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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
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Title: J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2
Author: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Release Date: March 24, 2004 [eBook #11700]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK J. S. LE FANU'S GHOSTLY TALES,
VOLUME 2***
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J. S. LE FANU'S GHOSTLY TALES, VOLUME 2
An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House (1862)
and
Ultor De Lacy: A Legend of Cappercullen (1861)
by
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
An Authentic Narrative of
a Haunted House
[The Editor of the UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE submits the following very
remarkable statement, with every detail of which he has been for some
years acquainted, upon the ground that it affords the most authentic and
ample relation of a series of marvellous phenoma, in nowise connected
with what is technically termed "spiritualism," which he has anywhere
met with. All the persons--and there are many of them living--upon whose
separate evidence some parts, and upon whose united testimony others, of
this most singular recital depend, are, in their several walks of life,
respectable, and such as would in any matter of judicial investigation
be deemed wholly unexceptionable witnesses. There is not an incident
here recorded which would not have been distinctly deposed to on oath
had any necessity existed, by the persons who severally, and some of
them in great fear, related their own distinct experiences. The Editor
begs most pointedly to meet _in limine_ the suspicion, that he is
elaborating a trick, or vouching for another ghost of Mrs. Veal. As a
mere story the narrative is valueless: its sole claim to attention is
its absolute truth. For the good faith of its relator he pledges his own
and the character of this Magazine. With the Editor's concurrence, the
name of the watering-place, and some special circumstances in no
essential way bearing upon the peculiar character of the story, but
which might have indicated the locality, and possibly annoyed persons
interested in house property there, have been suppressed by the
narrator. Not the slightest liberty has been taken with the narrative,
which is presented precisely in the terms in which the writer of it, who
employs throughout the first person, would, if need were, fix it in the
form of an affidavit.]
Within the last eight years--the precise date I purposely omit--I I was
ordered by my physician, my health being in an unsatisfactory state, to
change my residence to one upon the sea-coast; and accordingly, I took a
house for a year in a fashionable watering-place, at a moderate distance
from the city in which I had previously resided, and connected with it
by a railway.
Winter was setting in when my removal thither was decided upon; but
there was nothing whatever dismal or depressing in the change. The house
I had taken was to all appearance, and in point of convenience, too,
quite a modern one. It formed one in a cheerful row, with small gardens
in front, facing the sea, and commanding sea air and sea views in
perfection. In the rear it had coach-house and stable, and between them
and the house a considerable grass-plot, with some flower-beds,
interposed.
Our family consisted of my wife and myself, with three children, the
eldest about nine years old, she and the next in age being girls; and
the youngest, between six and seven, a boy. To these were added six
servants, whom, although for certain reasons I decline giving their real
names, I shall indicate, for the sake of clearness, by arbitrary ones.
There was a nurse, Mrs. Southerland; a nursery-maid, Ellen Page; the
cook, Mrs. Greenwood; and the housemaid, Ellen Faith; a butler, whom I
shall call Smith, and his son, James, about two-and-twenty.
We came out to take possession at about seven o'clock in the evening;
every thing was comfortable and cheery; good fires lighted, the rooms
neat and airy, and a general air of preparation and comfort, highly
conducive to good spirits and pleasant anticipations.
The sitting-rooms were large and cheerful, and they and the bed-rooms
more than ordinarily lofty, the kitchen and servants' rooms, on the same
level, were well and comfortably furnished, and had, like the rest of
the house, an air of recent painting and fitting up, and a completely
modern character, which imparted a very cheerful air of cleanliness and
convenience.
There had been just enough of the fuss of settling agreeably to occupy
us, and to give a pleasant turn to our thoughts after we had retired to
our rooms. Being an invalid, I had a small bed to myself--resigning the
four-poster to my wife. The candle was extinguished, but a night-light
was burning. I was coming up stairs, and she, already in bed, had just
dismissed her maid, when we were both startled by a wild scream from her
room; I found her in a state of the extremest agitation and terror. She
insisted that she had seen an unnaturally tall figure come beside her
bed and stand there. The light was too faint to enable her to define any
thing respecting this apparition, beyond the fact of her having most
distinctly seen such a shape, colourless from the insufficiency of the
light to disclose more than its dark outline.
We both endeavoured to re-assure her. The room once more looked so
cheerful in the candlelight, that we were quite uninfluenced by the
contagion of her terrors. The movements and voices of the servants down
stairs still getting things into their places and completing our
comfortable arrangements, had also their effect in steeling us against
any such influence, and we set the whole thing down as a dream, or an
imperfectly-seen outline of the bed-curtains. When, however, we were
alone, my wife reiterated, still in great agitation, her clear assertion
that she had most positively seen, being at the time as completely awake
as ever she was, precisely what she had described to us. And in this
conviction she continued perfectly firm.
A day or two after this, it came out that our servants were under an
apprehension that, somehow or other, thieves had established a secret
mode of access to the lower part of the house. The butler, Smith, had
seen an ill-looking woman in his room on the first night of our arrival;
and he and other servants constantly saw, for many days subsequently,
glimpses of a retreating figure, which corresponded with that so seen by
him, passing through a passage which led to a back area in which were
some coal-vaults.
This figure was seen always in the act of retreating, its back turned,
generally getting round the corner of the passage into the area, in a
stealthy and hurried way, and, when closely followed, imperfectly seen
again entering one of the coal-vaults, and when pursued into it, nowhere
to be found.
The idea of any thing supernatural in the matter had, strange to say,
not yet entered the mind of any one of the servants. They had heard some
stories of smugglers having secret passages into houses, and using their
means of access for purposes of pillage, or with a view to frighten
superstitious people out of houses which they needed for their own
objects, and a suspicion of similar practices here, caused them extreme
uneasiness. The apparent anxiety also manifested by this retreating
figure to escape observation, and her always appearing to make her
egress at the same point, favoured this romantic hypothesis. The men,
however, made a most careful examination of the back area, and of the
coal-vaults, with a view to discover some mode of egress, but entirely
without success. On the contrary, the result was, so far as it went,
subversive of the theory; solid masonry met them on every hand.
I called the man, Smith, up, to hear from his own lips the particulars
of what he had seen; and certainly his report was very curious. I give
it as literally as my memory enables me:----
His son slept in the same room, and was sound asleep; but he lay awake,
as men sometimes will on a change of bed, and having many things on his
mind. He was lying with his face towards the wall, but observing a light
and some little stir in the room, he turned round in his bed, and saw
the figure of a woman, squalid, and ragged in dress; her figure rather
low and broad; as well as I recollect, she had something--either a cloak
or shawl--on, and wore a bonnet. Her back was turned, and she appeared
to be searching or rummaging for something on the floor, and, without
appearing to observe him, she turned in doing so towards him. The light,
which was more like the intense glow of a coal, as he described it,
being of a deep red colour, proceeded from the hollow of her hand, which
she held beside her head, and he saw her perfectly distinctly. She
appeared middle-aged, was deeply pitted with the smallpox, and blind of
one eye. His phrase in describing her general appearance was, that she
was "a miserable, poor-looking creature."
He was under the impression that she must be the woman who had been left
by the proprietor in charge of the house, and who had that evening,
after having given up the keys, remained for some little time with the
female servants. He coughed, therefore, to apprize her of his presence,
and turned again towards the wall. When he again looked round she and
the light were gone; and odd as was her method of lighting herself in
her search, the circumstances excited neither uneasiness nor curiosity
in his mind, until he discovered next morning that the woman in question
had left the house long before he had gone to his bed.
I examined the man very closely as to the appearance of the person who
had visited him, and the result was what I have described. It struck me
as an odd thing, that even then, considering how prone to superstition
persons in his rank of life usually are, he did not seem to suspect any
thing supernatural in the occurrence; and, on the contrary, was
thoroughly persuaded that his visitant was a living person, who had got
into the house by some hidden entrance.
On Sunday, on his return from his place of worship, he told me that,
when the service was ended, and the congregation making their way slowly
out, he saw the very woman in the crowd, and kept his eye upon her for
several minutes, but such was the crush, that all his efforts to reach
her were unavailing, and when he got into the open street she was gone.
He was quite positive as to his having distinctly seen her, however,
for several minutes, and scouted the possibility of any mistake as to
identity; and fully impressed with the substantial and living reality of
his visitant, he was very much provoked at her having escaped him. He
made inquiries also in the neighbourhood, but could procure no
information, nor hear of any other persons having seen any woman
corresponding with his visitant.
