There lived some fifteen years since in a small and ruinous house, little
better than a hovel, an old woman who was reported to have considerably
exceeded her eightieth year, and who rejoiced in the name of Alice, or
popularly, Ally Moran. Her society was not much courted, for she was
neither rich, nor, as the reader may suppose, beautiful. In addition to a
lean cur and a cat she had one human companion, her grandson, Peter
Brien, whom, with laudable good nature, she had supported from the period
of his orphanage down to that of my story, which finds him in his
twentieth year. Peter was a good-natured slob of a fellow, much more
addicted to wrestling, dancing, and love-making, than to hard work, and
fonder of whiskey-punch than good advice. His grandmother had a high
opinion of his accomplishments, which indeed was but natural, and also of
his genius, for Peter had of late years begun to apply his mind to
politics; and as it was plain that he had a mortal hatred of honest
labour, his grandmother predicted, like a true fortuneteller, that he was
born to marry an heiress, and Peter himself (who had no mind to forego
his freedom even on such terms) that he was destined to find a pot of
gold. Upon one point both agreed, that being unfitted by the peculiar
bias of his genius for work, he was to acquire the immense fortune to
which his merits entitled him by means of a pure run of good luck. This
solution of Peter's future had the double effect of reconciling both
himself and his grandmother to his idle courses, and also of maintaining
that even flow of hilarious spirits which made him everywhere welcome,
and which was in truth the natural result of his consciousness of
approaching affluence.
It happened one night that Peter had enjoyed himself to a very late hour
with two or three choice spirits near Palmerstown. They had talked
politics and love, sung songs, and told stories, and, above all, had
swallowed, in the chastened disguise of punch, at least a pint of good
whiskey, every man.
It was considerably past one o'clock when Peter bid his companions
goodbye, with a sigh and a hiccough, and lighting his pipe set forth on
his solitary homeward way.
The bridge of Chapelizod was pretty nearly the midway point of his night
march, and from one cause or another his progress was rather slow, and it
was past two o'clock by the time he found himself leaning over its old
battlements, and looking up the river, over whose winding current and
wooded banks the soft moonlight was falling.
The cold breeze that blew lightly down the stream was grateful to him. It
cooled his throbbing head, and he drank it in at his hot lips. The scene,
too, had, without his being well sensible of it, a secret fascination.
The village was sunk in the profoundest slumber, not a mortal stirring,
not a sound afloat, a soft haze covered it all, and the fairy moonlight
hovered over the entire landscape.
In a state between rumination and rapture, Peter continued to lean over
the battlements of the old bridge, and as he did so he saw, or fancied he
saw, emerging one after another along the river bank in the little
gardens and enclosures in the rear of the street of Chapelizod, the
queerest little white-washed huts and cabins he had ever seen there
before. They had not been there that evening when he passed the bridge on
the way to his merry tryst. But the most remarkable thing about it was
the odd way in which these quaint little cabins showed themselves. First
he saw one or two of them just with the corner of his eye, and when he
looked full at them, strange to say, they faded away and disappeared.
Then another and another came in view, but all in the same coy way, just
appearing and gone again before he could well fix his gaze upon them; in
a little while, however, they began to bear a fuller gaze, and he found,
as it seemed to himself, that he was able by an effort of attention to
fix the vision for a longer and a longer time, and when they waxed faint
and nearly vanished, he had the power of recalling them into light and
substance, until at last their vacillating indistinctness became less and
less, and they assumed a permanent place in the moonlit landscape.
"Be the hokey," said Peter, lost in amazement, and dropping his pipe into
the river unconsciously, "them is the quarist bits iv mud cabins I ever
seen, growing up like musharoons in the dew of an evening, and poppin' up
here and down again there, and up again in another place, like so many
white rabbits in a warren; and there they stand at last as firm and fast
as if they were there from the Deluge; bedad it's enough to make a man
a'most believe in the fairies."
This latter was a large concession from Peter, who was a bit of a
free-thinker, and spoke contemptuously in his ordinary conversation of
that class of agencies.
Having treated himself to a long last stare at these mysterious fabrics,
Peter prepared to pursue his homeward way; having crossed the bridge and
passed the mill, he arrived at the corner of the main-street of the
little town, and casting a careless look up the Dublin road, his eye was
arrested by a most unexpected spectacle.
This was no other than a column of foot soldiers, marching with perfect
regularity towards the village, and headed by an officer on horseback.
They were at the far side of the turnpike, which was closed; but much to
his perplexity he perceived that they marched on through it without
appearing to sustain the least check from that barrier.
