When he had recovered sufficiently to talk with the people about him — speaking, like a man at his last hour, from a burdened heart, and troubled conscience — he repeated his story, but said he did not see, or, at all events, know, the face of the figure that stood in the gap. No one believed him. He told more about it to the priest than to others. He certainly had a secret to tell. He might as well have divulged it frankly, for the neighbours all knew well enough that it was the face of dead Ellen Coleman that he had seen.
From that moment my granduncle never raised his head. He was a scared, silent, broken-spirited man. It was early summer then, and at the fall of the leaf in the same year he died.
Of course there was a wake, such as beseemed a strong farmer so rich as he. For some reason the arrangements of this ceremonial were a little different from the usual routine.
The usual practice is to place the body in the great room, or kitchen, as it is called, of the house. In this particular case there was, as I told you, for some reason, an unusual arrangement. The body was placed in a small room that opened upon the greater one. The door of this, during the wake, stood open. There were candles about the bed, and pipes and tobacco on the table, and stools for such guests as chose to enter, the door standing open for their reception.
The body, having been laid out, was left alone, in this smaller room, during the preparations for the wake. After nightfall one of the women, approaching the bed to get a chair which she had left near it, rushed from the room with a scream, and, having recovered her speech at the further end of the “kitchen,” and surrounded by a gaping audience, she said, at last:
“May I never sin, if his face bain’t riz up again the back o’ the bed, and he starin’ down to the doore, wid eyes as big as pewter plates, that id be shinin’ in the moon!”
“Arra, woman! Is it cracked you are?” said one of the farm boys as they are termed, being men of any age you please.
“Agh, Molly, don’t be talkin’, woman! ’Tis what ye consayted it, goin’ into the dark room, out o’ the light. Why didn’t ye take a candle in your fingers, ye aumadhaun?” said one of her female companions.
“Candle, or no candle; I seen it,” insisted Molly. “An’ what’s more, I could a’most tak’ my oath I seen his arum, too, stretchin’ out o’ the bed along the flure, three times as long as it should be, to take hould o’ me be the fut.”
“Nansinse, ye fool, what id he want o’ yer fut?” exclaimed one scornfully.
“Gi’ me the candle, some o’ yez — in the name o’ God,” said old Sal Doolan, that was straight and lean, and a woman that could pray like a priest almost.
“Give her a candle,” agreed all.
But whatever they might say, there wasn’t one among them that did not look pale and stern enough as they followed Mrs. Doolan, who was praying as fast as her lips could patter, and leading the van with a tallow candle, held like a taper, in her fingers.
The door was half open, as the panic-stricken girl had left it; and holding the candle on high the better to examine the room, she made a step or so into it.
If my granduncle’s hand had been stretched along the floor, in the unnatural way described, he had drawn it back again under the sheet that covered him. And tall Mrs. Doolan was in no danger of tripping over his arm as she entered. But she had not gone more than a step or two with her candle aloft, when, with a drowning face, she suddenly stopped short, staring at the bed which was now fully in view.
“Lord, bless us, Mrs. Doolan, ma’am, come back,” said the woman next her, who had fast hold of her dress, or her ‘coat,’ as they call it, and drawing her backwards with a frightened pluck, while a general recoil among her followers betokened the alarm which her hesitation had inspired.
“Whisht, will yez?” said the leader, peremptorily, “I can’t hear my own ears wid the noise ye’re makin’, an’ which iv yez let the cat in here, an’ whose cat is it?” she asked, peering suspiciously at a white cat that was sitting on the breast of the corpse.
“Put it away, will yez?” she resumed, with horror at the profanation. “Many a corpse as I sthretched and crossed in the bed, the likes o’ that I never seen yet. The man o’ the house, wid a brute baste like that mounted on him, like a phooka, Lord forgi’ me for namin’ the like in this room. Dhrive it away, some o’ yez! out o’ that, this minute, I tell ye.”
