I
A MAYO woman once said to me, ‘I knew a servant girl who hung herself
for the love of God. She was lonely for the priest and her society,[E]
and hung herself to the banisters with a scarf. She was no sooner dead
than she became white as a lily, and if it had been murder or suicide
she would have become black as black. They gave her Christian burial,
and the priest said she was no sooner dead than she was with the Lord.
So nothing matters that you do for the love of God.’ I do not wonder
at the pleasure she has in telling this story, for she herself loves
all holy things with an ardour that brings them quickly to her lips.
She told me once that she never hears anything described in a sermon
that she does not afterwards see with her eyes. She has described to
me the gates of Purgatory as they showed themselves to her eyes, but
I remember nothing of the description except that she could not see
the souls in trouble but only the gates. Her mind continually dwells
on what is pleasant and beautiful. One day she asked me what month
and what flower were the most beautiful. When I answered that I did
not know, she said, ‘The month of May, because of the Virgin, and the
lily of the valley, because it never sinned, but came pure out of the
rocks,’ and then she asked, ‘What is the cause of the three cold months
of winter?’ I did not know even that, and so she said, ‘The sin of man
and the vengeance of God.’ Christ Himself was not only blessed, but
perfect in all manly proportions in her eyes, so much do beauty and
holiness go together in her thoughts. He alone of all men was exactly
six feet high, all others are a little more or a little less.
Her thoughts and her sights of the people of faery are pleasant and
beautiful too, and I have never heard her call them the Fallen Angels.
They are people like ourselves, only better-looking, and many and many
a time she has gone to the window to watch them drive their waggons
through the sky, waggon behind waggon in long line, or to the door to
hear them singing and dancing in the Forth. They sing chiefly, it
seems, a song called ‘The Distant Waterfall,’ and though they once
knocked her down she never thinks badly of them. She saw them most
easily when she was in service in King’s County, and one morning a
little while ago she said to me, ‘Last night I was waiting up for the
master and it was a quarter-past eleven. I heard a bang right down on
the table. “King’s County all over,” says I, and I laughed till I was
near dead. It was a warning I was staying too long. They wanted the
place to themselves.’ I told her once of somebody who saw a faery and
fainted, and she said, ‘It could not have been a faery, but some bad
thing, nobody could faint at a faery. It was a demon. I was not afraid
when they near put me, and the bed under me, out through the roof. I
wasn’t afraid either when you were at some work and I heard a thing
coming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel, and squealing. It went to
all the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent it
through the universe like a flash of fire. There was a man in my place,
a tearing fellow, and he put one of them down. He went out to meet it
on the road, but he must have been told the words. But the faeries are
the best neighbours. If you do good to them they will do good to you,
but they don’t like you to be on their path.’ Another time she said to
me, ‘They are always good to the poor.’