Stories by English Authors: Ireland Part 9

Pat looked in the desired direction, but misapprehended the object to be the western sky, where an overblown fiery rose seemed to have scattered all its petals broadcast. "Sure, that's on'y the sun settin'

red like," he explained, indifferently, and would have resumed his excavations if he had not been seized and hustled half-way up the cliff before he could disengage his mind from his brigades and batteries. Both heads soon bobbed up over the edge without accident; for Pat climbed like a monkey when once he had grasped the situation.

His grandmother's att.i.tude toward Joe McEvoy constrained her to receive him effusively as prey s.n.a.t.c.hed from the foaming jaws of death; but it was out of Mrs. Fottrel's pocket that a peppermint-drop came to sweetly seal his new lease of life.

"And what are you after now, Mick?" she said, observing that, instead of drawing himself up to level ground, he stood poised on an uncomfortable perch, and looked back the steep way he had come.

"I'm thinkin' to slip down agin," he said, "and see if be any manner of manes I could huroosha th' ould baste round the rocks yonder.

The wather mightn't be altogither too deep there yit; at all evints, she's between the divil and the deep say where she is now; it's just a chanst."

"Sorra a much," said Joe, disconsolately; "scarce worth breakin'

your bones after, any way."

"Bones, how are you? Sure, there's no call to be breakin' bones in the matter," said Mick, beginning to descend. This was true enough, if he had minded what he was about; but then he did not. So far from it, he was saying to himself, "One 'ud ha' thought now she might ha' took a sort of pride in it," when the bottom of the world seemed to drop away from under his feet, and his irrelevant meditations ended in a shattering thud down on the rocky pavement a long way below. He never heard the shouts and shrieks which the incident occasioned above his head. Once only he became dimly conscious of a quivering network of prismatic flashes, which he could not see through, and a booming throb in his ears, which made him murmur dazedly: "Wirra, I thought I'd got beyond hearin' of them drums."

In another moment: "What's took me?" he said, with a start. But the depths he sank among remain always dark and silent.

Next day messengers from Tullykillagin told Mrs. Doherty that the Lord had "took" her son Mick, and that "he had gone out to say wid the tide, before they could get anybody to him, and there was no tellin' where he might be swep' up, if ever he came to sh.o.r.e at all."

"And the quarest part of it was that Joe McEvoy's ould cow that he went after had legged herself up, somehow, on the rocks out of reach, and niver a harm on her when they found her in the mornin'.

But she'd been all of a could quiver ever since, and himself doubted if she'd rightly git over it--might the divil mend her, and she after bein' the death of a fine young man. Sure, every sowl up at Tullykillagin was rale annoyed about it. Even ould Biddy Duggan, that was as cross-tempered as a weasel, did be frettin' for the lad; and Joe McEvoy was sittin' crooched like an ould wet hen, over his fire block out, that he hadn't the heart to be lightin'."

Mrs. Doherty said she didn't know what talk they had of the Lord and the say and the ould cow; but she'd known well enough the way it was when Mick niver come home last night. He'd just took off after the souldiers, as he'd a great notion one time.

She was, as may have been observed, rather a dull-witted woman, and proportionately hard to convince against her will.

"A great notion intirely," she said; "on'y she'd scarce have thought he'd go do such a thing on her in airnest. And I runnin'

away indoors yisterday out of the heighth of the divarsion, when the band-music was a thrate to be hearin', just to see his bit of supper wouldn't be late on him. And the grand little pitaty-cake I had for him; I may be throwin' it to the hins now, unless Molly might fancy a bit; for we 'll not be apt to set eyes on him this three year. Och, wirra! and he that contint at home, and niver a word out of him about the souldierin' this long while. If it had been poor Thady itself, 't would ha' been diff'rint; but Mick--I'd scarce ha' thought it of him; for he'd a dale of good-nature, Mrs.

Geoghegan, ma'am."

"He had so, tub-be sure, woman dear," said Mrs. Geoghegan, "or he might be sittin' warm in here this minnit."

"The back of me hand to thim blamed ould throopers," said Mrs.