The cook and the housemaid occupied a bed-room on the kitchen floor. It
had whitewashed walls, and they were actually terrified by the
appearance of the shadow of a woman passing and repassing across the
side wall opposite to their beds. They suspected that this had been
going on much longer than they were aware, for its presence was
discovered by a sort of accident, its movements happening to take a
direction in distinct contrariety to theirs.
This shadow always moved upon one particular wall, returning after short
intervals, and causing them extreme terror. They placed the candle, as
the most obvious specific, so close to the infested wall, that the flame
all but touched it; and believed for some time that they had effectually
got rid of this annoyance; but one night, notwithstanding this
arrangement of the light, the shadow returned, passing and repassing, as
heretofore, upon the same wall, although their only candle was burning
within an inch of it, and it was obvious that no substance capable of
casting such a shadow could have interposed; and, indeed, as they
described it, the shadow seemed to have no sort of relation to the
position of the light, and appeared, as I have said, in manifest
defiance of the laws of optics.
I ought to mention that the housemaid was a particularly fearless sort
of person, as well as a very honest one; and her companion, the cook, a
scrupulously religious woman, and both agreed in every particular in
their relation of what occurred.
Meanwhile, the nursery was not without its annoyances, though as yet of
a comparatively trivial kind. Sometimes, at night, the handle of the
door was turned hurriedly as if by a person trying to come in, and at
others a knocking was made at it. These sounds occurred after the
children had settled to sleep, and while the nurse still remained awake.
Whenever she called to know "who is there," the sounds ceased; but
several times, and particularly at first, she was under the impression
that they were caused by her mistress, who had come to see the children,
and thus impressed she had got up and opened the door, expecting to see
her, but discovering only darkness, and receiving no answer to her
inquiries.
With respect to this nurse, I must mention that I believe no more
perfectly trustworthy servant was ever employed in her capacity; and, in
addition to her integrity, she was remarkably gifted with sound common
sense.
One morning, I think about three or four weeks after our arrival, I was
sitting at the parlour window which looked to the front, when I saw the
little iron door which admitted into the small garden that lay between
the window where I was sitting and the public road, pushed open by a
woman who so exactly answered the description given by Smith of the
woman who had visited his room on the night of his arrival as
instantaneously to impress me with the conviction that she must be the
identical person. She was a square, short woman, dressed in soiled and
tattered clothes, scarred and pitted with small-pox, and blind of an
eye. She stepped hurriedly into the little enclosure, and peered from a
distance of a few yards into the room where I was sitting. I felt that
now was the moment to clear the matter up; but there was something
stealthy in the manner and look of the woman which convinced me that I
must not appear to notice her until her retreat was fairly cut off.
Unfortunately, I was suffering from a lame foot, and could not reach the
bell as quickly as I wished. I made all the haste I could, and rang
violently to bring up the servant Smith. In the short interval that
intervened, I observed the woman from the window, who having in a
leisurely way, and with a kind of scrutiny, looked along the front
windows of the house, passed quickly out again, closing the gate after
her, and followed a lady who was walking along the footpath at a quick
pace, as if with the intention of begging from her. The moment the man
entered I told him--"the blind woman you described to me has this
instant followed a lady in that direction, try to overtake her." He was,
if possible, more eager than I in the chase, but returned in a short
time after a vain pursuit, very hot, and utterly disappointed. And,
thereafter, we saw her face no more.
All this time, and up to the period of our leaving the house, which was
not for two or three months later, there occurred at intervals the only
phenomenon in the entire series having any resemblance to what we hear
described of "Spiritualism." This was a knocking, like a soft hammering
with a wooden mallet, as it seemed in the timbers between the bedroom
ceilings and the roof. It had this special peculiarity, that it was
always rythmical, and, I think, invariably, the emphasis upon the last
stroke. It would sound rapidly "one, two, three, _four_--one, two,
three, _four_;" or "one, two, _three_--one, two, _three_," and sometimes
"one, _two_--one, _two_," &c., and this, with intervals and
resumptions, monotonously for hours at a time.
At first this caused my wife, who was a good deal confined to her bed,
much annoyance; and we sent to our neighbours to inquire if any
hammering or carpentering was going on in their houses but were informed
that nothing of the sort was taking place. I have myself heard it
frequently, always in the same inaccessible part of the house, and with
the same monotonous emphasis. One odd thing about it was, that on my
wife's calling out, as she used to do when it became more than usually
troublesome, "stop that noise," it was invariably arrested for a longer
or shorter time.
Of course none of these occurrences were ever mentioned in hearing of
the children. They would have been, no doubt, like most children,
greatly terrified had they heard any thing of the matter, and known that
their elders were unable to account for what was passing; and their
fears would have made them wretched and troublesome.
They used to play for some hours every day in the back garden--the house
forming one end of this oblong inclosure, the stable and coach-house the
other, and two parallel walls of considerable height the sides. Here, as
it afforded a perfectly safe playground, they were frequently left quite
to themselves; and in talking over their days' adventures, as children
will, they happened to mention a woman, or rather the woman, for they
had long grown familiar with her appearance, whom they used to see in
the garden while they were at play. They assumed that she came in and
went out at the stable door, but they never actually saw her enter or
depart. They merely saw a figure--that of a very poor woman, soiled and
ragged--near the stable wall, stooping over the ground, and apparently
grubbing in the loose clay in search of something. She did not disturb,
or appear to observe them; and they left her in undisturbed possession
of her nook of ground. When seen it was always in the same spot, and
similarly occupied; and the description they gave of her general
appearance--for they never saw her face--corresponded with that of the
one-eyed woman whom Smith, and subsequently as it seemed, I had seen.
The other man, James, who looked after a mare which I had purchased for
the purpose of riding exercise, had, like every one else in the house,
his little trouble to report, though it was not much. The stall in
which, as the most comfortable, it was decided to place her, she
peremptorily declined to enter. Though a very docile and gentle little
animal, there was no getting her into it. She would snort and rear, and,
in fact, do or suffer any thing rather than set her hoof in it. He was
fain, therefore, to place her in another. And on several occasions he
found her there, exhibiting all the equine symptoms of extreme fear.
Like the rest of us, however, this man was not troubled in the
particular case with any superstitious qualms. The mare had evidently
been frightened; and he was puzzled to find out how, or by whom, for the
stable was well-secured, and had, I am nearly certain, a lock-up yard
outside.
One morning I was greeted with the intelligence that robbers had
certainly got into the house in the night; and that one of them had
actually been seen in the nursery. The witness, I found, was my eldest
child, then, as I have said, about nine years of age. Having awoke in
the night, and lain awake for some time in her bed, she heard the handle
of the door turn, and a person whom she distinctly saw--for it was a
light night, and the window-shutters unclosed--but whom she had never
seen before, stepped in on tiptoe, and with an appearance of great
caution. He was a rather small man, with a very red face; he wore an
oddly cut frock coat, the collar of which stood up, and trousers, rough
and wide, like those of a sailor, turned up at the ankles, and either
short boots or clumsy shoes, covered with mud. This man listened beside
the nurse's bed, which stood next the door, as if to satisfy himself
that she was sleeping soundly; and having done so for some seconds, he
began to move cautiously in a diagonal line, across the room to the
chimney-piece, where he stood for a while, and so resumed his tiptoe
walk, skirting the wall, until he reached a chest of drawers, some of
which were open, and into which he looked, and began to rummage in a
hurried way, as the child supposed, making search for something worth
taking away. He then passed on to the window, where was a
dressing-table, at which he also stopped, turning over the things upon
it, and standing for some time at the window as if looking out, and then
resuming his walk by the side wall opposite to that by which he had
moved up to the window, he returned in the same way toward the nurse's
bed, so as to reach it at the foot. With its side to the end wall, in
which was the door, was placed the little bed in which lay my eldest
child, who watched his proceedings with the extremest terror. As he drew
near she instinctively moved herself in the bed, with her head and
shoulders to the wall, drawing up her feet; but he passed by without
appearing to observe, or, at least, to care for her presence.
Immediately after the nurse turned in her bed as if about to waken; and
when the child, who had drawn the clothes about her head, again ventured
to peep out, the man was gone.
The child had no idea of her having seen any thing more formidable than
a thief. With the prowling, cautious, and noiseless manner of proceeding
common to such marauders, the air and movements of the man whom she had
seen entirely corresponded. And on hearing her perfectly distinct and
consistent account, I could myself arrive at no other conclusion than
that a stranger had actually got into the house. I had, therefore, in
the first instance, a most careful examination made to discover any
traces of an entrance having been made by any window into the house. The
doors had been found barred and locked as usual; but no sign of any
thing of the sort was discernible. I then had the various
articles--plate, wearing apparel, books, &c., counted; and after having
conned over and reckoned up every thing, it became quite clear that
nothing whatever had been removed from the house, nor was there the
slightest indication of any thing having been so much as disturbed
there. I must here state that this child was remarkably clear,
intelligent, and observant; and that her description of the man, and of
all that had occurred, was most exact, and as detailed as the want of
perfect light rendered possible.
