The O'Donoghue Part 75

It was so--the courage that withstood every a.s.sault of evil fortune--every calamity which poverty and distress can bring down--failed at last;--the strong heart was broken--the O'Donoghue was dead.

We will once more ask our readers to accompany us to the glen, the scene of our story. It was of an evening, calm and tranquil as that on which our tale opened, on a day in August, in the year 1815, that two travellers, leaving the postillion of their carriage to refresh his horses, advanced alone and on foot for above a mile into this tranquil valley; the air had all that deathlike stillness so characteristic of autumn, while over the mountains and the lake the same rich mellow light was shed. As the travellers proceeded slowly, they stopped from time to time, and gazed on the scene; and, although their looks met, and glance seemed to answer glance, they neither of them spoke: from their appearance, it might have been conjectured that they were foreigners.

The man, bronzed by weather and exposure, possessed features which, in all their sternness, were yet eminently handsome: he wore a short thick moustache, but the armless sleeve of his coat, fastened on the bosom, was a sign still more indisputable than even his port and bearing, that he was a soldier. His companion was a lady in the very pride and bloom of beauty, but her dress, more remarkably than his, betrayed the foreigner; in the rapid look she turned from the bold scenery around them to the face of him at whose side she walked, one might read either a direct appeal to memory, or the expression of wonder and admiration of the spot. Too much engrossed by his own thoughts, or too deeply occupied by the scene before him, the man moved on, until at last he came in front of a low ruined wall, beneath a tall and overhanging cliff. He stopped for some seconds, and gazed at this with such intentness as prevented him from noticing the figure of a beggar, who, in all the semblance of extreme poverty, sat crouching among the ruins. She was an old, or at least seemed a very old woman--her hair, uncovered by cap or hood, was white as snow, but her features still preserved an expression of quick intelligence, as, lifting her head from the att.i.tude of moping thought, she fixed her eyes stedfastly on the travellers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 480]

"Give her something, 'mon cher,'" said the lady to her companion in French; but the request was twice made before he seemed conscious of it. The woman, meanwhile, sat still, and neither made any demand for charity, or any appeal to their compa.s.sion.

"This is Glenflesk, my good woman," said he at length, with the intonation of a foreign accent on the words.

The woman nodded a.s.sentingly, but made no reply.

"Whose estate is all this here?" said he, pointing with his hand to either side of the valley.

"'Sorra one o' me knows whose it is," said the woman, in a voice of evident displeasure. "When I was a child it was the O'Donoghues', but they are dead and gone now--I don't know whose it is."

"And the O'Donoghues are dead and gone, you say? What became of the last of them?--what was his fate?"

"Is it the one that turned Protestant you mean?" said the woman, as an expression of fiendish malignity shot beneath her dark brows: "he was the only one that ever prospered, because he was a heretic, maybe."

"But how did he prosper?" said the stranger.

"Didn't he marry the daughter of the rich Englishman, that lived there beyant? and wasn't he a member of Parlimint? and sure they tell me that he went out beyond the says to be be Judge somewhere in foreign parts--in India, I believe."

"And who lives in the old castle of the family?"

"The crows and the owls lives in it now," said the woman, with a grating laugh--"the same way as the weasels and the rats burrow in my own little place here. Ay, you may stare and wonder, but here, where you see me sit, among these old stones and black timbers, was my own comfortable home--the house I was born and reared in--and the hearth I sat by when I was a child."

The man whispered a few words to his companion in a deep, low voice--she started, and was about to speak, when he stopped her, saying, "Nay, nay, it is better not;" then, turning to the woman, asked, "And were there, then, no others, whose fortunes you remember?"

"It is little worth while remembering them," said the crone, whose own misfortunes shed bitterness over all the memory of others. "There was an old Scotchman that lived there long after the others were gone, and when the niece went back to the nunnery in France he staid there still alone by himself. The people used to see him settling the room, and putting books here, and papers there, and making all ready agin she came back--and that's the way he spent his time to the day of his death.

Don't cry, my lady; he was a hard-hearted old man, and it isn't eyes like yours should weep tears for him; if you want to pity any one, 'pity the poor, that's houseless and friendless.'"

"And the Lodge," said the stranger--"is not that the name they gave the pretty house beside the lake?"

"'Tisn't a pretty house now, then," said the hag, laughing. "It's a ruin like the rest."

"How is that?--does the Englishman never come to it?"

"Why should he come to it? Sure it's in law ever since that black-hearted villain Hemsworth was killed--n.o.body knows who owns it, and they say it will never be found out; but," said she, rising, and gathering her cloak around her as she prepared to move away--"there's neither luck nor grace upon the spot. G.o.d Almighty made it beautiful and lovely to look upon, but man and man's wickedness brought a curse down upon it."

The man drew his purse forth, and, while endeavouring to take some pieces of money from it by the aid of his single remaining hand, she turned abruptly about, and, staring him stedfastly in the face, said--

"I'll not take your money--'tisn't money will serve me now--them that's poor themselves will never see me in want."

"Stop a moment," said the stranger, "I have a claim on you."

"That you haven't," said the woman, sternly--"I know you well, Mark O'Donoghue--ay, and your wife, Miss Kate there; but it isn't by a purse full of gold you'll ever make up for desarting the cause of ould Ireland."

"Don't be angry with her," whispered a low mild voice behind. He turned, and saw a very old man dressed in black, and with all the semblance of a priest. "Don't be angry with her, sir; poor Mary's senses are often wandering; and," added he with a sigh, "she has met sore trials, and may well be pardoned, if, in the bitterness of her grief, she looks at the world with little favour or forgiveness. She has mistaken you for another, and hence the source of her anger."

THE END.