Each repeated the order, but no one seemed inclined to execute it. They were crossing themselves, and whispering their conjectures and misgivings as to the nature of the beast, which was no cat of that house, nor one that they had ever seen before. On a sudden, the white cat placed itself on the pillow over the head of the body, and having from that place glared for a time at them over the features of the corpse, it crept softly along the body towards them, growling low and fiercely as it drew near.
Out of the room they bounced, in dreadful confusion, shutting the door fast after them, and not for a good while did the hardiest venture to peep in again.
The white cat was sitting in its old place, on the dead man’s breast, but this time it crept quietly down the side of the bed, and disappeared under it, the sheet which was spread like a coverlet, and hung down nearly to the floor, concealing it from view.
Praying, crossing themselves, and not forgetting a sprinkling of holy water, they peeped, and finally searched, poking spades, “wattles,” pitchforks and such implements under the bed. But the cat was not to be found, and they concluded that it had made its escape among their feet as they stood near the threshold. So they secured the door carefully, with hasp and padlock. But when the door was opened next morning they found the white cat sitting, as if it had never been disturbed, upon the breast of the dead man.
Again occurred very nearly the same scene with a like result, only that some said they saw the cat afterwards lurking under a big box in a corner of the outer-room, where my granduncle kept his leases and papers, and his prayer-book and beads.
Mrs. Doolan heard it growling at her heels wherever she went; and although she could not see it, she could hear it spring on the back of her chair when she sat down, and growl in her ear, so that she would bounce up with a scream and a prayer, fancying that it was on the point of taking her by the throat.
And the priest’s boy, looking round the corner, under the branches of the old orchard, saw a white cat sitting under the little window of the room where my granduncle was laid out and looking up at the four small panes of glass as a cat will watch a bird.
The end of it was that the cat was found on the corpse again, when the room was visited, and do what they might, whenever the body was left alone, the cat was found again in the same ill-omened contiguity with the dead man. And this continued, to the scandal and fear of the neighbourhood, until the door was opened finally for the wake.
My granduncle being dead, and, with all due solemnities, buried, I have done with him. But not quite yet with the white cat. No banshee ever yet was more inalienably attached to a family than this ominous apparition is to mine. But there is this difference. The banshee seems to be animated with an affectionate sympathy with the bereaved family to whom it is hereditarily attached, whereas this thing has about it a suspicion of malice. It is the messenger simply of death. And its taking the shape of a cat — the coldest, and they say, the most vindictive of brutes — is indicative of the spirit of its visit.
When my grandfather’s death was near, although he seemed quite well at the time, it appeared not exactly, but very nearly in the same way in which I told you it showed itself to my father.
The day before my Uncle Teigue was killed by the bursting of his gun, it appeared to him in the evening, at twilight, by the lough, in the field where I saw the woman who walked across the water, as I told you. My uncle was washing the barrel of his gun in the lough. The grass is short there, and there is no cover near it. He did not know how it approached; but the first he saw of it, the white cat was walking close round his feet, in the twilight, with an angry twist of its tail, a
nd a green glare in its eyes, and do what he would, it continued walking round and round him, in larger or smaller circles, till he reached the orchard, and there he lost it.
My poor Aunt Peg — she married one of the O’Brians, near Oolah — came to Drumgunniol to go to the funeral of a cousin who died about a mile away. She died herself, poor woman, only a month after.
Coming from the wake, at two or three o’clock in the morning, as she got over the style into the farm of Drumgunniol, she saw the white cat at her side, and it kept close beside her, she ready to faint all the time, till she reached the door of the house, where it made a spring up into the whitethorn tree that grows close by, and so it parted from her. And my little brother Jim saw it also, just three weeks before he died. Every member of our family who dies, or takes his death-sickness, at Drumgunniol, is sure to see the white cat, and no one of us who sees it need hope for long life after.