I felt assured that an entrance had actually been effected into the
house, though for what purpose was not easily to be conjectured. The
man, Smith, was equally confident upon this point; and his theory was
that the object was simply to frighten us out of the house by making us
believe it haunted; and he was more than ever anxious and on the alert
to discover the conspirators. It often since appeared to me odd. Every
year, indeed, more odd, as this cumulative case of the marvellous
becomes to my mind more and more inexplicable--that underlying my sense
of mystery and puzzle, was all along the quiet assumption that all these
occurrences were one way or another referable to natural causes. I could
not account for them, indeed, myself; but during the whole period I
inhabited that house, I never once felt, though much alone, and often up
very late at night, any of those tremors and thrills which every one has
at times experienced when situation and the hour are favourable. Except
the cook and housemaid, who were plagued with the shadow I mentioned
crossing and recrossing upon the bedroom wall, we all, without
exception, experienced the same strange sense of security, and regarded
these phenomena rather with a perplexed sort of interest and curiosity,
than with any more unpleasant sensations.
The knockings which I have mentioned at the nursery door, preceded
generally by the sound of a step on the lobby, meanwhile continued. At
that time (for my wife, like myself, was an invalid) two eminent
physicians, who came out occasionally by rail, were attending us. These
gentlemen were at first only amused, but ultimately interested, and very
much puzzled by the occurrences which we described. One of them, at
last, recommended that a candle should be kept burning upon the lobby.
It was in fact a recurrence to an old woman's recipe against ghosts--of
course it might be serviceable, too, against impostors; at all events,
seeming, as I have said, very much interested and puzzled, he advised
it, and it was tried. We fancied that it was successful; for there was
an interval of quiet for, I think, three or four nights. But after that,
the noises--the footsteps on the lobby--the knocking at the door, and
the turning of the handle recommenced in full force, notwithstanding the
light upon the table outside; and these particular phenomena became only
more perplexing than ever.
The alarm of robbers and smugglers gradually subsided after a week or
two; but we were again to hear news from the nursery. Our second little
girl, then between seven and eight years of age, saw in the night
time--she alone being awake--a young woman, with black, or very dark
hair, which hung loose, and with a black cloak on, standing near the
middle of the floor, opposite the hearthstone, and fronting the foot of
her bed. She appeared quite unobservant of the children and nurse
sleeping in the room. She was very pale, and looked, the child said,
both "sorry and frightened," and with something very peculiar and
terrible about her eyes, which made the child conclude that she was
dead. She was looking, not at, but in the direction of the child's bed,
and there was a dark streak across her throat, like a scar with blood
upon it. This figure was not motionless; but once or twice turned
slowly, and without appearing to be conscious of the presence of the
child, or the other occupants of the room, like a person in vacancy or
abstraction. There was on this occasion a night-light burning in the
chamber; and the child saw, or thought she saw, all these particulars
with the most perfect distinctness. She got her head under the
bed-clothes; and although a good many years have passed since then, she
cannot recall the spectacle without feelings of peculiar horror.
One day, when the children were playing in the back garden, I asked them
to point out to me the spot where they were accustomed to see the woman
who occasionally showed herself as I have described, near the stable
wall. There was no division of opinion as to this precise point, which
they indicated in the most distinct and confident way. I suggested that,
perhaps, something might be hidden there in the ground; and advised them
digging a hole there with their little spades, to try for it.
Accordingly, to work they went, and by my return in the evening they had
grubbed up a piece of a jawbone, with several teeth in it. The bone was
very much decayed, and ready to crumble to pieces, but the teeth were
quite sound. I could not tell whether they were human grinders; but I
showed the fossil to one of the physicians I have mentioned, who came
out the next evening, and he pronounced them human teeth. The same
conclusion was come to a day or two later by the other medical man. It
appears to me now, on reviewing the whole matter, almost unaccountable
that, with such evidence before me, I should not have got in a labourer,
and had the spot effectually dug and searched. I can only say, that so
it was. I was quite satisfied of the moral truth of every word that had
been related to me, and which I have here set down with scrupulous
accuracy. But I experienced an apathy, for which neither then nor
afterwards did I quite know how to account. I had a vague, but immovable
impression that the whole affair was referable to natural agencies. It
was not until some time after we had left the house, which, by-the-by,
we afterwards found had had the reputation of being haunted before we
had come to live in it, that on reconsideration I discovered the serious
difficulty of accounting satisfactorily for all that had occurred upon
ordinary principles. A great deal we might arbitrarily set down to
imagination. But even in so doing there was, _in limine_, the oddity,
not to say improbability, of so many different persons having nearly
simultaneously suffered from different spectral and other illusions
during the short period for which we had occupied that house, who never
before, nor so far as we learned, afterwards were troubled by any fears
or fancies of the sort. There were other things, too, not to be so
accounted for. The odd knockings in the roof I frequently heard myself.
There were also, which I before forgot to mention, in the daytime,
rappings at the doors of the sitting-rooms, which constantly deceived
us; and it was not till our "come in" was unanswered, and the hall or
passage outside the door was discovered to be empty, that we learned
that whatever else caused them, human hands did not. All the persons who
reported having seen the different persons or appearances here described
by me, were just as confident of having literally and distinctly seen
them, as I was of having seen the hard-featured woman with the blind
eye, so remarkably corresponding with Smith's description.
About a week after the discovery of the teeth, which were found, I
think, about two feet under the ground, a friend, much advanced in
years, and who remembered the town in which we had now taken up our
abode, for a very long time, happened to pay us a visit. He
good-humouredly pooh-poohed the whole thing; but at the same time was
evidently curious about it. "We might construct a sort of story," said I
(I am giving, of course, the substance and purport, not the exact words,
of our dialogue), "and assign to each of the three figures who appeared
their respective parts in some dreadful tragedy enacted in this house.
The male figure represents the murderer; the ill-looking, one-eyed woman
his accomplice, who, we will suppose, buried the body where she is now
so often seen grubbing in the earth, and where the human teeth and
jawbone have so lately been disinterred; and the young woman with
dishevelled tresses, and black cloak, and the bloody scar across her
throat, their victim. A difficulty, however, which I cannot get over,
exists in the cheerfulness, the great publicity, and the evident very
recent date of the house." "Why, as to that," said he, "the house is
_not_ modern; it and those beside it formed an old government store,
altered and fitted up recently as you see. I remember it well in my
young days, fifty years ago, before the town had grown out in this
direction, and a more entirely lonely spot, or one more fitted for the
commission of a secret crime, could not have been imagined."
I have nothing to add, for very soon after this my physician pronounced
a longer stay unnecessary for my health, and we took our departure for
another place of abode. I may add, that although I have resided for
considerable periods in many other houses, I never experienced any
annoyances of a similar kind elsewhere; neither have I made (stupid dog!
you will say), any inquiries respecting either the antecedents or
subsequent history of the house in which we made so disturbed a sojourn.
I was content with what I knew, and have here related as clearly as I
could, and I think it a very pretty puzzle as it stands.
[Thus ends the statement, which we abandon to the ingenuity of our
readers, having ourselves no satisfactory explanation to suggest; and
simply repeating the assurance with which we prefaced it, namely, that
we can vouch for the perfect good faith and the accuracy of the
narrator.--E.D.U.M.]
Ultor De Lacy:
A Legend of Cappercullen
CHAPTER I
The Jacobite's Legacy
In my youth I heard a great many Irish family traditions, more or less
of a supernatural character, some of them very peculiar, and all, to a
child at least, highly interesting. One of these I will now relate,
though the translation to cold type from oral narrative, with all the
aids of animated human voice and countenance, and the appropriate
_mise-en-scène_ of the old-fashioned parlour fireside and its listening
circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of
leafless boughs, with the occasional rattle of the clumsy old
window-frame behind shutter and curtain, as the blast swept by, is at
best a trying one.
About midway up the romantic glen of Cappercullen, near the point where
the counties of Limerick, Clare, and Tipperary converge, upon the then
sequestered and forest-bound range of the Slieve-Felim hills, there
stood, in the reigns of the two earliest Georges, the picturesque and
massive remains of one of the finest of the Anglo-Irish castles of
Munster--perhaps of Ireland.
