark, that night we sat by the pool and Miss Miranda told us the story of the green jade tree. He was probably watching on the very evening that Donald Reynolds finally came."
"Yes," David reminded her bitterly, "and slipped away on a chase after a will-o'-the-wisp, lit his candle and came up here to this place when he might have been of some real use at home. He even brought us there after him, though he did not know it, just at the time when the man he dreaded had really come. If he had only been sensible—"
"Don't let him think of that," said Betsey. "Yes, he went at just the wrong minute but he must be kept from remembering it."
Michael must have suspected that their whispered discussion concerned the truth of his strange notions.
"Maybe I was wrong," he said miserably, "but did not my own eyes see Something stand there by the pool, did not my ears hear a splash in the water ​that boded no good. If it had only been running water—"
Betsey felt David start suddenly in the dark.
"Say that again, Michael," he ordered breathlessly.
The old Irishman repeated the words faithfully, even to the groan at the end of them. David's excitement was rapidly communicating itself to Betsey.
"That was on the night Miss Miranda's father was taken ill," she said, although of this explanation there was no need.
"I know, I know," the boy returned quickly, "but wasn't Mr. Reynolds in his shop all the rest of the evening? That is what has puzzled me."
"I looked in once and he was gone," she answered, "but it was for such a little while that I never thought of it again. Oh, if we should find what is lost, at last!"
David was already on his feet, peering over the stone wall toward the pool.
"We should try to get Michael home first," Betsey objected, seeing already what was in his mind.
"No, no," the Irishman insisted, having only a vague notion of what they were about, but feeling excitement in the air. "You shall not move me one inch if there is aught to do first that may help Miss Miranda."
"You must lie very still," warned Betsey.
​"Indeed and I will," promised Michael obediently, "but—what is it you are going to do, you two?"
They did not stop to explain, so great was their haste. They went clambering over the wall again, and tumbled down the other side upon the grass. The wind, from which they had been sheltered below, caught them again as they ran to the pool. They knelt down at opposite sides of the shallow curve and plunged their arms, shoulder deep, into the tossing water.
"I have found something," exclaimed Betsey almost immediately; "it feels like thin metal blades set in a ring."
She drew her prize, dripping, from the basin and held it up. As she sat back on her heels the wind loosened her hair and flung its dark mass over her shoulder. David, unable to see, took the object in his hand and felt of it carefully.
"That is certainly the missing valve," he pronounced, "so we know now that we are right. The other parts were two steel tubes, about as long as my hand. Those will not be so easy to find. They may have rolled away to the deep end."
No amount of fumbling on the bottom revealed anything further except that Betsey, lifting a stone, grasped a frog that was beneath it and almost tumbled into the water with the dreadful start its ​slippery little body caused her. She sat up, panting, and attempted to wring out her wet sleeve.
"What if we could not find them after all," she lamented. "Mr. Reynolds must have meant that no one, not even himself, should ever have them again."
But David was not willing to give up so easily.
"It is like a needle in a haystack," he admitted, "but even such things have been found."
He poised himself at the edge of the basin, then slid into the water with the clean straight dive of an expert swimmer. Once he went down, and twice, and came up empty handed. The third time he was gone so long that the water quieted and the reflected stars shone once more in their places. Betsey, leaning over to watch in an agony of apprehension, felt her tired spirit completely give way.
"Oh, David," she wailed, although under her breath, "don't be drowned and leave me alone in the dark."
As though in answer to her words a widening circle suddenly appeared on the surface and David's head rose at the center of the pool. He gasped and spluttered and shook the water from his eyes.
"I have them," he announced joyfully, "one in each hand. Now we have found them all."
He came clambering out on the edge of the basin, ​the water pouring from him in streams, his red head sleek and shining.
"I got a little short of breath that last time," he admitted. "I kept touching the things and they kept rolling away, I thought I would never get them in my hands. They would have rusted to bits in a little longer; we have not found them at all too soon."
Michael's wits seemed to be wandering a little when they returned to him, nor did he appear to understand very clearly the account that, both speaking excitedly, they poured into his ears.
"Of course, of course," he kept repeating a little impatiently, "did I not tell you that the secret of the ill luck charm lay in the pool of stars?"
"You did, Michael," Betsey agreed soothingly at last, "but you see we did not quite understand."
"And now," said David, getting up, "I am going back to the cottage to telephone for the doctor and to bring help to carry Michael home. It will not be long."
Betsey sat very quiet after he had gone. The wind whooped and whirled overhead, bowing the trees and beating back and forth the branches of the vines and shrubs. All at once she began to hear a strange cracking, a grating of stones and the snapping of ivy stems, the crushing of bushes, then an ​appalling rumble that grew to a deafening crash of falling stone. Even in the sheltered corner where they were, the ground rocked and a cloud of gritty dust blew in upon them, almost choking them both. Michael, startled, actually managed to raise himself on his elbow.
"What was that?" he asked.
"The wind has carried down the last walls that were standing in the south wing," she replied. "David said that they have been crumbling for years and that lately, with feet going back and forth over them, they have grown more and more ready to fall. I am glad you did not go farther, you might have been hurt worse than this."
