Only later, when he woke one night in pain, was he bothered by the phrase, “And salute no man by the way.” He lay for a while trying to place it, and at last remembered the man who had passed him on the road in the evening. Or had the man passed him? Could he have been a figure in one of those strange dreams that had begun to plague him? Father Conroy was never sure, but the doubt was enough to cause him another restless night.

Later still, after returning from his desperate visit to England, when he knew and had accepted that he was going to die, he thought again of the man. By that time he could laugh at his fate, and he laughed now at his encounter with the harbinger of his pain. “Who but a cursed Conroy,” he asked himself, “would have a Jehovah’s Witness for a banshee?”

Chapter 2

It was the watershed in Father Conroy’s life. Looking back, the vista seemed wide and flat as a bogland, sunny for the most part, with shadows moving over it here and there – like the trouble about Drewitt’s pony. The country ahead declined steeply into mists and darkness; it was broken by chasms, which when the light glinted on them were rivers carrying reflections of the past; it was the country in which he was to spend the last weeks of his life. Between the two was the night the Witness passed, the night the pain began.

It began suddenly in his sleep. He had been dreaming of a horse which he was trying to harness in the stable of his father’s place in Rosnagree. Slowly he circled it in the darkness of the stall, and slowly it withdrew from him, eluding him with a cautious violence which struck terror into him. He was conscious of breathing close at hand, of a hoof striking softly on the floor. At last, when he could wait no longer, he moved in to where its eye gleamed, and at once pain thudded sharply in his leg. He woke up trembling, to find the pain there just above the knee, still so sharp that he rolled over in agony on the bed. Holding the knee doubled up to him, he gradually became aware of his whereabouts and waited, not knowing what to do, just sweating it out.

Noctis equi, he thought, as if he were naming a disease, noctis equi! And he tried to place the quotation, as if by doing so he could assuage the pain. Who, in God’s name, could have been troubled by the horses of night? Not Horace. Vergil, perhaps? But where, which book? Even when the pain eased away, he lay racking his brain until the cocks of Kilbride began to crow and the window blind grew yellow against the light.