It crowned the precipitous edge of the wooded glen, itself half-buried
among the wild forest that covered that long and solitary range. There
was no human habitation within a circle of many miles, except the
half-dozen hovels and the small thatched chapel composing the little
village of Murroa, which lay at the foot of the glen among the
straggling skirts of the noble forest.
Its remoteness and difficulty of access saved it from demolition. It was
worth nobody's while to pull down and remove the ponderous and clumsy
oak, much less the masonry or flagged roofing of the pile. Whatever
would pay the cost of removal had been long since carried away. The rest
was abandoned to time--the destroyer.
The hereditary owners of this noble building and of a wide territory in
the contiguous counties I have named, were English--the De Lacys--long
naturalized in Ireland. They had acquired at least this portion of their
estate in the reign of Henry VIII, and held it, with some vicissitudes,
down to the establishment of the revolution in Ireland, when they
suffered attainder, and, like other great families of that period,
underwent a final eclipse.
The De Lacy of that day retired to France, and held a brief command in
the Irish Brigade, interrupted by sickness. He retired, became a poor
hanger-on of the Court of St. Germains, and died early in the eighteenth
century--as well as I remember, 1705--leaving an only son, hardly twelve
years old, called by the strange but significant name of Ultor.
At this point commences the marvellous ingredient of my tale.
When his father was dying, he had him to his bedside, with no one by
except his confessor; and having told him, first, that on reaching the
age of twenty-one, he was to lay claim to a certain small estate in the
county of Clare, in Ireland, in right of his mother--the title-deeds of
which he gave him--and next, having enjoined him not to marry before the
age of thirty, on the ground that earlier marriages destroyed the spirit
and the power of enterprise, and would incapacitate him from the
accomplishment of his destiny--the restoration of his family--he then
went on to open to the child a matter which so terrified him that he
cried lamentably, trembling all over, clinging to the priest's gown with
one hand and to his father's cold wrist with the other, and imploring
him, with screams of horror, to desist from his communication.
But the priest, impressed, no doubt, himself, with its necessity,
compelled him to listen. And then his father showed him a small picture,
from which also the child turned with shrieks, until similarly
constrained to look. They did not let him go until he had carefully
conned the features, and was able to tell them, from memory, the colour
of the eyes and hair, and the fashion and hues of the dress. Then his
father gave him a black box containing this portrait, which was a
full-length miniature, about nine inches long, painted very finely in
oils, as smooth as enamel, and folded above it a sheet of paper, written
over in a careful and very legible hand.
The deeds and this black box constituted the most important legacy
bequeathed to his only child by the ruined Jacobite, and he deposited
them in the hands of the priest, in trust, till his boy, Ultor, should
have attained to an age to understand their value, and to keep them
securely.
When this scene was ended, the dying exile's mind, I suppose, was
relieved, for he spoke cheerily, and said he believed he would recover;
and they soothed the crying child, and his father kissed him, and gave
him a little silver coin to buy fruit with; and so they sent him off
with another boy for a walk, and when he came back his father was dead.
He remained in France under the care of this ecclesiastic until he had
attained the age of twenty-one, when he repaired to Ireland, and his
title being unaffected by his father's attainder, he easily made good
his claim to the small estate in the county of Clare.
There he settled, making a dismal and solitary tour now and then of the
vast territories which had once been his father's, and nursing those
gloomy and impatient thoughts which befitted the enterprises to which he
was devoted.
Occasionally he visited Paris, that common centre of English, Irish, and
Scottish disaffection; and there, when a little past thirty, he married
the daughter of another ruined Irish house. His bride returned with him
to the melancholy seclusion of their Munster residence, where she bore
him in succession two daughters--Alice, the elder, dark-eyed and
dark-haired, grave and sensible--Una, four years younger, with large
blue eyes and long and beautiful golden hair.
Their poor mother was, I believe, naturally a lighthearted, sociable,
high-spirited little creature; and her gay and childish nature pined in
the isolation and gloom of her lot. At all events she died young, and
the children were left to the sole care of their melancholy and
embittered father. In process of time the girls grew up, tradition says,
beautiful. The elder was designed for a convent, the younger her father
hoped to mate as nobly as her high blood and splendid beauty seemed to
promise, if only the great game on which he had resolved to stake all
succeeded.
CHAPTER II
The Fairies in the Castle
The Rebellion of '45 came, and Ultor de Lacy was one of the few Irishmen
implicated treasonably in that daring and romantic insurrection. Of
course there were warrants out against him, but he was not to be found.
The young ladies, indeed, remained as heretofore in their father's
lonely house in Clare; but whether he had crossed the water or was still
in Ireland was for some time unknown, even to them. In due course he was
attainted, and his little estate forfeited. It was a miserable
catastrophe--a tremendous and beggarly waking up from a life-long dream
of returning principality.
In due course the officers of the crown came down to take possession,
and it behoved the young ladies to flit. Happily for them the
ecclesiastic I have mentioned was not quite so confident as their
father, of his winning back the magnificent patrimony of his ancestors;
and by his advice the daughters had been secured twenty pounds a year
each, under the marriage settlement of their parents, which was all that
stood between this proud house and literal destitution.
Late one evening, as some little boys from the village were returning
from a ramble through the dark and devious glen of Cappercullen, with
their pockets laden with nuts and "frahans," to their amazement and even
terror they saw a light streaming redly from the narrow window of one of
the towers overhanging the precipice among the ivy and the lofty
branches, across the glen, already dim in the shadows of the deepening
night.
"Look--look--look--'tis the Phooka's tower!" was the general cry, in the
vernacular Irish, and a universal scamper commenced.
The bed of the glen, strewn with great fragments of rock, among which
rose the tall stems of ancient trees, and overgrown with a tangled
copse, was at the best no favourable ground for a run. Now it was dark;
and, terrible work breaking through brambles and hazels and tumbling
over rocks. Little Shaeen Mull Ryan, the last of the panic rout,
screaming to his mates to wait for him--saw a whitish figure emerge from
the thicket at the base of the stone flight of steps that descended the
side of the glen, close by the castle-wall, intercepting his flight, and
a discordant male voice shrieked----
"I have you!"
At the same time the boy, with a cry of terror, tripped and tumbled; and
felt himself roughly caught by the arm, and hauled to his feet with a
shake.
A wild yell from the child, and a volley of terror and entreaty
followed.
"Who is it, Larry; what's the matter?" cried a voice, high in air, from
the turret window, The words floated down through the trees, clear and
sweet as the low notes of a flute.
"Only a child, my lady; a boy."
"Is he hurt?"
"Are you hurted?" demanded the whitish man, who held him fast, and
repeated the question in Irish; but the child only kept blubbering and
crying for mercy, with his hands clasped, and trying to drop on his
knees.
Larry's strong old hand held him up. He _was_ hurt, and bleeding from
over his eye.
"Just a trifle hurted, my lady!"
"Bring him up here."
Shaeen Mull Ryan gave himself over. He was among "the good people," who
he knew would keep him prisoner for ever and a day. There was no good in
resisting. He grew bewildered, and yielded himself passively to his
fate, and emerged from the glen on the platform above; his captor's
knotted old hand still on his arm, and looked round on the tall
mysterious trees, and the gray front of the castle, revealed in the
imperfect moonlight, as upon the scenery of a dream.
The old man who, with thin wiry legs, walked by his side, in a dingy
white coat, and blue facings, and great pewter buttons, with his silver
gray hair escaping from under his battered three-cocked hat; and his
shrewd puckered resolute face, in which the boy could read no promise of
sympathy, showing so white and phantom-like in the moonlight, was, as he
thought, the incarnate ideal of a fairy.
This figure led him in silence under the great arched gateway, and
across the grass-grown court, to the door in the far angle of the
building; and so, in the dark, round and round, up a stone screw stair,
and with a short turn into a large room, with a fire of turf and wood,
burning on its long unused hearth, over which hung a pot, and about it
an old woman with a great wooden spoon was busy. An iron candlestick
supported their solitary candle; and about the floor of the room, as
well as on the table and chairs, lay a litter of all sorts of things;
piles of old faded hangings, boxes, trunks, clothes, pewter-plates, and
cups; and I know not what more.
But what instantly engaged the fearful gaze of the boy were the figures
of two ladies; red drugget cloaks they had on, like the peasant girls of
Munster and Connaught, and the rest of their dress was pretty much in
keeping. But they had the grand air, the refined expression and beauty,
and above all, the serene air of command that belong to people of a
higher rank.
The elder, with black hair and full brown eyes, sat writing at the deal
table on which the candle stood, and raised her dark gaze to the boy as
he came in. The other, with her hood thrown back, beautiful and _riant_,
with a flood of wavy golden hair, and great blue eyes, and with
something kind, and arch, and strange in her countenance, struck him as
the most wonderful beauty he could have imagined.
