UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAINS
Rowallan was an old, rambling house that stood in a wilderness of weeds
and trees under the shadow of the Mourne Mountains. It was a house
with a strange name; people said it was never free from sorrow. Others
went so far as to say there was a curse on the place, and many went
miles out of their way rather than pass the big gates after dark, and
crossed themselves when they passed them in broad daylight. There was
not a man or woman in the countryside who could not have given you the
reason for this feeling about Rowallan. Anyone could have told you
that the master had been murdered not five years ago at his own gates.
Most of them could have told how his father before him had died on the
same spot--died cursing a son and daughter who had turned to be Roman
Catholics. And in some of the cottages there still lived a man or a
woman old enough to remember the master before that: a bad man, for he
had believed in neither God nor devil, and had broken his neck, riding
home one night full of drink, at the gates. God save us! was it any
wonder people were afraid to pass them? The present, too, had its own
share of sorrow. The children, they would tell you, lived almost
alone; there was no one to take care of them but two old servants, both
over sixty, for the mistress, though still alive, was a broken-hearted
woman, who had never left her room since her husband's death. This
they might have told a stranger, but no one would have dreamt of
telling the children these tales about their home. They, though they
had friends in every cottage, had never heard one word of either
haunting sorrow or curse. It is true that sometimes, coming home in
the evening from a long day's expedition across the mountains, they
felt a strange sense of depression when they came to the big iron
gates. For no reason, it seemed, a foreboding of calamity chilled
their spirits, and sent them, at a run, up the avenue into the house to
the warm shelter of the kitchen, to be assured by Lull's cheerful
presence that their mother had not died in their absence, and life was
still happy.
There were five of them: Mick, Jane, Fly, Patsy, and Honeybird. The
tales people told of their home were not the strangest part of their
history. Their father had been a man hated by his own class for his
broad and generous views at a time when the whole country was
disturbed, and loved by his poorer neighbours for the same reason. He
had been murdered by a terrible mistake. It was not the master,
Michael Darragh, but his Roman Catholic brother Niel, the murderer had
meant to kill. Niel Darragh, when he and his sister had been driven
out of their father's house for their religious views, had taken a farm
about a mile from Rowallan, and it was over his title to this farm the
quarrel had arisen that had ended in the master being murdered,
mistaken in the dark for his brother. The children's mother was an
Englishwoman, who came of an old Puritan stock, and had married against
the wishes of her family. Her husband's death was God's judgment for
her wickedness, she thought. She had never recovered from the shock of
the murder, and was only able to move with Lull's help from her bed to
a couch by the window, and she was so entirely occupied with her own
troubles that she often forgot the children existed. So it came that
they were being brought up by Lull, their father's old nurse, and Andy
Graham, the coachman. Lull had so much else to do, with all the work
of the house, and an invalid mistress to wait on, that the children
were left to come and go as they pleased. Twice a week they went to
old Mr Rannigan, the rector, for lessons, but on other days they roamed
for miles over the country, making friends at every cottage they
passed. When they came home in the evening Lull was always waiting
with supper by the kitchen fire, ready to hear their adventures, to
sympathise or reprove as she saw fit. So long as they were well fed
and clothed, and did nothing Quality would be ashamed of, she said she
was content. Days spent on the mountains, fishing in some brown
stream, helping an old peasant to herd his cow, or watching a woman
spin by her door, taught the children more than they learnt from Mr
Rannigan. They brought back to Lull stories of ghosts, Orange and
Papist, who fought by night on the bridge that had once been slippery
with their blood; of the devil's strange doings in the mountains: how
he had bitten a piece out of one--the marks of his teeth showed to this
day; or milder tales of fairy people--leprachauns, and the fiddlers
whose music only the good could hear. Lull believed them all, crossed
herself at the mention of ghosts and devil--her own mother had seen
fairies dancing on the rocks one day as she was coming home from
school. Lull herself, though she had never seen anything, had heard
the banshee wailing round the house the night the master's mother died.
The children were sure Lull could have heard the fairy fiddlers if she
would have come with them to the right place up the mountains; she was
good enough to hear it--they knew that.
Lull was a good old woman. The children were right; she was never
cross, but always loving and kind, always ready to help them whatever
they might want. Any spare minute she had was spent at her beads, and
often while she worked they could tell by her lips she was saying her
prayers. Blessed saints and holy angels filled her world, and her
tales, if they were not of the days when she first came to Rowallan,
were about these wonderful beings. They were far better than fairies,
she said; for the best of fairies were mischievous at times, but the
saints could be depended on. But the children thought her tales about
their home were even more interesting than tales of the saints.
There was a time, she said, when the dilapidated old house and garden
had been the finest in Ireland. When she came to Rowallan, a slip of a
girl, more than forty years ago, there had been no less than seven
gardeners about the place. Ould Davy, who worked in the kitchen garden
now, was all that was left of them. Now the house was falling to
pieces, great patches of damp discoloured the walls, and most of the
rooms were shut up; but Lull had seen the day when all was light and
colour, when the rooms were filled with guests, and the children, who
slept in the nursery then, had heard the rustle of silk dresses, not
the scamper of rats, on the stairs at night. The children could see,
when they opened the shutters in the disused drawing-room, how
beautiful everything had been then, though the yellow damask, the satin
chairs, and the big sconces on the wall were faded, moth-eaten, and
dusty now. And in the garden, where Lull's thoughts loved to dwell on
the flowers she had seen--lupins, phlox, roses, pinks, bachelor's
buttons, and more whose names she had forgotten, that had fought others
for leave to grow, she said--a strange flower would now and again push
its way up through weeds and grass to witness that her tales were true.