On they came at a slow march; and what was most singular in the matter
was, that they were drawing several cannons along with them; some held
ropes, others spoked the wheels, and others again marched in front of the
guns and behind them, with muskets shouldered, giving a stately character
of parade and regularity to this, as it seemed to Peter, most unmilitary
procedure.
It was owing either to some temporary defect in Peter's vision, or to
some illusion attendant upon mist and moonlight, or perhaps to some other
cause, that the whole procession had a certain waving and vapoury
character which perplexed and tasked his eyes not a little. It was like
the pictured pageant of a phantasmagoria reflected upon smoke. It was as
if every breath disturbed it; sometimes it was blurred, sometimes
obliterated; now here, now there. Sometimes, while the upper part was
quite distinct, the legs of the column would nearly fade away or vanish
outright, and then again they would come out into clear relief, marching
on with measured tread, while the cocked hats and shoulders grew, as it
were, transparent, and all but disappeared.
Notwithstanding these strange optical fluctuations, however, the column
continued steadily to advance. Peter crossed the street from the corner
near the old bridge, running on tip-toe, and with his body stooped to
avoid observation, and took up a position upon the raised footpath in the
shadow of the houses, where, as the soldiers kept the middle of the road,
he calculated that he might, himself undetected, see them distinctly
enough as they passed.
"What the div--, what on airth," he muttered, checking the irreligious
ejaculation with which he was about to start, for certain queer
misgivings were hovering about his heart, notwithstanding the factitious
courage of the whiskey bottle. "What on airth is the manin' of all this?
is it the French that's landed at last to give us a hand and help us in
airnest to this blessed repale? If it is not them, I simply ask who the
div--, I mane who on airth are they, for such sogers as them I never
seen before in my born days?"
By this time the foremost of them were quite near, and truth to say they
were the queerest soldiers he had ever seen in the course of his life.
They wore long gaiters and leather breeches, three-cornered hats, bound
with silver lace, long blue coats, with scarlet facings and linings,
which latter were shewn by a fastening which held together the two
opposite corners of the skirt behind; and in front the breasts were in
like manner connected at a single point, where and below which they
sloped back, disclosing a long-flapped waistcoat of snowy whiteness; they
had very large, long cross-belts, and wore enormous pouches of white
leather hung extraordinarily low, and on each of which a little silver
star was glittering. But what struck him as most grotesque and outlandish
in their costume was their extraordinary display of shirt-frill in front,
and of ruffle about their wrists, and the strange manner in which their
hair was frizzled out and powdered under their hats, and clubbed up into
great rolls behind. But one of the party was mounted. He rode a tall
white horse, with high action and arching neck; he had a snow-white
feather in his three-cornered hat, and his coat was shimmering all over
with a profusion of silver lace. From these circumstances Peter concluded
that he must be the commander of the detachment, and examined him as he
passed attentively. He was a slight, tall man, whose legs did not half
fill his leather breeches, and he appeared to be at the wrong side of
sixty. He had a shrunken, weather-beaten, mulberry-coloured face, carried
a large black patch over one eye, and turned neither to the right nor to
the left, but rode on at the head of his men, with a grim, military
inflexibility.
The countenances of these soldiers, officers as well as men, seemed all
full of trouble, and, so to speak, scared and wild. He watched in vain
for a single contented or comely face. They had, one and all, a
melancholy and hang-dog look; and as they passed by, Peter fancied that
the air grew cold and thrilling.
He had seated himself upon a stone bench, from which, staring with all
his might, he gazed upon the grotesque and noiseless procession as it
filed by him. Noiseless it was; he could neither hear the jingle of
accoutrements, the tread of feet, nor the rumble of the wheels; and when
the old colonel turned his horse a little, and made as though he were
giving the word of command, and a trumpeter, with a swollen blue nose and
white feather fringe round his hat, who was walking beside him, turned
about and put his bugle to his lips, still Peter heard nothing, although
it was plain the sound had reached the soldiers, for they instantly
changed their front to three abreast.
"Botheration!" muttered Peter, "is it deaf I'm growing?"
But that could not be, for he heard the sighing of the breeze and the
rush of the neighbouring Liffey plain enough.
"Well," said he, in the same cautious key, "by the piper, this bangs
Banagher fairly! It's either the Frinch army that's in it, come to take
the town iv Chapelizod by surprise, an' makin' no noise for feard iv
wakenin' the inhabitants; or else it's--it's--what it's--somethin' else.
But, tundher-an-ouns, what's gone wid Fitzpatrick's shop across the way?"