They questioned the man in a language strange to the child. It was not
English, for he had a smattering of that, and the man's story seemed to
amuse them. The two young ladies exchanged a glance, and smiled
mysteriously. He was more convinced than ever that he was among the good
people. The younger stepped gaily forward and said----
"Do you know who _I_ am, my little man? Well, I'm the fairy Una, and
this is my palace; and that fairy you see there (pointing to the dark
lady, who was looking out something in a box), is my sister and family
physician, the Lady Graveairs; and these (glancing at the old man and
woman), are some of my courtiers; and I'm considering now what I shall
do with _you_, whether I shall send you to-night to Lough Guir, riding
on a rush, to make my compliments to the Earl of Desmond in his
enchanted castle; or, straight to your bed, two thousand miles under
ground, among the gnomes; or to prison in that little corner of the moon
you see through the window--with the man-in-the-moon for your gaoler,
for thrice three hundred years and a day! There, don't cry. You only see
how serious a thing it is for you, little boys, to come so near my
castle. Now, for this once, I'll let you go. But, henceforward, any boys
I, or my people, may find within half a mile round my castle, shall
belong to me for life, and never behold their home or their people
more."
And she sang a little air and chased mystically half a dozen steps
before him, holding out her cloak with her pretty fingers, and
courtesying very low, to his indescribable alarm.
Then, with a little laugh, she said----
"My little man, we must mend your head."
And so they washed his scratch, and the elder one applied a plaister to
it. And she of the great blue eyes took out of her pocket a little
French box of bon-bons and emptied it into his hand, and she said----
"You need not be afraid to eat these--they are very good--and I'll send
my fairy, Blanc-et-bleu, to set you free. Take him (she addressed
Larry), and let him go, with a solemn charge."
The elder, with a grave and affectionate smile, said, looking on the
fairy----
"Brave, dear, wild Una! nothing can ever quell your gaiety of heart."
And Una kissed her merrily on the cheek.
So the oak door of the room again opened, and Shaeen, with his
conductor, descended the stair. He walked with the scared boy in grim
silence near half way down the wild hill-side toward Murroa, and then he
stopped, and said in Irish----
"You never saw the fairies before, my fine fellow, and 'tisn't often
those who once set eyes on us return to tell it. Whoever comes nearer,
night or day, than this stone," and he tapped it with the end of his
cane, "will never see his home again, for we'll keep him till the day of
judgment; goodnight, little gossoon--and away with you."
So these young ladies, Alice and Una, with two old servants, by their
father's direction, had taken up their abode in a portion of that side
of the old castle which overhung the glen; and with the furniture and
hangings they had removed from their late residence, and with the aid of
glass in the casements and some other indispensable repairs, and a
thorough airing, they made the rooms they had selected just habitable,
as a rude and temporary shelter.
CHAPTER III
The Priest's Adventures in the Glen
At first, of course, they saw or heard little of their father. In
general, however, they knew that his plan was to procure some employment
in France, and to remove them there. Their present strange abode was
only an adventure and an episode, and they believed that any day they
might receive instructions to commence their journey.
After a little while the pursuit relaxed. The government, I believe, did
not care, provided he did not obtrude himself, what became of him, or
where he concealed himself. At all events, the local authorities showed
no disposition to hunt him down. The young ladies' charges on the little
forfeited property were paid without any dispute, and no vexatious
inquiries were raised as to what had become of the furniture and other
personal property which had been carried away from the forfeited house.
The haunted reputation of the castle--for in those days, in matters of
the marvellous, the oldest were children--secured the little family in
the seclusion they coveted. Once, or sometimes twice a week, old
Laurence, with a shaggy little pony, made a secret expedition to the
city of Limerick, starting before dawn, and returning under the cover of
the night, with his purchases. There was beside an occasional sly
moonlit visit from the old parish priest, and a midnight mass in the old
castle for the little outlawed congregation.
As the alarm and inquiry subsided, their father made them, now and then,
a brief and stealthy visit. At first these were but of a night's
duration, and with great precaution; but gradually they were extended
and less guarded. Still he was, as the phrase is in Munster, "on his
keeping." He had firearms always by his bed, and had arranged places of
concealment in the castle in the event of a surprise. But no attempt nor
any disposition to molest him appearing, he grew more at ease, if not
more cheerful.
It came, at last, that he would sometimes stay so long as two whole
months at a time, and then depart as suddenly and mysteriously as he
came. I suppose he had always some promising plot on hand, and his head
full of ingenious treason, and lived on the sickly and exciting dietary
of hope deferred.
Was there a poetical justice in this, that the little _ménage_ thus
secretly established, in the solitary and timeworn pile, should have
themselves experienced, but from causes not so easily explicable, those
very supernatural perturbations which they had themselves essayed to
inspire?
The interruption of the old priest's secret visits was the earliest
consequence of the mysterious interference which now began to display
itself. One night, having left his cob in care of his old sacristan in
the little village, he trudged on foot along the winding pathway, among
the gray rocks and ferns that threaded the glen, intending a ghostly
visit to the fair recluses of the castle, and he lost his way in this
strange fashion.
There was moonlight, indeed, but it was little more than quarter-moon,
and a long train of funereal clouds were sailing slowly across the
sky--so that, faint and wan as it was, the light seldom shone full out,
and was often hidden for a minute or two altogether. When he reached the
point in the glen where the castle-stairs were wont to be, he could see
nothing of them, and above, no trace of the castle-towers. So, puzzled
somewhat, he pursued his way up the ravine, wondering how his walk had
become so unusually protracted and fatiguing.
At last, sure enough, he saw the castle as plain as could be, and a
lonely streak of candle-light issuing from the tower, just as usual,
when his visit was expected. But he could not find the stair; and had to
clamber among the rocks and copse-wood the best way he could. But when
he emerged at top, there was nothing but the bare heath. Then the clouds
stole over the moon again, and he moved along with hesitation and
difficulty, and once more he saw the outline of the castle against the
sky, quite sharp and clear. But this time it proved to be a great
battlemented mass of cloud on the horizon. In a few minutes more he was
quite close, all of a sudden, to the great front, rising gray and dim in
the feeble light, and not till he could have struck it with his good oak
"wattle" did he discover it to be only one of those wild, gray frontages
of living rock that rise here and there in picturesque tiers along the
slopes of those solitary mountains. And so, till dawn, pursuing this
mirage of the castle, through pools and among ravines, he wore out a
night of miserable misadventure and fatigue.
Another night, riding up the glen, so far as the level way at bottom
would allow, and intending to make his nag fast at his customary tree,
he heard on a sudden a horrid shriek at top of the steep rocks above his
head, and something--a gigantic human form, it seemed--came tumbling and
bounding headlong down through the rocks, and fell with a fearful
impetus just before his horse's hoofs and there lay like a huge
palpitating carcass. The horse was scared, as, indeed, was his rider,
too, and more so when this apparently lifeless thing sprang up to his
legs, and throwing his arms apart to bar their further progress,
advanced his white and gigantic face towards them. Then the horse
started about, with a snort of terror, nearly unseating the priest, and
broke away into a furious and uncontrollable gallop.
I need not recount all the strange and various misadventures which the
honest priest sustained in his endeavours to visit the castle, and its
isolated tenants. They were enough to wear out his resolution, and
frighten him into submission. And so at last these spiritual visits
quite ceased; and fearing to awaken inquiry and suspicion, he thought it
only prudent to abstain from attempting them in the daytime.
So the young ladies of the castle were more alone than ever. Their
father, whose visits were frequently of long duration, had of late
ceased altogether to speak of their contemplated departure for France,
grew angry at any allusion to it, and they feared, had abandoned the
plan altogether.
CHAPTER IV
The Light in the Bell Tower
Shortly after the discontinuance of the priest's visits, old Laurence,
one night, to his surprise, saw light issuing from a window in the Bell
Tower. It was at first only a tremulous red ray, visible only for a few
minutes, which seemed to pass from the room, through whose window it
escaped upon the courtyard of the castle, and so to lose itself. This
tower and casement were in the angle of the building, exactly
confronting that in which the little outlawed family had taken up their
quarters.
The whole family were troubled at the appearance of this dull red ray
from the chamber in the Bell Tower. Nobody knew what to make of it. But
Laurence, who had campaigned in Italy with his old master, the young
ladies' grandfather--"the heavens be his bed this night!"--was resolved
to see it out, and took his great horse-pistols with him, and ascended
to the corridor leading to the tower. But his search was vain.
