Irish Stories and Folklore

by Stephen Brennan

  Then immediately the priest entered the large room where all the scholars and the kings’ sons were seated, and called out to them—

  “Now, tell me the truth, and let none fear to contradict me; tell me what is your belief—have men souls?”

  “Master,” they answered, “once we believed that men had souls; but thanks to your teaching, we believe so no longer. There is no Hell, and no Heaven, and no God. This is our belief, for it is thus you taught us.”

  Then the priest grew pale with fear, and cried out—“Listen! I taught you a lie. There is a God, and man has an immortal soul. I believe now all I denied before.”

  But the shouts of laughter that rose up drowned the priest’s voice, for they thought he was only trying them for argument.

  “Prove it, master,” they cried. “Prove it. Who has ever seen God? Who has ever seen the soul?”

  And the room was stirred with their laughter.

  The priest stood up to answer them, but no word could he utter. All his eloquence, all his powers of argument had gone from him; and he could do nothing but wring his hands and cry out, “There is a God! there is a God! Lord have mercy on my soul!”

  And they all began to mock him! and repeat his own words that he had taught them—

  “Show him to us; show us your God.” And he fled from them, groaning with agony, for he saw that none believed; and how, then, could his soul be saved?

  But he thought next of his wife. “She will believe,” he said to himself; “women never give up God.”

  And he went to her; but she told him that she believed only what he taught her, and that a good wife should believe in her husband first and before and above all things in Heaven or earth.

  Then despair came on him, and he rushed from the house, and began to ask every one he met if they believed. But the same answer came from one and all—“We believe only what you have taught us,” for his doctrine had spread far and wide through the country.

  Then he grew half mad with fear, for the hours were passing, and he flung himself down on the ground in a lonesome spot, and wept and groaned in terror, for the time was coming fast when he must die.

  Just then a little child came by. “God save you kindly,” said the child to him.

  The priest started up.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked.

  “I have come from a far country to learn about him,” said the child. “Will your honor direct me to the best school they have in these parts?”

  “The best school and the best teacher is close by,” said the priest, and he named himself.

  “Oh, not to that man,” answered the child, “for I am told he denies God, and Heaven, and Hell, and even that man has a soul, because he cannot see it; but I would soon put him down.”

  The priest looked at him earnestly. “How?” he inquired.

  “Why,” said the child, “I would ask him if he believed he had life to show me his life.”

  “But he could not do that, my child,” said the priest. “Life cannot be seen; we have it, but it is invisible.”

  “Then if we have life, though we cannot see it, we may also have a soul, though it is invisible,” answered the child.

  When the priest heard him speak these words, he fell down on his knees before him, weeping for joy, for now he knew his soul was safe; he had met one at last that believed. And he told the child his whole story—all his wickedness, and pride, and blasphemy against the great God; and how the angel had come to him, and told him of the only way in which he could be saved, through the faith and prayers of someone that believed.

  “Now, then,” he said to the child, “take this penknife and strike it into my breast, and go on stabbing the flesh until you see the paleness of death on my face. Then watch—for a living thing will soar up from my body as I die, and you will then know that my soul has ascended to the presence of God. And when you see this thing, make haste and run to my school, and call on all my scholars to come and see that the soul of their master has left the body, and that all he taught them was a lie, for that there is a God who punishes sin, and a Heaven, and a Hell, and that man has an immortal soul destined for eternal happiness or misery.”

  “I will pray,” said the child, “to have courage to do this work.”

  And he kneeled down and prayed. Then when he rose up he took the penknife and struck it into the priest’s heart, and struck and struck again till all the flesh was lacerated; but still the priest lived, though the agony was horrible, for he could not die until the twenty-four hours had expired.

  At last the agony seemed to cease, and the stillness of death settled on his face.

  Then the child, who was watching, saw a beautiful living creature, with four snow-white wings, mount from the dead man’s body into the air and go fluttering round his head.

  So he ran to bring the scholars; and when they saw it, they all knew it was the soul of their master; and they watched with wonder and awe until it passed from sight into the clouds.

  And this was the first butterfly that was ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterflies are the souls of the dead, waiting for the moment when they may enter Purgatory, and so pass through torture to purification and peace.