The brown, dingy stone building at the opposite side of the street looked
newer and cleaner than he had been used to see it; the front door of it
stood open, and a sentry, in the same grotesque uniform, with shouldered
musket, was pacing noiselessly to and fro before it. At the angle of this
building, in like manner, a wide gate (of which Peter had no recollection
whatever) stood open, before which, also, a similar sentry was gliding,
and into this gateway the whole column gradually passed, and Peter
finally lost sight of it.
"I'm not asleep; I'm not dhramin'," said he, rubbing his eyes, and
stamping slightly on the pavement, to assure himself that he was wide
awake. "It is a quare business, whatever it is; an' it's not alone that,
but everything about town looks strange to me. There's Tresham's house
new painted, bedad, an' them flowers in the windies! An' Delany's house,
too, that had not a whole pane of glass in it this morning, and scarce a
slate on the roof of it! It is not possible it's what it's dhrunk I am.
Sure there's the big tree, and not a leaf of it changed since I passed,
and the stars overhead, all right. I don't think it is in my eyes it is."
And so looking about him, and every moment finding or fancying new food
for wonder, he walked along the pavement, intending, without further
delay, to make his way home.
But his adventures for the night were not concluded. He had nearly
reached the angle of the short land that leads up to the church, when for
the first time he perceived that an officer, in the uniform he had just
seen, was walking before, only a few yards in advance of him.
The officer was walking along at an easy, swinging gait, and carried
his sword under his arm, and was looking down on the pavement with an
air of reverie.
In the very fact that he seemed unconscious of Peter's presence, and
disposed to keep his reflections to himself, there was something
reassuring. Besides, the reader must please to remember that our hero had
a quantum sufficit of good punch before his adventure commenced, and was
thus fortified against those qualms and terrors under which, in a more
reasonable state of mind, he might not impossibly have sunk.
The idea of the French invasion revived in full power in Peter's fuddled
imagination, as he pursued the nonchalant swagger of the officer.
"Be the powers iv Moll Kelly, I'll ax him what it is," said Peter, with a
sudden accession of rashness. "He may tell me or not, as he plases, but
he can't be offinded, anyhow."
With this reflection having inspired himself, Peter cleared his voice
and began--
"Captain!" said he, "I ax your pardon, captain, an' maybe you'd be so
condescindin' to my ignorance as to tell me, if it's plasin' to yer
honour, whether your honour is not a Frinchman, if it's plasin' to you."
This he asked, not thinking that, had it been as he suspected, not one
word of his question in all probability would have been intelligible to
the person he addressed. He was, however, understood, for the officer
answered him in English, at the same time slackening his pace and moving
a little to the side of the pathway, as if to invite his interrogator to
take his place beside him.
"No; I am an Irishman," he answered.
"I humbly thank your honour," said Peter, drawing nearer--for the
affability and the nativity of the officer encouraged him--"but maybe
your honour is in the _sarvice_ of the King of France?"
"I serve the same King as you do," he answered, with a sorrowful
significance which Peter did not comprehend at the time; and,
interrogating in turn, he asked, "But what calls you forth at this hour
of the day?"
"The _day,_ your honour!--the night, you mane."
"It was always our way to turn night into day, and we keep to it still,"
remarked the soldier. "But, no matter, come up here to my house; I have a
job for you, if you wish to earn some money easily. I live here."
As he said this, he beckoned authoritatively to Peter, who followed
almost mechanically at his heels, and they turned up a little lane near
the old Roman Catholic chapel, at the end of which stood, in Peter's
time, the ruins of a tall, stone-built house.
Like everything else in the town, it had suffered a metamorphosis. The
stained and ragged walls were now erect, perfect, and covered with
pebble-dash; window-panes glittered coldly in every window; the green
hall-door had a bright brass knocker on it. Peter did not know whether to
believe his previous or his present impressions; seeing is believing, and
Peter could not dispute the reality of the scene. All the records of his
memory seemed but the images of a tipsy dream. In a trance of
astonishment and perplexity, therefore, he submitted himself to the
chances of his adventure.
The door opened, the officer beckoned with a melancholy air of authority
to Peter, and entered. Our hero followed him into a sort of hall, which
was very dark, but he was guided by the steps of the soldier, and, in
silence, they ascended the stairs. The moonlight, which shone in at the
lobbies, showed an old, dark wainscoting, and a heavy, oak banister. They
passed by closed doors at different landing-places, but all was dark and
silent as, indeed, became that late hour of the night.