This light left a sense of great uneasiness among the inmates, and most
certainly it was not pleasant to suspect the establishment of an
independent and possibly dangerous lodger or even colony, within the
walls of the same old building.
The light very soon appeared again, steadier and somewhat brighter, in
the same chamber. Again old Laurence buckled on his armour, swearing
ominously to himself, and this time bent in earnest upon conflict. The
young ladies watched in thrilling suspense from the great window in
_their_ stronghold, looking diagonally across the court. But as
Laurence, who had entered the massive range of buildings opposite, might
be supposed to be approaching the chamber from which this ill-omened
glare proceeded, it steadily waned, finally disappearing altogether,
just a few seconds before his voice was heard shouting from the arched
window to know which way the light had gone.
This lighting up of the great chamber of the Bell Tower grew at last to
be of frequent and almost continual recurrence. It was, there, long ago,
in times of trouble and danger, that the De Lacys of those evil days
used to sit in feudal judgment upon captive adversaries, and, as
tradition alleged, often gave them no more time for shrift and prayer,
than it needed to mount to the battlement of the turret over-head, from
which they were forthwith hung by the necks, for a caveat and admonition
to all evil disposed persons viewing the same from the country beneath.
Old Laurence observed these mysterious glimmerings with an evil and an
anxious eye, and many and various were the stratagems he tried, but in
vain, to surprise the audacious intruders. It is, however, I believe, a
fact that no phenomenon, no matter how startling at first, if prosecuted
with tolerable regularity, and unattended with any new circumstances of
terror, will very long continue to excite alarm or even wonder.
So the family came to acquiesce in this mysterious light. No harm
accompanied it. Old Laurence, as he smoked his lonely pipe in the
grass-grown courtyard, would cast a disturbed glance at it, as it softly
glowed out through the darking aperture, and mutter a prayer or an oath.
But he had given over the chase as a hopeless business. And Peggy
Sullivan, the old dame of all work, when, by chance, for she never
willingly looked toward the haunted quarter, she caught the faint
reflection of its dull effulgence with the corner of her eye, would sign
herself with the cross or fumble at her beads, and deeper furrows would
gather in her forehead, and her face grow ashen and perturbed. And this
was not mended by the levity with which the young ladies, with whom the
spectre had lost his influence, familiarity, as usual, breeding
contempt, had come to talk, and even to jest, about it.
CHAPTER V
The Man with the Claret Mark
But as the former excitement flagged, old Peggy Sullivan produced a new
one; for she solemnly avowed that she had seen a thin-faced man, with an
ugly red mark all over the side of his cheek, looking out of the same
window, just at sunset, before the young ladies returned from their
evening walk.
This sounded in their ears like an old woman's dream, but still it was
an excitement, jocular in the morning, and just, perhaps, a little
fearful as night overspread the vast and desolate building, but still,
not wholly unpleasant. This little flicker of credulity suddenly,
however, blazed up into the full light of conviction.
Old Laurence, who was not given to dreaming, and had a cool, hard head,
and an eye like a hawk, saw the same figure, just about the same hour,
when the last level gleam of sunset was tinting the summits of the
towers and the tops of the tall trees that surrounded them.
He had just entered the court from the great gate, when he heard all at
once the hard peculiar twitter of alarm which sparrows make when a cat
or a hawk invades their safety, rising all round from the thick ivy that
overclimbed the wall on his left, and raising his eyes listlessly, he
saw, with a sort of shock, a thin, ungainly man, standing with his legs
crossed, in the recess of the window from which the light was wont to
issue, leaning with his elbows on the stone mullion, and looking down
with a sort of sickly sneer, his hollow yellow cheeks being deeply
stained on one side with what is called a "claret-mark."
"I have you at last, you villain!" cried Larry, in a strange rage and
panic: "drop down out of that on the grass here, and give yourself up,
or I'll shoot you."
The threat was backed with an oath, and he drew from his coat pocket the
long holster pistol he was wont to carry, and covered his man cleverly.
"I give you while I count ten--one-two-three-four. If you draw back,
I'll fire, mind; five-six--you'd better be lively--seven-eight-nine--one
chance more; will you come down? Then take it--ten!"
Bang went the pistol. The sinister stranger was hardly fifteen feet
removed from him, and Larry was a dead shot. But this time he made a
scandalous miss, for the shot knocked a little white dust from the stone
wall a full yard at one side; and the fellow never shifted his negligent
posture or qualified his sardonic smile during the procedure.
Larry was mortified and angry.
"You'll not get off this time, my tulip!" he said with a grin,
exchanging the smoking weapon for the loaded pistol in reserve.
"What are you pistolling, Larry?" said a familiar voice close by his
elbow, and he saw his master, accompanied by a handsome young man in a
cloak.
"That villain, your honour, in the window, there."
"Why there's nobody there, Larry," said De Lacy, with a laugh, though
that was no common indulgence with him.
As Larry gazed, the figure somehow dissolved and broke up without
receding. A hanging tuft of yellow and red ivy nodded queerly in place
of the face, some broken and discoloured masonry in perspective took up
the outline and colouring of the arms and figure, and two imperfect red
and yellow lichen streaks carried on the curved tracing of the long
spindle shanks. Larry blessed himself, and drew his hand across his damp
forehead, over his bewildered eyes, and could not speak for a minute.
It was all some devilish trick; he could take his oath he saw every
feature in the fellow's face, the lace and buttons of his cloak and
doublet, and even his long finger nails and thin yellow fingers that
overhung the cross-shaft of the window, where there was now nothing but
a rusty stain left.
The young gentleman who had arrived with De Lacy, stayed that night and
shared with great apparent relish the homely fare of the family. He was
a gay and gallant Frenchman, and the beauty of the younger lady, and her
pleasantry and spirit, seemed to make his hours pass but too swiftly,
and the moment of parting sad.
When he had departed early in the morning, Ultor De Lacy had a long talk
with his elder daughter, while the younger was busy with her early dairy
task, for among their retainers this _proles generosa_ reckoned a "kind"
little Kerry cow.
He told her that he had visited France since he had been last at
Cappercullen, and how good and gracious their sovereign had been, and
how he had arranged a noble alliance for her sister Una. The young
gentleman was of high blood, and though not rich, had, nevertheless, his
acres and his _nom de terre_, besides a captain's rank in the army. He
was, in short, the very gentleman with whom they had parted only that
morning. On what special business he was now in Ireland there was no
necessity that he should speak; but being here he had brought him hither
to present him to his daughter, and found that the impression she had
made was quite what was desirable.
"You, you know, dear Alice, are promised to a conventual life. Had it
been otherwise--"
He hesitated for a moment.
"You are right, dear father," she said, kissing his hand, "I _am_ so
promised, and no earthly tie or allurement has power to draw me from
that holy engagement."
"Well," he said, returning her caress, "I do not mean to urge you upon
that point. It must not, however, be until Una's marriage has taken
place. That cannot be, for many good reasons, sooner than this time
twelve months; we shall then exchange this strange and barbarous abode
for Paris, where are many eligible convents, in which are entertained as
sisters some of the noblest ladies of France; and there, too, in Una's
marriage will be continued, though not the name, at all events the
blood, the lineage, and the title which, so sure as justice ultimately
governs the course of human events, will be again established, powerful
and honoured in this country, the scene of their ancient glory and
transitory misfortunes. Meanwhile, we must not mention this engagement
to Una. Here she runs no risk of being sought or won; but the mere
knowledge that her hand was absolutely pledged, might excite a
capricious opposition and repining such as neither I nor you would like
to see; therefore be secret."
The same evening he took Alice with him for a ramble round the castle
wall, while they talked of grave matters, and he as usual allowed her a
dim and doubtful view of some of those cloud-built castles in which he
habitually dwelt, and among which his jaded hopes revived.
They were walking upon a pleasant short sward of darkest green, on one
side overhung by the gray castle walls, and on the other by the forest
trees that here and there closely approached it, when precisely as they
turned the angle of the Bell Tower, they were encountered by a person
walking directly towards them. The sight of a stranger, with the
exception of the one visitor introduced by her father, was in this place
so absolutely unprecedented, that Alice was amazed and affrighted to
such a degree that for a moment she stood stock-still.
But there was more in this apparition to excite unpleasant emotions,
than the mere circumstance of its unexpectedness. The figure was very
strange, being that of a tall, lean, ungainly man, dressed in a dingy
suit, somewhat of a Spanish fashion, with a brown laced cloak, and faded
red stockings. He had long lank legs, long arms, hands, and fingers, and
a very long sickly face, with a drooping nose, and a sly, sarcastic
leer, and a great purplish stain over-spreading more than half of one
cheek.
