O’Gara continued to hold his place as almoner, after his regiment had been taken into the pay of France. He accompanied them through several of the continental campaigns, and finally retired into an humble monastery in the north of Italy — in whose library are, we believe, still to be seen, several volumes inscribed with his name. Thomas Talbot retired to the court of St. Germains, where he subsisted, nominally, upon his wretched pension, but in reality upon play, at which he was an adept — and which maintained him in those debauched and expensive courses to which he was addicted — until at last his vicious career was suddenly cut short, and he was found, early one morning, in a narrow lane, in an obscure part of Paris, lying stark and stiff, in a pool of blood — his body pierced with a hundred wounds, and his broken sword still griped in his cold hand, attesting the characteristic resolution with which he had contended for his life.
The fate of Miles Garrett was somewhat remarkable. When Ryan, familiarly known as Ned of the Hills, retired to the Slievephelim mountains, the centre of the ancient patrimony of the O’Moel Ryans (the sept whose representative he claimed to be), none of the bordering proprietary suffered at all so severely and so often from his predatory excursions, as did the renegade proprietor of Lisnamoe. Bitterly did Miles Garrett resent the pillage which thinned his broad pastures of their choicest kine and horses; but unable, with such a retinue as he, unaided, could command, to contend against the numerous band which the rapparee kept constantly about him, he secretly arranged a plan by which he and two neighbouring gentlemen, Waller of Castle Waller, and Bourke, of Glinbally, were to meet upon the heights overlooking Muroe, and thus to concentrate their forces for pursuit on the next alarm. This was not long deferred. One fine autumn morning, the “herds” came running into the castle of Lisnamoe, with news that the outlaw and his men were driving off the cattle. Messengers were despatched in hot haste to those who had promised their assistance; and Miles Garrett and his men, making a long sweep to intercept the outlaw’s retreat, halted at the head of Cappercullen Glen, overhanging the little village of Muroe. Here having dismounted, Garrett pursued the tangled and narrow path which wound along the edge of the precipitous glen, descending toward the village from which quarter the expected assistance was to arrive. Tradition says, that on turning a corner of this precarious and giddy path, he was encountered, face to face, by the rapparee himself. A brief and deadly struggle instantly ensued, in which, Garrett’s footing failing him, the outlaw ran him through the body with his rapier. Whether the wound were a mortal one or not, the result was the same; for, standing upon the salient angle of the pathway — suspended a hundred feet and more above the craggy base, among whose rocks a swollen mountain stream was flashing and foaming — he reeled backward, and fell over the unguarded edge of the precipice. Headlong through the air he tumbled, and touching a branch in his fall, turned over, and so, head downward, reached the rocky bed of the torrent, where his skull was shattered like a gourd; and he lay huddled together among the stones and foam, until hours after, the ghastly corpse was found by children gathering “frahans” in the depths of that lonely dingle.
THE END
THE HOUSE BY THE CHURCHYARD
Published in three volumes in 1863, this was the last of Le Fanu’s novels to be set in the past (and in Ireland) and the first to be published under his own name. It was initially serialised in the Dublin University Magazine from October 1861 to February 1863, under the pseudonym Charles de Cresseron. Indeed, most of Le Fanu’s subsequent novels were first published in that periodical, which he owned and edited from 1861. The book version of the novel was self-published by Le Fanu, but he was able to sell a number of copies to the London publisher Tinsley, who soon reissued it under their own imprint. It was Le Fanu’s most successful novel up to that point and is still one of his better known works.
The story opens with a prologue describing the discovery of a violently beaten skull in the churchyard at Chapelizod, near Dublin, and the narrator then takes us back in time to 1767, as he imagines the events that might explain the skull’s condition. As might be imagined from this description, the ensuing plot is an intriguing mix of the supernatural and the sensational with a realistic depiction of life in a mid-nineteenth-century Irish village.
Le Fanu spent his youth in Chapelizod, near the Phoenix Park area of Dublin, and drew on his impressions of that village for the setting of this novel and some of his ghost stories, one of which (‘Narrative of a Ghost of a Hand’) is incorporated in the narrative of this novel. The book was later an important reference point for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which contains cryptic allusions to the novel.
The title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII.
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.
CHAPTER LXII.
CHAPTER LXIII.
CHAPTER LXIV.
CHAPTER LXV.