SIR DOMINICK’S BARGAIN: A LEGEND OF DUNORAN
Anonymous in All the Year Round (1872)
In the early autumn of the year 1838, business called me to the south of Ireland. The weather was delightful, the scenery and people were new to me, and sending my luggage on by the mail-coach route in charge of a servant, I hired a serviceable nag at a posting-house, and, full of the curiosity of an explorer, I commenced a leisurely journey of five-and-twenty miles on horseback, by sequestered cross-roads, to my place of destination. By bog and hill, by plain and ruined castle, and many a winding stream, my picturesque road led me.
I had started late, and having made little more than half my journey, I was thinking of making a short halt at the next convenient place, and letting my horse have a rest and a feed, and making some provision also for the comforts of his rider.
It was about four o’clock when the road, ascending a gradual steep, found a passage through a rocky gorge between the abrupt termination of a range of mountain to my left and a rocky hill, that rose dark and sudden at my right. Below me lay a little thatched village, under a long line of gigantic beech-trees, through the boughs of which the lowly chimneys sent up their thin turf-smoke. To my left, stretched away for miles, ascending the mountain range I have mentioned, a wild park, through whose sward and ferns the rock broke, timeworn and lichen-stained. This park was studded with straggling wood, which thickened to something like a forest, behind and beyond the little village I was approaching, clothing the irregular ascent of the hillsides with beautiful, and in some places discoloured foliage.
As you descend, the road winds slightly, with the grey park-wall, built of loose stone, and mantled here and there with ivy, at its left, and crosses a shallow ford; and as I approached the village, through breaks in the woodlands, I caught glimpses of the long front of an old ruined house, placed among the trees, about halfway up the picturesque mountain-side.
The solitude and melancholy of this ruin piqued my curiosity, and when I had reached the rude thatched public-house, with the sign of St. Columbkill, with robes, mitre, and crozier displayed over its lintel, having seen to my horse and made a good meal myself on a rasher and eggs, I began to think again of the wooded park and the ruinous house, and resolved on a ramble of half an hour among its sylvan solitudes.
The name of the place, I found, was Dunoran; and beside the gate a stile admitted to the grounds, through which, with a pensive enjoyment, I began to saunter towards the dilapidated mansion.
A long grass-grown road, with many turns and windings, led up to the old house, under the shadow of the wood.
The road, as it approached the house skirted the edge of a precipitous glen, clothed with hazel, dwarf-oak, and thorn, and the silent house stood with its wide-open hall-door facing this dark ravine, the further edge of which was crowned with towering forest; and great trees stood about the house and its deserted courtyard and stables.
I walked in and looked about me, through passages overgrown with nettles and weeds; from room to room with ceilings rotted, and here and there a great beam dark and worn, with tendrils of ivy trailing over it. The tall walls with rotten plaster were stained and mouldy, and in some rooms the remains of decayed wainscoting crazily swung to and fro. The almost sashless windows were darkened also with ivy, and about the tall chimneys the jackdaws were wheeling, while from the huge trees that overhung the glen in sombre masses at the other side, the rooks kept up a ceaseless cawing.
As I walked through these melancholy passages — peeping only into some of the rooms, for the flooring was quite gone in the middle, and bowed down toward the centre, and the house was very nearly un-roofed, a state of things which made the exploration a little critical — I began to wonder why so grand a house, in the midst of scenery so picturesque, had been permitted to go to decay; I dreamed of the hospitalities of which it had long ago been the rallying place, and I thought what a scene of Redgauntlet revelries it might disclose at midnight.
The great staircase was of oak, which had stood the weather wonderfully, and I sat down upon its steps, musing vaguely on the transitoriness of all things under the sun.
Except for the hoarse and distant clamour of the rooks, hardly audible where I sat, no sound broke the profound stillness of the spot. Such a sense of solitude I have seldom experienced before. The air was stirless, there was not even the rustle of a withered leaf along the passage. It was oppressive. The tall trees that stood close about the building darkened it, and added something of awe to the melancholy of the scene.