Lull always ended her talks as she rose to take the children off to
bed, with a promise that all would come back again, that one fine day
their ship would come in.
Andy Graham, in the stable, said the same thing. On Sunday mornings,
when they watched him getting ready to take them to church, he would
say, as he put on the old top hat and faded blue coat that were his
livery: "Troth, the day'll come when I'll not be wispin' hay round me
head to keep on a hat that was made for a man twiced me size, an' it's
more than an ould coat that has only one tail to it I'll be wearin'.
I'll be the smartest lad in Ireland, with livery to me legs forby, when
yer fortune comes back to yez all again."
This hopeful view of the future, a romantic fiction half believed by
Lull and Andy themselves, was taken quite seriously by the children.
They imagined their home was under some kind of enchantment that would
one day be broken. It was true Lull had told them the present state of
Rowallan was God's will, and Andy said God alone knew when their
fortune would come back; but the children, whose mind held fairies,
saints, banshees, and angels, and their mother's Puritan God, had no
difficulty in reconciling God's will and an enchantment. One thing had
helped to confirm this belief. Mick and Jane remembered the night
their father died--it was the night Honeybird was born--and, thinking
back over it now, they were sure they had heard the incantation that
had wrought the spell. They had been waked by a noise, a muttering,
and a tramp of feet on the gravel beneath the nursery window. They had
been frightened, for Lull was not in the nursery, and when they ran out
into the passage to call her they saw their mother standing in a white
dress at the top of the stairs and a crowd of strange faces in the hall
below. That was all they had seen, for someone had pushed them back
into the nursery, and locked them in, but they had heard shrieks and
horrible laughter through the night. No one knew when the spell would
be broken, but when the one fine day did come the children believed
that in some mysterious way the house would shake off its air of ruin
and decay; the six gardeners would come back to join ould Davy, who,
though he was so cross, had been faithful all these years; the horses
and carriages and dogs that Andy remembered would return; their mother
would come downstairs; and, perhaps, their father would come to life
again, if he were really dead, and had not been whipped away to some
remote island, they thought it was quite possible, till the time when
the enchantment would cease.
Their chief reason for looking with joy to this day was that then their
mother would be quite well, and their anxiety about her would be over.
Twice a day they went to her room--to bid her good-morning and
good-night. Then she read them a chapter from the Bible, and made them
promise to say their prayers. From her they got their ideas of God's
terrible judgments, and of the Last Day, when the heavens would roll
back like a scroll, and they would be caught up in the clouds. Jane
was afraid it might happen when she was bathing some day, and she would
be caught up in her bare skin. She always put her boots and stockings
under her pillow when she went to bed, in case it came like a thief in
the night. Occasionally Mrs Darragh was well enough to forget her own
trouble, and then she would keep the children with her, and tell them
stories of the time when she was a child. These were the children's
happiest days. They would sit on the floor round her sofa, listening,
fascinated by her description of a life so unlike their own. Their
mother, like a child in a book, had never gone outside the garden gates
without her nurse, and they laughed at the difference between their
life and hers. She never went fishing, and brought home enough fish to
feed her family for three days; she never tramped for miles over
mountains or spent whole days catching glasen off the rocks. The
country she had lived in had been different, too--a red-roofed village,
where every cottage had a garden neat and trim, and all the children
had rosy cheeks and tidy yellow hair. But on their mother's bad days,
when she remembered another past, they would creep to her door, and
listen with troubled faces to her wild talk of sins and punishment, and
hear her praying for forgiveness and death. Their love for their
mother was a passionate devotion, and through it came the only real
trouble they knew--they were afraid that God would answer her prayer,
and take her from them. So her bad days came to mean days of black
misery for them, when they spent their time beseeching God not to take
her prayers seriously: it was only because she was ill that she thought
she wanted to die, and would have changed her mind by the morning. If
after one of these bad days a stormy night followed, misery changed to
terror. On such a night the Banshee had wailed for their grandmother,
and if they heard her now it would be for a sign that their mother must
die too.
Lull would do her best to comfort them. "Banshee daren't set fut in
the garden, or raise wan skirl of a cry, after all the prayers yez have
been sayin'," she would tell them. But when she left them it was only
to go to the kitchen fire and pray against the same fear herself. But,
apart from this shadow, that often lifted for weeks at a time, their
life was very happy. Mick, the eldest, was twelve years old, and
Honeybird was five; the others, Jane, Fly, and Patsy, came between.
The two eldest, Mick and Jane, led the others, though Fly and Patsy
criticised their leaders' opinions when they saw fit; Honeybird was
content to blindly obey. After one of their good days they would go to
bed in the big nursery, sure that no children in the world were so
content. When there was no frightening wind in the trees they could
hear through the open window the sea across the fields. "It's a quare,
good world," Jane would mutter sleepily; and Fly would reply: "The
sea's the nicest ould thing in it; you'd think it was hooshin' us to
sleep"; and then Patsy's voice would come from the dressing-room:
"Mebby it's bringin' our ship in to us."