  But the schools of Ireland were quite deserted after that time, for people said, “What is the use of going so far to learn, when the wisest man in all Ireland did not know if he had a soul till he was near losing it, and was only saved at last through the simple belief of a little child.”

  THE RISING OF THE MOON

  BY JOHN KEEGAN CASEY

  “Oh! then tell me, Shawn O’Ferrall, Tell me why you hurry so?”

  “Hush ma bouchal, hush and listen,” And his cheeks were all a-glow.

  “I bear orders from the captain, Get you ready quick and soon,

  For the pikes must be together at the risin’ of the moon.”

  At the risin’ of the moon, at the risin’ of the moon,

  For the pikes must be together at the risin’ of the moon.

  “Oh! then tell me, Shawn O’Ferrall, Where the gatherin’ is to be?”

  “In the ould spot by the river, Right well known to you and me.

  One word more—for signal token Whistle up the marchin’ tune,

  With your pike upon your shoulder, by the risin’ of the moon.”

  By the risin’ of the moon, by the risin’ of the moon,

  With your pike upon your shoulder, by the risin’ of the moon.

  Out from many a mudwall cabin Eyes were watching thro’ that night,

  Many a manly chest was throbbing For the blessed warning light.

  Murmurs ran along the valleys Like the banshee’s lonely croon,

  And a thousand blades were flashing at the risin’ of the moon.

  At the risin’ of the moon, at the risin’ of the moon,

  And a thousand blades were flashing at the risin’ of the moon.

  There beside the singing river That dark mass of men was seen,

  Far above the shining weapons Hung their own beloved green.

  “Death to ev’ry foe and traitor! Forward! strike the marchin’ tune,

  And hurrah, my boys, for freedom! ’Tis the risin’ of the moon.”

  ‘Tis the risin’ of the moon, ’Tis the risin’ of the moon,

  And hurrah my boys for freedom! ’Tis the risin’ of the moon.

  Well they fought for poor old Ireland, And full bitter was their fate

  (Oh! what glorious pride and sorrow Fill the name of Ninety-Eight).

  Yet, thank God, e’en still are beating Hearts in manhood’s burning noon,

  Who would follow in their footsteps, At the risin’ of the moon!

  At the rising of the moon, at the risin’ of the moon,

  Who would follow in their footsteps, at the risin’ of the moon.

  HIGH TEA AT MCKEOWN’S

  BY EDITH SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

  “Papa!” said the youngest Miss Purcell, aged eleven, entering t
he drawing-room at Mount Purcell in a high state of indignation and a flannel dressing-gown that had descended to her in unbroken line of succession from her eldest sister, “isn’t it my turn for the foxy mare tomorrow? Nora had her at Kilmacabee, and it’s a rotten shame—”

  The youngest Miss Purcell here showed signs of the imminence of tears, and rooted in the torn pocket of the dressing-gown for the hereditary pocket-handkerchief that went with it.

  Sir Thomas paused in the act of cutting the end off a long cigar, and said briefly:

  “Neither of you’ll get her. She’s going ploughing the Craughmore.”

  The youngest Miss Purcell knew as well as her sister Nora that the latter had already commandeered the foxy mare, and, with the connivance of the cowboy, had concealed her in the cow-house; but her sense of tribal honor, stimulated by her sister’s threatening eye, withheld her from opening this branch of the subject.

  “Well, but Johnny Mulcahy won’t plough tomorrow because he’s going to the Donovan child’s funeral. Tommy Brien’s just told me so, and he’ll be drunk when he comes back, and tomorrow’ll be the first day that Carnage and Trumpeter are going out—”

  The youngest Miss Purcell paused, and uttered a loud sob.

  “My darling baby,” remonstrated Lady Purcell from behind a reading-lamp, “you really ought not to run about the stable-yard at this hour of the night, or, indeed, at any other time!”

  “Baby’s always bothering to come out hunting,” remarked an elder sister, “and you know yourself, mamma, that the last time she came was when she stole the postman’s pony, and he had to run all the way to Drinagh, and you said yourself she was to be kept in the next day for a punishment.”