In this mood I heard, with an unpleasant surprise, close to me, a voice that was drawling, and, I fancied, sneering, repeat the words: “Food for worms, dead and rotten; God over all.”
There was a small window in the wall, here very thick, which had been built up, and in the dark recess of this, deep in the shadow, I now saw a sharp-featured man, sitting with his feet dangling. His keen eyes were fixed on me, and he was smiling cynically, and before I had well recovered my surprise, he repeated the distich:
/P “If death was a thing that money could buy, The rich they would live, and the poor they would die. P/
“It was a grand house in its day, sir,” he continued, “Dunoran House, and the Sarsfields. Sir Dominick Sarsfield was the last of the old stock. He lost his life not six foot away from where you are sitting.”
As he thus spoke he let himself down, with a little jump, on to the ground.
He was a dark-faced, sharp-featured, little hunchback, and had a walking-stick in his hand, with the end of which he pointed to a rusty stain in the plaster of the wall.
“Do you mind that mark, sir?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, standing up, and looking at it, with a curious anticipation of something worth hearing.
“That’s about seven or eight feet from the ground, sir, and you’ll not guess what it is.”
“I dare say not,” said I, “unless it is a stain from the weather.”
“’Tis nothing so lucky, sir,” he answered, with the same cynical smile and a wag of his head, still pointing at the mark with his stick. “That’s a splash of brains and blood. It’s there this hundhred years; and it will never leave it while the wall stands.”
“He was murdered, then?”
“Worse than that, sir,” he answered.
“He killed himself, perhaps?”
“Worse than that, itself, this cross between us and harm! I’m oulder than I look, sir; you wouldn’t guess my years.”
He became silent, and looked at me, evidently inviting a guess.
“Well, I should guess you to be about five-and-fifty.”
He laughed, and took a pinch of snuff, and said:
“I’m that, your honour, and something to the back of it. I was seventy last Candlemas. You would not a’ thought that, to look at me.”
“Upon my word I should not; I can hardly believe it even now. Still, you don’t remember Sir Dominick Sarsfield’s death?” I said, glancing up at the ominous stain on the wall.
“No, sir, that was a long while before I was born. But my grandfather was b
utler here long ago, and many a time I heard tell how Sir Dominick came by his death. There was no masther in the great house ever sinst that happened. But there was two sarvants in care of it, and my aunt was one o’ them; and she kep’ me here wid her till I was nine year old, and she was lavin’ the place to go to Dublin; and from that time it was let to go down. The wind sthript the roof, and the rain rotted the timber, and little by little, in sixty years’ time, it kem to what you see. But I have a likin’ for it still, for the sake of ould times; and I never come this way but I take a look in. I don’t think it’s many more times I’ll be turnin’ to see the ould place, for I’ll be undher the sod myself before long.”
“You’ll outlive younger people,” I said.
And, quitting that trite subject, I ran on:
“I don’t wonder that you like this old place; it is a beautiful spot, such noble trees.”
“I wish ye seen the glin when the nuts is ripe; they’re the sweetest nuts in all Ireland, I think,” he rejoined, with a practical sense of the picturesque. “You’d fill your pockets while you’d be lookin’ about you.”
“These are very fine old woods,” I remarked. “I have not seen any in Ireland I thought so beautiful.”
“Eiah! your honour, the woods about here is nothing to what they wor. Al the mountains along here was wood when my father was a gossoon, and Murroa Wood was the grandest of them all. All oak mostly, and all cut down as bare as the road. Not one left here that’s fit to compare with them. Which way did your honour come hither — from Limerick?”
“No. Killaloe.”
“Well, then, you passed the ground where Murroa Wood was in former times. You kem undher Lisnavourra, the steep knob of a hill about a mile above the village here. ’Twas near that Murroa Wood was, and ’twas there Sir Dominick Sarsfield first met the devil, the Lord between us and harm, and a bad meeting it was for him and his.”
Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu Page 857