Now they ascended to the topmost floor. The captain paused for a minute
at the nearest door, and, with a heavy groan, pushing it open, entered
the room. Peter remained at the threshold. A slight female form in a
sort of loose, white robe, and with a great deal of dark hair hanging
loosely about her, was standing in the middle of the floor, with her
back towards them.
The soldier stopped short before he reached her, and said, in a voice of
great anguish, "Still the same, sweet bird--sweet bird! still the same."
Whereupon, she turned suddenly, and threw her arms about the neck of the
officer, with a gesture of fondness and despair, and her frame was
agitated as if by a burst of sobs. He held her close to his breast in
silence; and honest Peter felt a strange terror creep over him, as he
witnessed these mysterious sorrows and endearments.
"To-night, to-night--and then ten years more--ten long years--another
ten years."
The officer and the lady seemed to speak these words together; her voice
mingled with his in a musical and fearful wail, like a distant summer
wind, in the dead hour of night, wandering through ruins. Then he heard
the officer say, alone, in a voice of anguish--
"Upon me be it all, for ever, sweet birdie, upon me."
And again they seemed to mourn together in the same soft and desolate
wail, like sounds of grief heard from a great distance.
Peter was thrilled with horror, but he was also under a strange
fascination; and an intense and dreadful curiosity held him fast.
The moon was shining obliquely into the room, and through the window
Peter saw the familiar slopes of the Park, sleeping mistily under its
shimmer. He could also see the furniture of the room with tolerable
distinctness--the old balloon-backed chairs, a four-post bed in a sort of
recess, and a rack against the wall, from which hung some military
clothes and accoutrements; and the sight of all these homely objects
reassured him somewhat, and he could not help feeling unspeakably curious
to see the face of the girl whose long hair was streaming over the
officer's epaulet.
Peter, accordingly, coughed, at first slightly, and afterward more
loudly, to recall her from her reverie of grief; and, apparently, he
succeeded; for she turned round, as did her companion, and both, standing
hand in hand, gazed upon him fixedly. He thought he had never seen such
large, strange eyes in all his life; and their gaze seemed to chill the
very air around him, and arrest the pulses of his heart. An eternity of
misery and remorse was in the shadowy faces that looked upon him.
If Peter had taken less whisky by a single thimbleful, it is probable
that he would have lost heart altogether before these figures, which
seemed every moment to assume a more marked and fearful, though hardly
definable, contrast to ordinary human shapes.
"What is it you want with me?" he stammered.
"To bring my lost treasure to the churchyard," replied the lady, in a
silvery voice of more than mortal desolation.
The word "treasure" revived the resolution of Peter, although a cold
sweat was covering him, and his hair was bristling with horror; he
believed, however, that he was on the brink of fortune, if he could but
command nerve to brave the interview to its close.
"And where," he gasped, "is it hid--where will I find it?"
They both pointed to the sill of the window, through which the moon was
shining at the far end of the room, and the soldier said--
"Under that stone."
Peter drew a long breath, and wiped the cold dew from his face,
preparatory to passing to the window, where he expected to secure the
reward of his protracted terrors. But looking steadfastly at the window,
he saw the faint image of a new-born child sitting upon the sill in the
moonlight, with its little arms stretched toward him, and a smile so
heavenly as he never beheld before.
At sight of this, strange to say, his heart entirely failed him, he
looked on the figures that stood near, and beheld them gazing on the
infantine form with a smile so guilty and distorted, that he felt as if
he were entering alive among the scenery of hell, and shuddering, he
cried in an irrepressible agony of horror--
"I'll have nothing to say with you, and nothing to do with you; I don't
know what yez are or what yez want iv me, but let me go this minute,
every one of yez, in the name of God."
With these words there came a strange rumbling and sighing about
Peter's ears; he lost sight of everything, and felt that peculiar and
not unpleasant sensation of falling softly, that sometimes supervenes
in sleep, ending in a dull shock. After that he had neither dream nor
consciousness till he wakened, chill and stiff, stretched between two
piles of old rubbish, among the black and roofless walls of the
ruined house.
We need hardly mention that the village had put on its wonted air of
neglect and decay, or that Peter looked around him in vain for traces of
those novelties which had so puzzled and distracted him upon the
previous night.
"Ay, ay," said his grandmother, removing her pipe, as he ended his
description of the view from the bridge, "sure enough I remember myself,
when I was a slip of a girl, these little white cabins among the gardens
by the river side. The artillery sogers that was married, or had not room
in the barracks, used to be in them, but they're all gone long ago.