The old man's brain seemed to have been aroused by the shock into a moment of absolute clearness.
"I should have been buried entirely, I am thinking," he remarked, "and there would have been an end to an old fool and his whims and fancies. I sought to set things right in my own way and have done nothing but harm, while it is you and Mr. David have found out all the trouble by your plain good sense and loyal friendship, and will know how to mend what has gone amiss. It is your standing so firm by Miss Miranda that has made things go well again."
"But it was you who told me to stand by her," Betsey reminded him comfortingly. "I would never ​have dreamed that I could help her if you had not told me so."
He was quiet a little but presently spoke again.
"When they come to carry me home it may be the pain of lifting me over the wall will disorder my wits once more. So I should tell you what was to be a secret, that Mr. Ted comes home to-day. That was why I was so anxious the bad luck should be gone on this very night, and thanks to you, it is. He was not quite certain of the time and did not wish to disappoint his sister, so it was to old Michael he sent the message to be on the watch for him. We were always great friends, Mr. Ted and me, and to think that the blessed Saint Christopher has brought him home safe at last."
He must have made an effort to tell this, feeling that his senses were once more slipping from him for almost immediately he went off again into confused muttering.
"He saved my life," he said once, more clearly, "he saved my sheep, him and those great beautiful white dogs, but—" the thread of consciousness had snapped again—"they were always the hunters, those greyhounds of the King of Connemara; though they lived a thousand years ago you can hear their cry over the hills to this day!"
It was, to Betsey, a moment of great relief, when she heard feet upon the grassy pathway, saw the ​gleam of lanterns through the rifts in the broken walls and knew that help had come. Later, however, there was a very hard hour at the old man's tiny cottage when the doctor attended to his broken leg and the gash in his head.
"He will get through all right," was the cheerful assurance given when the affair was over. "I have attended Michael before, he gets himself into many scrapes but he always comes out of them."
The nurse had come down to give assistance, but she and the doctor were both needed at Mr. Reynolds' bedside. When questioned about Miss Miranda's father, the doctor merely shook his head.
They went away, leaving Betsey to watch Michael alone, since David also had betaken himself to the cottage. She sat for hour after long hour until it was beginning to be morning, as she could see from her place by the bed near the tiny window. The birds were singing; perhaps it was that same thrush that had greeted her before, that was swinging from the drooping elm tree and calling its welcome to the dawn. Michael was sleeping peacefully, she felt very weary herself as she sat there watching the gray light turn slowly to bright day. A step fell on the threshold, a heavy step that could be none other than Mrs. Bassett's.
"These are the strangest doings that ever I heard of," she exclaimed as she came in, taking off her ​coat and putting on her apron almost with the same motion. "To think that I slept through it all and never knew a thing until that boy, tinkering in the workshop before it was light, happened to wake me. I've got the breakfast ready up there at Miss Miranda's, and set everything to rights and now I am just going to stay here while you go back and get some sleep. What a time you have had, poor dear! They say Mr. Reynolds has got through the night a little better than they hoped, though there is still nothing that will rouse him from that stupor."
The sun was really up and shining as Betsey passed through the garden toward the cottage. The world was very clean and glittering and very still, with only the old cock strutting across the poultry yard and lifting his voice in a loud, full crow that sounded far through the quiet of the dawn. It was a pleasant, homely, familiar sound after the strange adventures and unrealities of the night. Betsey began to wonder if it had not indeed been all a dream and she would not presently discover that she had dropped asleep before the toy-cupboard, the tree of jade or the silver Saint Christopher in her hand.
Black Dick, strutting and fluttering before the workshop, seemed to be telling her, before she could run across the grass to the door, that something of great moment was going on inside. David was busy with his back toward her, a very jubilant and ​excited David, still in the damp, bedraggled clothes of last night's adventures, but whistling gayly and handling wrench and hammer as though life itself depended on his speed. He looked at her over his shoulder, smiling his widest and happiest smile.
"Don't go," he said, breathless and eager, "don't go. Something—something is just going to happen!"
There was the snapping of a switch and the slow creak of a lever that had not recently been moved. Then followed a faint and rising hum, a whir of wheels grew louder and deeper, that filled the death-like silence of the room with gay song, that sounded over the garden and through the house, that reached the ears of the invalid upstairs and made him stir and smile and open his eyes.
Betsey listened enthralled, too filled with breathless delight to heed any other sound. Yet the gate from the lane was flung hastily and noisily open and a man in uniform came striding up the path. She did not even heed when Dick, with joyous cawing, spread wide black wings to fly to the stranger's shoulder, she only looked up, startled, to see him standing in the inner hallway beyond the workshop door. There was something of Miss Miranda in his bearing, something of her spirit in his dancing eyes. And his voice, somehow, had a faint ring of her father's when he called up the stair, the same ​familiar call, but with no note of worried helplessness like Mr. Reynolds', only the ringing tidings of a brother's long-desired homecoming—
"Miranda, oh, Miranda."