Doherty, "that sets the lads wild wid their thrampin' around."

"Poor Mick would be better wid them than where he is now--G.o.d have mercy on his soul!" said a neighbour, solemnly.

But Mick's mother continued to bewail herself: "And I missin' the best of all the tunes they played, so Molly was tellin' me, for 'fraid he 'd be kep' waitin' for his supper, and he comin' home to me hungry; and now--There's a terrible len'th of time in three year. I wouldn't ha' believed he'd ha' done it on me."

THE RIVAL DREAMERS

BY JOHN BANIM

Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton Irving has already given to the public a version of an American legend, which, in a princ.i.p.al feature, bears some likeness to the following transcript of a popular Irish one. It may, however, be interesting to show this very coincidence between the descendants of a Dutch transatlantic colony and the native peasantry of Ireland, in the superst.i.tious annals of both. Our tale, moreover, will be found original in all its circ.u.mstances, that alluded to only excepted.

Shamus Dempsey returned a silent, plodding, sorrowful man, though a young one, to his poor home, after seeing laid in the grave his aged, decrepit father. The last rays of the setting sun were glorious, shooting through the folds of their pavilion of scarlet clouds; the last song of the thrush, chanted from the bough nearest to his nest, was gladdening; the abundant though but half-matured crops around breathed of hope for the future. But Shamus's bosom was covered with the darkness that inward suns.h.i.+ne alone can illumine.

The chord that should respond to song and melody had snapped in it; for him the softly undulating fields of light-green wheat, or the silken-surfaced patches of barley, made a promise in vain. He was poor, penniless, friendless, and yet groaning under responsibilities; worn out by past and present suffering, and without a consoling prospect. His father's corpse had just been buried by a subscription among his neighbours, collected in an old glove, a penny or a half-penny from each, by the most active of the humble community to whom his sad state was a subject of pity. In the wretched shed which he called "home," a young wife lay on a truss of straw, listening to the hungry cries of two little children, and awaiting her hour to become the weeping mother of a third. And the recollection that but for an act of domestic treachery experienced by his father and himself, both would have been comfortable and respectable in the world, aggravated the bitterness of the feeling in which Shamus contemplated his lot. He could himself faintly call to mind a time of early childhood, when he lived with his parents in a roomy house, eating and sleeping and dressing well, and surrounded by servants and workmen; he further remembered that a day of great affliction came, upon which strange and rude persons forced their way into the house; and, for some cause his infant observation did not reach, father, servants, and workmen (his mother had just died) were all turned out upon the road and doomed to seek the shelter of a mean roof. But his father's discourse, since he gained the years of manhood, supplied Shamus with an explanation of all these circ.u.mstances, as follows.

Old Dempsey had been the youngest son of a large farmer, who divided his lands between two elder children, and destined Shamus's father to the Church, sending him abroad for education, and, during its course, supplying him with liberal allowances. Upon the eve of ordination the young student returned home to visit his friends; was much noticed by neighbouring small gentry of each religion; at the house of one of the opposite persuasion from his met a sister of the proprietor, who had a fortune in her own right; abandoned his clerical views for her smiles; eloped with her; married her privately; incurred thereby the irremovable hostility of his own family; but, after a short time, was received, along with his wife, by his generous brother-in-law, under whose guidance both became reputably settled in the house to which Shamus's early recollections pointed and where, till he was about six years old, he pa.s.sed indeed a happy childhood.

But, a little previous to this time, his mother's good brother died unmarried, and was succeeded by another of her brothers, who had unsuccessfully spent half his life as a lawyer in Dublin, and who, inheriting little of his predecessor's amiable character, soon showed himself a foe to her and her husband, professedly on account of her marriage with a Roman Catholic. He did not appear to their visit, shortly after his arrival in their neighbourhood, and he never condescended to return it. The affliction experienced by his sensitive sister from his conduct entailed upon her a premature accouchement, in which, giving birth to a lifeless babe, she unexpectedly died. The event was matter of triumph rather than of sorrow to her unnatural brother. For, in the first place, totally unguarded against the sudden result, she had died intestate; in the next place, he discovered that her private marriage had been celebrated by a Roman Catholic priest, consequently could not, according to law, hold good; and again, could not give to her nominal husband any right to her property, upon which both had hitherto lived, and which was now the sole means of existence to Shamus's father.