  “How ready you are with your punishments! What is it to you if she goes out or no?” demanded Sir Thomas, whose temper was always within easy reach.

  “She can have the cob, Tom,” interposed stout and sympathetic Lady Purcell, on whom the tears of her youngest born were having their wonted effect, “I’ll take the donkey chaise if I go out.”

  “The cob is it?” responded Sir Thomas, in the stalwart brogue in which he usually expressed himself. “The cob has a leg on him as big as your own since the last day one of them had him out!” The master of the house looked round with exceeding disfavor on his eight good-looking daughters. “However, I suppose it’s as good to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and if you don’t want him—”

  The youngest Miss Purcell swiftly returned her handkerchief to her pocket, and left the room before any change of opinion was possible.

  Mount Purcell was one of those households that deserve to be subsidized by any country neighborhood in consideration of their unfailing supply of topics of conversation. Sir Thomas was a man of old family, of good income and of sufficient education, who, while reserving the power of comporting himself like a gentleman, preferred as a rule to assimilate his demeanor to that of one of his own tenants (with whom, it may be mentioned, he was extremely popular). Many young men habitually dined out on Sir Thomas’s brogue and his unwearying efforts to dispose of his eight daughters.

  His wife was a handsome, amiable, and by no means unintelligent lady upon whose back the eight daughters had ploughed and had left long furrows. She was not infrequently spoken of as “that unfortunate Lady Purcell!” with a greater or less broadening of the accent on the second syllable according to the social standard of the speaker. Her tastes were comprehended and sympathized with by her gardener, and by the clerk at Mudie’s who refilled her box. The view taken of her by her husband and family was mainly a negative one, and was tinged throughout by the facts that she was afraid to drive anything more ambitious than the donkey, and had been known to mistake the kennel terrier for a hound puppy. She had succeeded in transmitting to her daughters her very successful complexion and blue eyes, but her responsibility for them had apparently gone no further. The Misses Purcell faced the world and its somewhat excessive interest in them with the intrepid esprit de corps of a square of British infantry, but among themselves they fought, as the coachman was wont to say—and no one knew better than the coachman—“both bitther an regular, like man and wife!” They ranged in age from about five and twenty downwards, sportswomen, warriors, and buccaneers, all of them, and it would be difficult to determine whether resentment or a certain secret pride bulked the larger in their male parent’s mind in connection with them.

  “Are you going to draw Clashnacrona tomorrow?” asked Muriel, the second of the gang (Lady Purcell, it should have been mentioned, had also been responsible for her daughters’ names), rising from her chair and pouring what was left of her after dinner coffee into her saucer, a proceeding which caused four pairs of lambent eyes to discover themselves in the coiled mat of red setters that occupied the drawing-room hearthrug.

  “No, I am not,” said Sir Thomas, “and, what’s more, I’m coming in early. I’m a fool to go hunting at all at this time o’ year, with half the potatoes not out of the ground.” He rose, and using the toe of his boot as the coulter of a plough, made a way for himself among the dogs to the centre of the hearthrug. “Be hanged to these dogs! I declare I don’t know am I more plagued with dogs or daughters! Lucy!”

  Lady Purcell dutifully disinterred her attention from a catalogue of Dutch bulbs.

  “When I get in tomorrow I’ll go call on that Local Government Board Inspector who’s staying in Drinagh. They tell me he’s a very nice fellow and he’s rolling in money. I daresay I’ll ask him to dinner. He was in the army one time, I believe. They often give these jobs to soldiers. If any of you girls come across him,” he continued, bending his fierce eyebrows upon his family, “I’ll trouble you to be civil to him and show him none of your infernal airs because he happens to be an Englishman! I hear he’s bicycling all over the country and he might come out to see the hounds.”

  Rosamund, the eldest, delivered herself of an almost imperceptible wink in the direction of Violet, the third of the party. Sir Thomas’s diplomacies were thoroughly appreciated by his offspring. “It’s time some of you were cleared out from under my feet!” he told them. Nevertheless when, some four or five years before, a subaltern of Engineers engaged on the Government survey of Ireland had laid his career, plus fifty pounds per annum and some impalpable expectations, at the feet of Muriel, the clearance effected by Sir Thomas had been that of Lieutenant Aubrey Hamilton. “Is it marry one of my daughters to that penniless pup!” he had said to Lady Purcell, whose sympathies had, as usual, been on the side of the detrimental. “Upon my honor, Lucy, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you—and that’s saying a good deal!”