CHAPTER LXVI.
CHAPTER LXVII.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
CHAPTER LXIX.
CHAPTER LXX.
CHAPTER LXXI.
CHAPTER LXXII.
CHAPTER LXXIII.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXV.
CHAPTER LXXVI.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
CHAPTER LXXX.
CHAPTER LXXXI.
CHAPTER LXXXII.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.
CHAPTER LXXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXXV.
CHAPTER LXXXVI.
CHAPTER LXXXVII.
CHAPTER LXXXVIII.
CHAPTER LXXXIX.
CHAPTER XC.
CHAPTER XCI.
CHAPTER XCII.
CHAPTER XCIII.
CHAPTER XCIV.
CHAPTER XCV.
CHAPTER XCVI.
CHAPTER XCVII.
CHAPTER XCVIII.
CHAPTER XCIX.
A modern view of Chapelizod, where this novel is set
The Tyled House, Balyfermot, the setting for ‘Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’
A PROLOGUE — BEING A DISH OF VILLAGE CHAT.
We are going to talk, if you please, in the ensuing chapters, of what was going on in Chapelizod about a hundred years ago. A hundred years, to be sure, is a good while; but
though fashions have changed, some old phrases dropped out, and new ones come in; and snuff and hair-powder, and sacques and solitaires quite passed away — yet men and women were men and women all the same — as elderly fellows, like your humble servant, who have seen and talked with rearward stragglers of that generation — now all and long marched off — can testify, if they will.
In those days Chapelizod was about the gayest and prettiest of the outpost villages in which old Dublin took a complacent pride. The poplars which stood, in military rows, here and there, just showed a glimpse of formality among the orchards and old timber that lined the banks of the river and the valley of the Liffey, with a lively sort of richness. The broad old street looked hospitable and merry, with steep roofs and many coloured hall-doors. The jolly old inn, just beyond the turnpike at the sweep of the road, leading over the buttressed bridge by the mill, was first to welcome the excursionist from Dublin, under the sign of the Phœnix. There, in the grand wainscoted back-parlour, with ‘the great and good King William,’ in his robe, garter, periwig, and sceptre presiding in the panel over the chimneypiece, and confronting the large projecting window, through which the river, and the daffodils, and the summer foliage looked so bright and quiet, the Aldermen of Skinner’s Alley — a club of the ‘true blue’ dye, as old as the Jacobite wars of the previous century — the corporation of shoemakers, or of tailors, or the freemasons, or the musical clubs, loved to dine at the stately hour of five, and deliver their jokes, sentiments, songs, and wisdom, on a pleasant summer’s evening. Alas! the inn is as clean gone as the guests — a dream of the shadow of smoke.
Lately, too, came down the old ‘Salmon House’ — so called from the blazonry of that noble fish upon its painted signboard — at the other end of the town, that, with a couple more, wheeled out at right angles from the line of the broad street, and directly confronting the passenger from Dublin, gave to it something of the character of a square, and just left room for the high road and Martin’s Row to slip between its flank and the orchard that overtopped the river wall. Well! it is gone. I blame nobody. I suppose it was quite rotten, and that the rats would soon have thrown up their lease of it; and that it was taken down, in short, chiefly, as one of the players said of ‘Old Drury,’ to prevent the inconvenience of its coming down of itself. Still a peevish but harmless old fellow — who hates change, and would wish things to stay as they were just a little, till his own great change comes; who haunts the places where his childhood was passed, and reverences the homeliest relics of by-gone generations — may be allowed to grumble a little at the impertinences of improving proprietors with a taste for accurate parallelograms and pale new brick.
Then there was the village church, with its tower dark and rustling from base to summit, with thick piled, bowering ivy. The royal arms cut in bold relief in the broad stone over the porch — where, pray, is that stone now, the memento of its old viceregal dignity? Where is the elevated pew, where many a lord lieutenant, in point, and gold lace, and thundercloud periwig, sate in awful isolation, and listened to orthodox and loyal sermons, and took French rappee; whence too, he stepped forth between the files of the guard of honour of the Royal Irish Artillery from the barrack over the way, in their courtly uniform, white, scarlet, and blue, cocked hats, and cues, and ruffles, presenting arms — into his emblazoned coach and six, with hanging footmen, as wonderful as Cinderella’s, and outriders outblazing the liveries of the troops, and rolling grandly away in sunshine and dust.