The lawyer speedily set to work upon these points, and with little difficulty succeeded in supplying for Shamus's recollections a day of trouble, already noticed. In fact, his father and he, now without a s.h.i.+lling, took refuge in a distant cabin, where, by the sweat of his parent's brow, as a labourer in the fields, the ill-fated hero of this story was scantily fed and clothed, until maturer years enabled him to relieve the old man's hand of the spade and sickle, and in turn labour for their common wants.

Shamus, becoming a little prosperous in the funeral we now see Shamus returning, and to such a home does he bend his heavy steps.

If to know that the enemy of his father and mother did not thrive on the spoils of his oppression could have yielded Shamus any consolation in his lot, he had long ago become aware of circ.u.mstances calculated to give this negative comfort. His maternal uncle enjoyed, indeed, his newly acquired property only a few years after it came into his possession. Partly on account of his cruelty to his relations, partly from a meanness and vulgarity of character, which soon displayed itself in his novel situation, and which, it was believed, had previously kept him in the lowest walks of his profession as a Dublin attorney, he found himself neglected and shunned by the gentry of his neighbourhood. To grow richer than those who thus insulted him, to blazon abroad reports of his wealth, and to watch opportunities of using it to their injury, became the means of revenge adopted by the parvenu. His legitimate income not promising a rapid accomplishment of this plan, he ventured, using precautions that seemingly set suspicion at defiance, to engage in smuggling-adventures on a large scale, for which his proximity to the coast afforded a local opportunity. Notwithstanding all his pettifogging cleverness, the ex-attorney was detected, however, in his illegal traffic, and fined to an amount which swept away half his real property. Driven to desperation by the publicity of his failure, as well as by the failure itself, he tried another grand effort to retrieve his fortune; was again surprised by the revenue officers; in a personal struggle with them, at the head of his band, killed one of their body; immediately absconded from Ireland; for the last twenty years had not been authentically heard of, but, it was believed, lived under an a.s.sumed name in London, deriving an obscure existence from some mean pursuit, of which the very nature enabled him to gratify propensities to drunkenness and other vices, learned during his first career in life.

All this Shamus knew, though only from report, inasmuch as his uncle had exiled himself while he was yet a child, and without previously having become known to the eyes of the nephew he had so much injured. But if Shamus occasionally drew a bitter and almost savage gratification from the downfall of his inhuman persecutor, no recurrence to the past could alleviate the misery of his present situation.

He pa.s.sed under one of the capacious open arches of the old abbey, and then entered his squalid shed reared against its wall, his heart as shattered and as trodden down as the ruins around him. No words of greeting ensued between him and his equally hopeless wife, as she sat on the straw of her bed, rocking to sleep, with feeble and mournful cries, her youngest infant. He silently lighted a fire of withered twigs on his ready-furnished hearthstone; put to roast among their embers a few potatoes which he had begged during the day; divided them between her and her crying children; and, as the moon rising high in the heavens warned him that night a.s.serted her full empire over the departed day, Shamus sank down upon the couch from which his father's mortal remains had lately been borne, supperless himself, and dinnerless, too, but not hungry; at least not conscious or recollecting that he was.