As he strode past, he touched his cap with his thin, discoloured
fingers, and an ugly side glance, and disappeared round the corner. The
eyes of father and daughter followed him in silence.
Ultor De Lacy seemed first absolutely terror-stricken, and then suddenly
inflamed with ungovernable fury. He dropped his cane on the ground, drew
his rapier, and, without wasting a thought on his daughter, pursued.
He just had a glimpse of the retreating figure as it disappeared round
the far angle. The plume, and the lank hair, the point of the
rapier-scabbard, the flutter of the skirt of the cloak, and one red
stocking and heel; and this was the last he saw of him.
When Alice reached his side, his drawn sword still in his hand, he was
in a state of abject agitation.
"Thank Heaven, he's gone!" she exclaimed.
"He's gone," echoed Ultor, with a strange glare.
"And you are safe," she added, clasping his hand.
He sighed a great sigh.
"And you don't think he's coming back?"
"He!--who?"
"The stranger who passed us but now. Do you know him, father?"
"Yes--and--no, child--I know him not--and yet I know him too well. Would
to heaven we could leave this accursed haunt tonight. Cursed be the
stupid malice that first provoked this horrible feud, which no sacrifice
and misery can appease, and no exorcism can quell or even suspend. The
wretch has come from afar with a sure instinct to devour my last
hope--to dog us into our last retreat--and to blast with his triumph the
very dust and ruins of our house. What ails that stupid priest that he
has given over his visits? Are _my_ children to be left without mass or
confession--the sacraments which _guard_ as well as save--because he
once loses his way in a mist, or mistakes a streak of foam in the brook
for a dead man's face? D--n him!"
"See, Alice, if he won't come," he resumed, "you must only _write_ your
confession to him in full--you and Una. Laurence is trusty, and will
carry it--and we'll get the bishop's--or, if need be, the Pope's leave
for him to give you absolution. I'll move heaven and earth, but you
_shall_ have the sacraments, poor children!--and see him. I've been a
wild fellow in my youth, and never pretended to sanctity; but I know
there's but one safe way--and--and--keep you each a bit of this--(he
opened a small silver box)--about you while you stay here--fold and sew
it up reverently in a bit of the old psaltery parchment and wear it next
your hearts--'tis a fragment of the consecrated wafer--and will help,
with the saints' protection, to guard you from harm--and be strict in
fasts, and constant in prayer--_I_ can do nothing--nor devise any help.
The curse has fallen, indeed, on me and mine."
And Alice, saw, in silence, the tears of despair roll down his pale and
agitated face.
This adventure was also a secret, and Una was to hear nothing of it.
CHAPTER VI
Voices
Now Una, nobody knew why, began to lose spirit, and to grow pale. Her
fun and frolic were quite gone! Even her songs ceased. She was silent
with her sister, and loved solitude better. She said she was well, and
quite happy, and could in no wise be got to account for the lamentable
change that had stolen over her. She had grown odd too, and obstinate in
trifles; and strangely reserved and cold.
Alice was very unhappy in consequence. What was the cause of this
estrangement--had she offended her, and how? But Una had never before
borne resentment for an hour. What could have altered her entire nature
so? Could it be the shadow and chill of coming insanity?
Once or twice, when her sister urged her with tears and entreaties to
disclose the secret of her changed spirits and demeanour, she seemed to
listen with a sort of silent wonder and suspicion, and then she looked
for a moment full upon her, and seemed on the very point of revealing
all. But the earnest dilated gaze stole downward to the floor, and
subsided into an odd wily smile, and she began to whisper to herself,
and the smile and the whisper were both a mystery to Alice.
She and Alice slept in the same bedroom--a chamber in a projecting
tower--which on their arrival, when poor Una was so merry, they had hung
round with old tapestry, and decorated fantastically according to their
skill and frolic. One night, as they went to bed, Una said, as if
speaking to herself----
"'Tis my last night in this room--I shall sleep no more with Alice."
"And what has poor Alice done, Una, to deserve your strange unkindness?"
Una looked on her curiously, and half frightened, and then the odd smile
stole over her face like a gleam of moonlight.
"My poor Alice, what have you to do with it?" she whispered.
"And why do you talk of sleeping no more with me?" said Alice.
"Why? Alice dear--no why--no reason--only a knowledge that it must be
so, or Una will die."
"Die, Una darling!--what can you mean?"
"Yes, sweet Alice, die, indeed. We must all die some time, you know,
or--or undergo a change; and my time is near--_very_ near--unless I
sleep apart from you."
"Indeed, Una, sweetheart, I think you _are_ ill, but not near death."
"Una knows what you think, wise Alice--but she's not mad--on the
contrary, she's wiser than other folks."
"She's sadder and stranger too," said Alice, tenderly.
"Knowledge is sorrow," answered Una, and she looked across the room
through her golden hair which she was combing--and through the window,
beyond which lay the tops of the great trees, and the still foliage of
the glen in the misty moonlight.
"'Tis enough, Alice dear; it must be so. The bed must move hence, or
Una's bed will be low enough ere long. See, it shan't be far though,
only into that small room."
She pointed to an inner room or closet opening from that in which they
lay. The walls of the building were hugely thick, and there were double
doors of oak between the chambers, and Alice thought, with a sigh, how
completely separated they were going to be.
However she offered no opposition. The change was made, and the girls
for the first time since childhood lay in separate chambers. A few
nights afterwards Alice awoke late in the night from a dreadful dream,
in which the sinister figure which she and her father had encountered in
their ramble round the castle walls, bore a principal part.
When she awoke there were still in her ears the sounds which had mingled
in her dream. They were the notes of a deep, ringing, bass voice rising
from the glen beneath the castle walls--something between humming and
singing--listlessly unequal and intermittent, like the melody of a man
whiling away the hours over his work. While she was wondering at this
unwonted minstrelsy, there came a silence, and--could she believe her
ears?--it certainly was Una's clear low contralto--softly singing a bar
or two from the window. Then once more silence--and then again the
strange manly voice, faintly chaunting from the leafy abyss.
With a strange wild feeling of suspicion and terror, Alice glided to the
window. The moon who sees so many things, and keeps all secrets, with
her cold impenetrable smile, was high in the sky. But Alice saw the red
flicker of a candle from Una's window, and, she thought, the shadow of
her head against the deep side wall of its recess. Then this was gone,
and there were no more sights or sounds that night.
As they sate at breakfast, the small birds were singing merrily from
among the sun-tipped foliage.
"I love this music," said Alice, unusually pale and sad; "it comes with
the pleasant light of morning. I remember, Una, when you used to sing,
like those gay birds, in the fresh beams of the morning; that was in the
old time, when Una kept no secret from poor Alice."
"And Una knows what her sage Alice means; but there are other birds,
silent all day long, and, they say, the sweetest too, that love to sing
by _night_ alone."
So things went on--the elder girl pained and melancholy--the younger
silent, changed, and unaccountable.
A little while after this, very late one night, on awaking, Alice heard
a conversation being carried on in her sister's room. There seemed to be
no disguise about it. She could not distinguish the words, indeed, the
walls being some six feet thick, and two great oak doors intercepting.
But Una's clear voice, and the deep bell-like tones of the unknown, made
up the dialogue.
Alice sprung from her bed, threw her clothes about her, and tried to
enter her sister's room; but the inner door was bolted. The voices
ceased to speak as she knocked, and Una opened it, and stood before her
in her nightdress, candle in hand.
"Una--Una, darling, as you hope for peace, tell me who is here?" cried
frightened Alice, with her trembling arms about her neck.
Una drew back, with her large innocent blue eyes fixed full upon her.
"Come in, Alice," she said, coldly.
And in came Alice, with a fearful glance around. There was no hiding
place there; a chair, a table, a little bedstead, and two or three pegs
in the wall to hang clothes on; a narrow window, with two iron bars
across; no hearth or chimney--nothing but bare walls.
Alice looked round in amazement, and her eyes glanced with painful
inquiry into those of her sister. Una smiled one of her peculiar
sidelong smiles, and said----
"Strange dreams! I've been dreaming--so has Alice. She hears and sees
Una's dreams, and wonders--and well she may."
And she kissed her sister's cheek with a cold kiss, and lay down in her
little bed, her slender hand under her head, and spoke no more.
Alice, not knowing what to think, went back to hers.
About this time Ultor De Lacy returned. He heard his elder daughter's
strange narrative with marked uneasiness, and his agitation seemed to
grow rather than subside. He enjoined her, however, not to mention it to
the old servant, nor in presence of anybody she might chance to see, but
only to him and to the priest, if he could be persuaded to resume his
duty and return. The trial, however, such as it was, could not endure
very long; matters had turned out favourably. The union of his younger
daughter might be accomplished within a few months, and in eight or
nine weeks they should be on their way to Paris.