"The Lord be merciful to us!" she resumed, when he had described the
military procession, "It's often I seen the regiment marchin' into the
town, jist as you saw it last night, acushla. Oh, voch, but it makes my
heart sore to think iv them days; they were pleasant times, sure enough;
but is not it terrible, avick, to think it's what it was the ghost of the
rigiment you seen? The Lord betune us an' harm, for it was nothing else,
as sure as I'm sittin' here."
When he mentioned the peculiar physiognomy and figure of the old officer
who rode at the head of the regiment--
"That," said the old crone, dogmatically, "was ould Colonel Grimshaw, the
Lord presarve us! he's buried in the churchyard iv Chapelizod, and well I
remember him, when I was a young thing, an' a cross ould floggin' fellow
he was wid the men, an' a devil's boy among the girls--rest his soul!"
"Amen!" said Peter; "it's often I read his tombstone myself; but he's a
long time dead."
"Sure, I tell you he died when I was no more nor a slip iv a girl--the
Lord betune us and harm!"
"I'm afeard it is what I'm not long for this world myself, afther seeing
such a sight as that," said Peter, fearfully.
"Nonsinse, avourneen," retorted his grandmother, indignantly, though she
had herself misgivings on the subject; "sure there was Phil Doolan, the
ferryman, that seen black Ann Scanlan in his own boat, and what harm ever
kem of it?"
Peter proceeded with his narrative, but when he came to the description
of the house, in which his adventure had had so sinister a conclusion,
the old woman was at fault.
"I know the house and the ould walls well, an' I can remember the time
there was a roof on it, and the doors an' windows in it, but it had a bad
name about being haunted, but by who, or for what, I forget intirely."
"Did you ever hear was there goold or silver there?" he inquired.
"No, no, avick, don't be thinking about the likes; take a fool's advice,
and never go next to near them ugly black walls again the longest day you
have to live; an' I'd take my davy, it's what it's the same word the
priest himself id be afther sayin' to you if you wor to ax his raverence
consarnin' it, for it's plain to be seen it was nothing good you seen
there, and there's neither luck nor grace about it."
Peter's adventure made no little noise in the neighbourhood, as the
reader may well suppose; and a few evenings after it, being on an errand
to old Major Vandeleur, who lived in a snug old-fashioned house, close by
the river, under a perfect bower of ancient trees, he was called on to
relate the story in the parlour.
The Major was, as I have said, an old man; he was small, lean, and
upright, with a mahogany complexion, and a wooden inflexibility of face;
he was a man, besides, of few words, and if _he_ was old, it follows
plainly that his mother was older still. Nobody could guess or tell _how_
old, but it was admitted that her own generation had long passed away,
and that she had not a competitor left. She had French blood in her
veins, and although she did not retain her charms quite so well as Ninon
de l'Enclos, she was in full possession of all her mental activity, and
talked quite enough for herself and the Major.
"So, Peter," she said, "you have seen the dear, old Royal Irish again in
the streets of Chapelizod. Make him a tumbler of punch, Frank; and Peter,
sit down, and while you take it let us have the story."
Peter accordingly, seated, near the door, with a tumbler of the nectarian
stimulant steaming beside him, proceeded with marvellous courage,
considering they had no light but the uncertain glare of the fire, to
relate with minute particularity his awful adventure. The old lady
listened at first with a smile of good-natured incredulity; her
cross-examination touching the drinking-bout at Palmerstown had been
teazing, but as the narrative proceeded she became attentive, and at
length absorbed, and once or twice she uttered ejaculations of pity or
awe. When it was over, the old lady looked with a somewhat sad and stern
abstraction on the table, patting her cat assiduously meanwhile, and then
suddenly looking upon her son, the Major, she said--
"Frank, as sure as I live he has seen the wicked Captain Devereux."
The Major uttered an inarticulate expression of wonder.
"The house was precisely that he has described. I have told you the story
often, as I heard it from your dear grandmother, about the poor young
lady he ruined, and the dreadful suspicion about the little baby. _She_,
poor thing, died in that house heart-broken, and you know he was shot
shortly after in a duel."
This was the only light that Peter ever received respecting his
adventure. It was supposed, however, that he still clung to the hope that
treasure of some sort was hidden about the old house, for he was often
seen lurking about its walls, and at last his fate overtook him, poor
fellow, in the pursuit; for climbing near the summit one day, his holding
gave way, and he fell upon the hard uneven ground, fracturing a leg and a
rib, and after a short interval died, and he, like the other heroes of
these true tales, lies buried in the little churchyard of Chapelizod.
* * * * *