His wife and little ones soon slept soundly, but Shamus lay for hours inaccessible to nature's claims for sleep as well as for food. From where he lay he could see, through the open front of his shed, out into the ruins abroad. After much abstraction in his own thoughts, the silence, the extent, and the peculiar desolation of the scene, almost spiritualised by the magic effect of alternate moons.h.i.+ne and darkness, of objects and of their parts, at last diverted his mind, though not to relieve it. He remembered distinctly, for the first time, where he was--an intruder among the dwellings of the dead; he called to mind, too, that the present was their hour for revealing themselves among the remote loneliness and obscurity of their crumbling and intricate abode. As his eye fixed upon a distant stream of cold light or of blank shadow, either the wavering of some feathery herbage from the walls or the flitting of some night-bird over the roofless aisle, made motion which went and came during the instant of his alarmed start, or else some disembodied sleeper around had challenged and evaded his vision so rapidly as to baffle even the accompaniment of thought. Shamus would, however, recur, during these entrancing aberrations, to his more real causes for terror; and he knew not, and to this day cannot distinctly tell, whether he waked or slept, when a new circ.u.mstance absorbed his attention. The moon struck fully, under his propped roof, upon the carved slab he had appropriated as a hearthstone; and turning his eye to the spot, he saw the semblance of a man advanced in years, though not very old, standing motionless, and very steadfastly regarding him. The still face of the figure shone like marble in the night-beam, without giving any idea of the solidity of that material; the long and deep shadows thrown by the forehead over the eyes left those unusally expressive features vague and uncertain.

Upon the head was a close-fitting black cap, the dress was a loose-sleeved, plaited garment of white, descending to the ground, and faced and otherwise checkered with black, and girded round the loins; exactly the costume which Shamus had often studied in a little framed and glazed print, hung up in the sacristy of the humble chapel recently built in the neighbourhood of the ruin by a few descendants of the great religious fraternity to whom, in its day of pride, the abbey had belonged. As he returned very inquisitively, though, as he avers, not now in alarm, the fixed gaze of his midnight visitor, a voice reached him, and he heard these strange words:

"Shamus Dempsey, go to London Bridge, and you will be a rich man."

"How will that come about, your reverence?" cried Shamus, jumping up from the straw.

But the figure was gone; and stumbling among the black embers on the remarkable place where it had stood, he fell prostrate, experiencing a change of sensation and of observance of objects around, which might be explained by supposing a transition from a sleeping to a waking state of mind.

The rest of the night he slept little, thinking of the advice he had received, and of the mysterious personage who gave it. But he resolved to say nothing about his vision, particularly to his wife, lest, in her present state of health, the frightful story might distress her; and, as to his own conduct respecting it, he determined to be guided by the future; in fact, he would wait to see if his counsellor came again. He did come again, appearing in the same spot at the same hour of the night, and wearing the same dress, though not the same expression of feature; for the shadowy brows now slightly frowned, and a little severity mingled with the former steadfastness of look.

"Shamus Dempsey, why have you not gone to London Bridge, and your wife so near the time when she will want what you are to get by going there? Remember, this is my second warning."

"Musha, your reverence, an' what am I to do on Lunnon Bridge?"

Again he rose to approach the figure; again it eluded him. Again a change occurred in the quality of the interest with which he regarded the admonition of his visitor. Again he pa.s.sed a day of doubt as to the propriety of undertaking what seemed to him little less than a journey to the world's end, without a penny in his pocket, and upon the eve of his wife's accouchement, merely in obedience to a recommendation which, according to his creed, was not yet sufficiently strongly given, even were it under any circ.u.mstances to be adopted.

For Shamus had often heard, and firmly believed, that a dream or a vision instructing one how to procure riches ought to be experienced three times before it became ent.i.tled to attention.

He lay down, however, half hoping that his vision might thus recommend itself to his notice It did so.

"Shamus Dempsey," said the figure, looking more angry than ever, "you have not yet gone to London Bridge, although I hear your wife dying out to bid you go. And, remember, this s my third warning."

"Why, then, tundher an' ouns, your reverence, just stop and tell me-"

Ere he could utter another word the holy visitant disappeared, in a real pa.s.sion at Shamus's qualified curse; and at the same moment his confused senses recognised the voice of his wife, sending up from her straw pallet the cries that betoken a mother's distant travail. Exchaning a few words with her, he hurried away. professedly call up, at her cabin window, an old crane who sometimes attended the very poorest women in Nance Dempsey's situation.

"Hurry to her, Noreen, acuishla, and do the best it's the will of G.o.d to let you do. And tell her from me, Noreen--" He stopped, drawing in his lip, and clutching his cudgel hard.

"Shamus, what ails you, avick?" asked old Noreen; "what ails you, to make the tears run down in the gray o' the morning?"