  It was near the beginning of September, and but a sleepy half dozen or so of riders had turned out to meet the hounds the following morning, at Liss Cranny Wood. There had been rain during the night and, though it had ceased, a wild wet wind was blowing hard from the north-west. The yellowing beech trees twisted and swung their grey arms in the gale. Hats flew down the wind like driven grouse; Sir Thomas’s voice, in the middle of the covert, came to the riders assembled at the cross roads on the outskirts of the wood in gusts, fitful indeed, but not so fitful that Nora, on the distrained foxy mare, was not able to gauge to a nicety the state of his temper. From the fact of her unostentatious position in the rear it might safely be concluded that it, like the wind, was still rising. The riders huddled together in the lee of the trees, their various elements fused in the crucible of Sir Thomas’s wrath into a compact and anxious mass. There had been an unusually large entry of puppies that season, and Sir Thomas’s temper, never at its best on a morning of cubbing, was making exhaustive demands on his stock of expletives. Rabbits were flying about in every direction, each with a shrieking puppy or two in its wake. Jerry, the Whip, was galloping ventre à terre along the road in the vain endeavor to overtake a couple in headlong flight to the farm where they had spent their happier earlier days. At the other side of the wood the Master was blowing himself into apoplexy in the attempt to recall half a dozen who were aw
ay in full cry after a cur-dog, and a zealous member of the hunt looked as if he were playing polo with another puppy that doubled and dodged to evade the lash and the duty of getting to covert. Hither and thither among the beech trees went that selection from the Master’s family circle, exclusive of the furtive Nora, that had on this occasion taken the field. It was a tradition in the country that there were never fewer than four Miss Purcells out, and that no individual Miss Purcell had more than three days’ hunting in the season. Whatever may have been the truth of this, the companion legend that each Miss Purcell slept with two hound puppies in her bed was plausibly upheld by the devotion with which the latter clung to the heels of their nurses.

  In the midst of these scenes of disorder an old fox rightly judging that this was no place for him, slid out of the covert, and crossed the road just in front of where Nora, in a blue serge skirt and a red Tam-o’-Shanter cap, lurked on the foxy mare. Close after him came four or five couple of old hounds, and, prominent among her elders, yelped the puppy that had been Nora’s special charge. This was not cubbing, and no one knew it better than Nora; but the sight of Carnage among the prophets—Carnage, whose noblest quarry hitherto had been the Mount Purcell turkey-cock—overthrew her scruples. The foxy mare, a ponderous creature, with a mane like a Nubian lion and a mouth like steel, required nearly as much room to turn in as a man-of-war, and while Nora, by vigorous use of her heel and a reliable ash plant, was getting her head round, her sister Muriel, on a raw-boned well-bred colt—Sir Thomas, as he said, made the best of a bad job, and utilized his daughters as roughriders—shot past her down the leafy road, closely followed by a stranger on a weedy bay horse, which Nora instantly recognized as the solitary hireling of the neighborhood.

  Through the belt of wood and out into the open country went the five couple, and after them went Muriel, Nora and the strange man. There had been an instant when the colt had thought that it seemed a pity to leave the road, but, none the less, he had the next instant found himself in the air, a considerable distance above a low stone wall, with a tingling streak across his ribs, and a bewildering sensation of having been hustled. The field in which he alighted was a sloping one and he ramped down it very enjoyably to himself, with all the weight of his sixteen hands and a half concentrated in his head, when suddenly a tall grassy bank confronted him, with, as he perceived with horror, a ditch in front of it. He tried to swerve, but there seemed something irrevocable about the way in which the bank faced him, and if his method of “changing feet” was not strictly conventional, he achieved the main point and found all four safely under him when he landed, which was as much—if not more than as much—as either he or Muriel expected. The Miss Purcells were a practical people, and were thankful for minor mercies.