A night or two after her father's arrival, Alice, in the dead of the
night, heard the well-known strange deep voice speaking softly, as it
seemed, close to her own window on the outside; and Una's voice, clear
and tender, spoke in answer. She hurried to her own casement, and pushed
it open, kneeling in the deep embrasure, and looking with a stealthy and
affrighted gaze towards her sister's window. As she crossed the floor
the voices subsided, and she saw a light withdrawn from within. The
moonbeams slanted bright and clear on the whole side of the castle
overlooking the glen, and she plainly beheld the shadow of a man
projected on the wall as on a screen.
This black shadow recalled with a horrid thrill the outline and fashion
of the figure in the Spanish dress. There were the cap and mantle, the
rapier, the long thin limbs and sinister angularity. It was so thrown
obliquely that the hands reached to the window-sill, and the feet
stretched and stretched, longer and longer as she looked, toward the
ground, and disappeared in the general darkness; and the rest, with a
sudden flicker, shot downwards, as shadows will on the sudden movement
of a light, and was lost in one gigantic leap down the castle wall.
"I do not know whether I dream or wake when I hear and see these sights;
but I will ask my father to sit up with me, and we _two_ surely cannot
be mistaken. May the holy saints keep and guard us!" And in her terror
she buried her head under the bed-clothes, and whispered her prayers for
an hour.
CHAPTER VII
Una's Love
"I have been with Father Denis," said De Lacy, next day, "and he will
come to-morrow; and, thank Heaven! you may both make your confession and
hear mass, and my mind will be at rest; and you'll find poor Una happier
and more like herself."
But 'tween cup and lip there's many a slip. The priest was not destined
to hear poor Una's shrift. When she bid her sister goodnight she looked
on her with her large, cold, wild eyes, till something of her old human
affections seemed to gather there, and they slowly filled with tears,
which dropped one after the other on her homely dress as she gazed in
her sister's face.
Alice, delighted, sprang up, and clasped her arms about her neck. "My
own darling treasure,'tis all over; you love your poor Alice again, and
will be happier than ever."
But while she held her in her embrace Una's eyes were turned towards the
window, and her lips apart, and Alice felt instinctively that her
thoughts were already far away.
"Hark!--listen!--hush!" and Una, with her delighted gaze fixed, as if
she saw far away beyond the castle wall, the trees, the glen, and the
night's dark curtain, held her hand raised near her ear, and waved her
head slightly in time, as it seemed, to music that reached not Alice's
ear, and smiled her strange pleased smile, and then the smile slowly
faded away, leaving that sly suspicious light behind it which somehow
scared her sister with an uncertain sense of danger; and she sang in
tones so sweet and low that it seemed but a reverie of a song,
recalling, as Alice fancied, the strain to which she had just listened
in that strange ecstasy, the plaintive and beautiful Irish ballad,
"Shule, shule, shule, aroon," the midnight summons of the outlawed Irish
soldier to his darling to follow him.
Alice had slept little the night before. She was now overpowered with
fatigue; and leaving her candle burning by her bedside, she fell into a
deep sleep. From this she awoke suddenly, and completely, as will
sometimes happen without any apparent cause, and she saw Una come into
the room. She had a little purse of embroidery--her own work--in her
hand; and she stole lightly to the bedside, with her peculiar oblique
smile, and evidently thinking that her sister was asleep.
Alice was thrilled with a strange terror, and did not speak or move; and
her sister slipped her hand softly under her bolster, and withdrew it.
Then Una stood for while by the hearth, and stretched her hand up to the
mantelpiece, from which she took a little bit of chalk, and Alice
thought she saw her place it in the fingers of a long yellow hand that
was stealthily introduced from her own chamber-door to receive it; and
Una paused in the dark recess of the door, and smiled over her shoulder
toward her sister, and then glided into her room, closing the doors.
Almost freezing with terror, Alice rose and glided after her, and stood
in her chamber, screaming----
"Una, Una, in heaven's name what troubles you?"
But Una seemed to have been sound asleep in her bed, and raised herself
with a start, and looking upon her with a peevish surprise, said----
"What does Alice seek here?"
"You were in my room, Una, dear; you seem disturbed and troubled."
"Dreams, Alice. My dreams crossing your brain; only dreams--dreams. Get
you to bed, and sleep."
And to bed she went, but _not_ to sleep. She lay awake more than an
hour; and then Una emerged once more from her room. This time she was
fully dressed, and had her cloak and thick shoes on, as their rattle on
the floor plainly discovered. She had a little bundle tied up in a
handkerchief in her hand, and her hood was drawn about her head; and
thus equipped, as it seemed, for a journey, she came and stood at the
foot of Alice's bed, and stared on her with a look so soulless and
terrible that her senses almost forsook her. Then she turned and went
back into her own chamber.
She may have returned; but Alice thought not--at least she did not see
her. But she lay in great excitement and perturbation; and was
terrified, about an hour later, by a knock at her chamber door--not that
opening into Una's room, but upon the little passage from the stone
screw staircase. She sprang from her bed; but the door was secured on
the inside, and she felt relieved. The knock was repeated, and she heard
some one laughing softly on the outside.
The morning came at last; that dreadful night was over. But Una! Where
was Una?
Alice never saw her more. On the head of her empty bed were traced in
chalk the words--Ultor De Lacy, Ultor O'Donnell. And Alice found beneath
her own pillow the little purse of embroidery she had seen in Una's
hand. It was her little parting token, and bore the simple
legend--"Una's love!"
De Lacy's rage and horror were boundless. He charged the priest, in
frantic language, with having exposed his child, by his cowardice and
neglect, to the machinations of the Fiend, and raved and blasphemed like
a man demented.
It is said that he procured a solemn exorcism to be performed, in the
hope of disenthralling and recovering his daughter. Several times, it is
alleged, she was seen by the old servants. Once on a sweet summer
morning, in the window of the tower, she was perceived combing her
beautiful golden tresses, and holding a little mirror in her hand; and
first, when she saw herself discovered, she looked affrighted, and then
smiled, her slanting, cunning smile. Sometimes, too, in the glen, by
moonlight, it was said belated villagers had met her, always startled
first, and then smiling, generally singing snatches of old Irish
ballads, that seemed to bear a sort of dim resemblance to her melancholy
fate. The apparition has long ceased. But it is said that now and again,
perhaps once in two or three years, late on a summer night, you may
hear--but faint and far away in the recesses of the glen--the sweet, sad
notes of Una's voice, singing those plaintive melodies. This, too, of
course, in time will cease, and all be forgotten.
CHAPTER VIII
Sister Agnes and the Portrait
When Ultor De Lacy died, his daughter Alice found among his effects a
small box, containing a portrait such as I have described. When she
looked on it, she recoiled in horror. There, in the plenitude of its
sinister peculiarities, was faithfully portrayed the phantom which lived
with a vivid and horrible accuracy in her remembrance. Folded in the
same box was a brief narrative, stating that, "A.D. 1601, in the month
of December, Walter De Lacy, of Cappercullen, made many prisoners at the
ford of Ownhey, or Abington, of Irish and Spanish soldiers, flying from
the great overthrow of the rebel powers at Kinsale, and among the number
one Roderic O'Donnell, an arch traitor, and near kinsman to that other
O'Donnell who led the rebels; who, claiming kindred through his mother
to De Lacy, sued for his life with instant and miserable entreaty, and
offered great ransom, but was by De Lacy, through great zeal for the
queen, as some thought, cruelly put to death. When he went to the
tower-top, where was the gallows, finding himself in extremity, and no
hope of mercy, he swore that though he could work them no evil before
his death, yet that he would devote himself thereafter to blast the
greatness of the De Lacys, and never leave them till his work was done.
He hath been seen often since, and always for that family perniciously,
insomuch that it hath been the custom to show to young children of that
lineage the picture of the said O'Donnell, in little, taken among his
few valuables, to prevent their being misled by him unawares, so that he
should not have his will, who by devilish wiles and hell-born cunning,
hath steadfastly sought the ruin of that ancient house, and especially
to leave that _stemma generosum_ destitute of issue for the transmission
of their pure blood and worshipful name."
Old Miss Croker, of Ross House, who was near seventy in the year 1821,
when she related this story to me, had seen and conversed with Alice De
Lacy, a professed nun, under the name of Sister Agnes, in a religious
house in King-street, in Dublin, founded by the famous Duchess of
Tyrconnell, and had the narrative from her own lips. I thought the tale
worth preserving, and have no more to say.
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