The ‘Ecclesiastical Commissioners’ have done their office here. The tower, indeed, remains, with half its antique growth of ivy gone; but the body of the church is new, and I, and perhaps an elderly fellow or two more, miss the oldfashioned square pews, distributed by a traditional tenure among the families and dignitaries of the town and vicinage (who are they now?), and sigh for the queer, old, clumsy reading-desk and pulpit, grown dearer from the long and hopeless separation; and wonder where the tables of the Ten Commandments, in long gold letters of Queen Anne’s date, upon a vivid blue ground, arched above, and flanking the communion-table, with its tall thin rails, and fifty other things that appeared to me in my nonage, as stable as the earth, and as sacred as the heavens, are gone to.
As for the barrack of the Royal Irish Artillery, the great gate leading into the parade ground, by the river side, and all that, I believe the earth, or rather that grim giant factory, which is now the grand feature and centre of Chapelizod, throbbing all over with steam, and whizzing with wheels, and vomiting pitchy smoke, has swallowed them up.
A line of houses fronting this — old familiar faces — still look blank and regretfully forth, through their glassy eyes, upon the changed scene. How different the company they kept some ninety or a hundred years ago!
Where is the mill, too, standing fast by the bridge, the manorial appendage of the town, which I loved in my boyhood for its gaunt and crazy aspect and dim interior, whence the clapper kept time mysteriously to the drone of the mill-sluice? I think it is gone. Surely that confounded thing can’t be my venerable old friend in masquerade!
But I can’t expect you, my reader — polite and patient as you manifestly are — to potter about with me, all the summer day, through this melancholy and mangled old town, with a canopy of factory soot between your head and the pleasant sky. One glance, however, before you go, you will vouchsafe at the village tree — that stalworth elm. It has not grown an inch these hundred years. It does not look a day older than it did fifty years ago, I can tell you. There he stands the same; and yet a stranger in the place of his birth, in a new order of things, joyless, busy, transformed Chapelizod, listening, as it seems to me, always to the unchanged song and prattle of the river, with his reveries and affections far away among by-gone times and a buried race. Thou hast a story, too, to tell, thou slighted and solitary sage, if only the winds would steal it musically forth, like the secret of Mildas from the moaning reeds.
The palmy days of Chapelizod were just about a hundred years ago, and those days — though I am jealous of their pleasant and kindly fame, and specially for the preservation of the few memorials they have left behind, were yet, I may say, in your ear, with all their colour and adventure — perhaps, on the whole, more pleasant to read about, and dream of, than they were to live in. Still their violence, follies, and hospitalities, softened by distance, and illuminated with a sort of barbaric splendour, have long presented to my fancy the glowing and ever-shifting combinations upon which, as on the red embers, in a winter’s gloaming, I love to gaze, propping my white head upon my hand, in a lazy luxury of reverie, from my own armchair, while they drop, ever and anon, into new shapes, and silently tell their ‘winter’s tales.’
When your humble servant, Charles de Cresseron, the compiler of this narrative, was a boy some fourteen years old — how long ago precisely that was, is nothing to the purpose, ’tis enough to say he remembers what he then saw and heard a good deal better than what happened a week ago — it came to pass that he was spending a pleasant week of his holidays with his benign uncle and godfather, the curate of Chapelizod. On the second day of his, or rather my sojourn (I take leave to return to the first person), there was a notable funeral of an old lady. Her name was Darby, and her journey to her last home was very considerable, being made in a hearse, by easy stages, from her house of Lisnabane, in the county of Sligo, to the churchyard of Chapelizod. There was a great flat stone over that small parcel of the rector’s freehold, which the family held by a tenure, not of lives, but of deaths, renewable for ever. So that my uncle, who was a man of an anxious temperament, had little trouble in satisfying himself of the meerings and identity of this narrow tenement, to which Lemuel Mattocks, the sexton, led him as straight and confidently as he could have done to the communion-table.
My uncle, therefore, fiated the sexton’s presentment, and the work commenced forthwith. I don’t know whether all boys have the same liking for horrors which I am conscious of having possessed — I only know that I liked the c
hurchyard, and deciphering tombstones, and watching the labours of the sexton, and hearing the old world village talk that often got up over the relics.
Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu Page 96