The Priest's Adventures in the Glen
At first, of course, they saw or heard little of their father. In
general, however, they knew that his plan was to procure some employment
in France, and to remove them there. Their present strange abode was
only an adventure and an episode, and they believed that any day they
might receive instructions to commence their journey.
After a little while the pursuit relaxed. The government, I believe, did
not care, provided he did not obtrude himself, what became of him, or
where he concealed himself. At all events, the local authorities showed
no disposition to hunt him down. The young ladies' charges on the little
forfeited property were paid without any dispute, and no vexatious
inquiries were raised as to what had become of the furniture and other
personal property which had been carried away from the forfeited house.
The haunted reputation of the castle--for in those days, in matters of
the marvellous, the oldest were children--secured the little family in
the seclusion they coveted. Once, or sometimes twice a week, old
Laurence, with a shaggy little pony, made a secret expedition to the
city of Limerick, starting before dawn, and returning under the cover of
the night, with his purchases. There was beside an occasional sly
moonlit visit from the old parish priest, and a midnight mass in the old
castle for the little outlawed congregation.
As the alarm and inquiry subsided, their father made them, now and then,
a brief and stealthy visit. At first these were but of a night's
duration, and with great precaution; but gradually they were extended
and less guarded. Still he was, as the phrase is in Munster, "on his
keeping." He had firearms always by his bed, and had arranged places of
concealment in the castle in the event of a surprise. But no attempt nor
any disposition to molest him appearing, he grew more at ease, if not
more cheerful.
It came, at last, that he would sometimes stay so long as two whole
months at a time, and then depart as suddenly and mysteriously as he
came. I suppose he had always some promising plot on hand, and his head
full of ingenious treason, and lived on the sickly and exciting dietary
of hope deferred.
Was there a poetical justice in this, that the little _ménage_ thus
secretly established, in the solitary and timeworn pile, should have
themselves experienced, but from causes not so easily explicable, those
very supernatural perturbations which they had themselves essayed to
inspire?
The interruption of the old priest's secret visits was the earliest
consequence of the mysterious interference which now began to display
itself. One night, having left his cob in care of his old sacristan in
the little village, he trudged on foot along the winding pathway, among
the gray rocks and ferns that threaded the glen, intending a ghostly
visit to the fair recluses of the castle, and he lost his way in this
strange fashion.
There was moonlight, indeed, but it was little more than quarter-moon,
and a long train of funereal clouds were sailing slowly across the
sky--so that, faint and wan as it was, the light seldom shone full out,
and was often hidden for a minute or two altogether. When he reached the
point in the glen where the castle-stairs were wont to be, he could see
nothing of them, and above, no trace of the castle-towers. So, puzzled
somewhat, he pursued his way up the ravine, wondering how his walk had
become so unusually protracted and fatiguing.
At last, sure enough, he saw the castle as plain as could be, and a
lonely streak of candle-light issuing from the tower, just as usual,
when his visit was expected. But he could not find the stair; and had to
clamber among the rocks and copse-wood the best way he could. But when
he emerged at top, there was nothing but the bare heath. Then the clouds
stole over the moon again, and he moved along with hesitation and
difficulty, and once more he saw the outline of the castle against the
sky, quite sharp and clear. But this time it proved to be a great
battlemented mass of cloud on the horizon. In a few minutes more he was
quite close, all of a sudden, to the great front, rising gray and dim in
the feeble light, and not till he could have struck it with his good oak
"wattle" did he discover it to be only one of those wild, gray frontages
of living rock that rise here and there in picturesque tiers along the
slopes of those solitary mountains. And so, till dawn, pursuing this
mirage of the castle, through pools and among ravines, he wore out a
night of miserable misadventure and fatigue.
Another night, riding up the glen, so far as the level way at bottom
would allow, and intending to make his nag fast at his customary tree,
he heard on a sudden a horrid shriek at top of the steep rocks above his
head, and something--a gigantic human form, it seemed--came tumbling and
bounding headlong down through the rocks, and fell with a fearful
impetus just before his horse's hoofs and there lay like a huge
palpitating carcass. The horse was scared, as, indeed, was his rider,
too, and more so when this apparently lifeless thing sprang up to his
legs, and throwing his arms apart to bar their further progress,
advanced his white and gigantic face towards them. Then the horse
started about, with a snort of terror, nearly unseating the priest, and
broke away into a furious and uncontrollable gallop.
I need not recount all the strange and various misadventures which the
honest priest sustained in his endeavours to visit the castle, and its
isolated tenants. They were enough to wear out his resolution, and
frighten him into submission. And so at last these spiritual visits
quite ceased; and fearing to awaken inquiry and suspicion, he thought it
only prudent to abstain from attempting them in the daytime.
So the young ladies of the castle were more alone than ever. Their
father, whose visits were frequently of long duration, had of late
ceased altogether to speak of their contemplated departure for France,
grew angry at any allusion to it, and they feared, had abandoned the
plan altogether.