THE ROPE AND THE RIOT IN GALLOWS GREEN--AND THE WOODS OF ARDGILLAGH BY
MOONLIGHT.
At length came that day, that dreadful day, whose evening Sir Henry
Ashwoode was never to see. Noon was the time fixed for the fatal
ceremonial; and long before that hour, the mob, in one dense mass of
thousands, had thronged and choked the streets leading to the old gaol.
Upon this awful day the wretched man acquired, by a strange revulsion,
a kind of stoical composure, which sustained him throughout the
dreadful preparations. With hands cold as clay, and a face white as
ashes, and from which every vestige of animation had vanished, he
proceeded, nevertheless, with a calm and collected demeanour to make
all his predetermined arrangements for the fearful scene. With a minute
elaborateness he finished his toilet, and dressed himself in a grave,
but particularly handsome suit. Could this shrunken, torpid, ghastly
spectre, in reality be the same creature who, a few months since, was
the admiration and envy of half the beaux of Dublin?
There was little or none of the fitful excitability about him which had
heretofore marked his demeanour during his confinement; on the
contrary, a kind of stupor and apathy had supervened, partly occasioned
by the laudanum which he had taken in unusually large quantities, and
partly by the overwhelming horror of his situation. He seemed to
observe and hear nothing. When the gaoler entered to remove his irons,
shortly before the time of his removal had arrived, he seemed a little
startled, and observing the physician who had attended him among those
who stood at the door of his cell, he beckoned him toward him.
"Doctor, doctor," said he in a dusky voice, "how much laudanum may I
safely take? I want my head clear to say a few words, to speak to the
people. Don't give me too much; but let me, with that condition, have
whatever I can safely swallow. You know--you understand me; don't
oblige me to speak any more just now."
The physician felt his pulse, and looked in his face, and then mingled
a little laudanum and water, which he applied to the young man's pale,
dry lips. This dose was hardly swallowed, when one of the gaol
officials entered, and stated that the ordinary was anxious to know
whether the prisoner wished to pray or confer with him in private
before his departure. The question had to be twice repeated ere it
reached Sir Henry. He replied, however, quickly, and in a low tone,--
"No, no, not for the world. I can't bear it; don't disturb me--don't,
don't."
It was now intimated to the prisoner that he must proceed. His arms
were pinioned, and he was conducted along the passages leading to the
entrance of the gaol, where he was received by the sheriff. For a
moment, as he passed out into the broad light and the keen fresh air,
he beheld the vast and eager mob pressing and heaving like a great dark
sea around him, and the mounted escort of dragoons with drawn swords
and gay uniforms; and without attaching any clear or definite meaning
to the spectacle, he beheld the plumes of a hearse, and two or three
fellows engaged in sliding the long black coffin into its place. These
sights, and the strange, gaping faces of the crowd, and the sheriff's
carriage, and the gay liveries, and the crowded fronts and roofs of the
crazy old houses opposite, for one moment danced like the fragment of a
dream across his vision, and in the next he sat in the old-fashioned
coach which was to convey him to the place of execution.
"Only twenty-seven years, only twenty-seven years, only twenty-seven
years," he muttered, vacantly and mechanically repeating the words
which had reached his ear from those who were curiously reading the
plate upon the coffin as he entered the coach--"only twenty-seven,
twenty-seven."
The awful procession moved on to the place of its final destination;
the enormous mob rushing along with it--crowding, jostling, swearing,
laughing, whistling, quarrelling, and hustling, as they forced their
way onward, and staring with coarse and eager curiosity whenever they
could into the vehicle in which Ashwoode sat. All the sights--the
haggard, smirched, and eager faces, the prancing horses of the
troopers, the well-known shops and streets, and the crowded
windows--all sailed by his eyes like some unintelligible and
heart-sickening dream. The place of public execution for criminals was
then, and continued to be for long after, a spot significantly
denominated "Gallows Hill," situated in the neighbourhood of St.
Stephen's Green, and not far from the line at present traversed by
Baggot Street. There a permanent gallows was erected, and thither, at
length, amid thousands of crowding spectators, the melancholy
procession came, and proceeded to the centre of area, where the gallows
stood, with the long new rope swinging in the wind, and the cart and
the hangman, with the guard of soldiers, prepared for their reception.
The vehicles drew up, and those who had to play a part in the dreadful
scene descended. The guard took their place, preserving a narrow circle
around the fatal spot, free from the pressure of the crowd. The
carriages were driven a little away, and the coffin was placed close
under the gallows, while Ashwoode, leaning upon the chaplain and upon
one of the sheriffs, proceeded toward the cart, which made the rude
platform on which he was to stand.
"Sir Henry Ashwoode," observes a contemporary authority, the _Dublin
Journal_, "showed a great deal of calmness and dignity, insomuch that a
great many of the mob, especially among the women, were weeping. His
figure and features were handsome, and he was finely dressed. He prayed
a short time with the ordinary, and then, with little assistance,
mounted the hurdle, whence he spoke to the people, declaring his
innocence with great solemnity. Then the hangman loosened his cravat,
and opened his shirt at the neck, and Sir Henry turning to him, bid
him, as it was understood, to take a ring from his finger, for a token
of forgiveness, which he did, and then the man drew the cap over his
eyes; but he made a sign, and the hangman lifted it up again, and Sir
Henry, looking round at all the multitude, said again, three times, 'In
the presence of God Almighty, I stand here innocent;' and then, a
minute after, 'I forgive all my enemies, and I die innocent;' then he
spoke a word to the hangman, and the cap being pulled down, and the
rope quickly adjusted, the hurdle was moved away, and he swung off, the
people with one consent crying out the while. He struggled for a long
time, and very hard; and not for more than an hour was the body cut
down, and laid in the coffin. He was buried in the night-time. His last
dying words have begot among most people a great opinion of his
innocence, though the lawyers still hold to it that he was guilty. It
was said that Mr. Blarden, the prosecutor, was in a house in Stephen's
Green, to see the hanging, and as soon as the mob heard it, they went
and broke the windows, and, but for the soldiers, would have forced
their way in, and done more violence."
Thus speaks the _Dublin Journal_, and the extract needs no addition
from us.
Gladly do we leave this hateful scene, and turn from the dreadful fate
of him whose follies and vices had wrought so much misery to others,
and ended in such fearful ignominy and destruction to himself. We leave
the smoky town, with all its fashion, vice, and villainy; its princely
equipages; its prodigals; its paupers; its great men and its
sycophants; its mountebanks and mendicants; its riches and its
wretchedness. We leave that old city of strange compounds, where the
sublime and the ridiculous, deep tragedies and most whimsical farces
are ever mingling--where magnificence and squalor rub shoulders day by
day, and beggars sit upon the steps of palaces. How much of what is
wonderful, wild, and awful, has not thy secret history known! How much
of the romance of human act and passion, vicissitude, joy and sorrow,
grandeur and despair, has there not lived, and moved, and perished, age
after age, under thy perennial curtain of solemn smoke!
Far, far behind, we leave the sickly smoky town--and over the far blue
hills and wooded country--through rocky glens, and by sonorous streams,
and over broad undulating plains, and through the quiet villages, with
their humble thatched roofs from which curls up the light blue smoke
among the sheltering bushes and tall hedge-rows--through ever-changing
scenes of softest rural beauty, in day time and at even-tide, and by
the wan, misty moonlight, we follow the two travellers who ride toward
the old domain of Ardgillagh.
The fourth day's journey brought them to the little village which
formed one of the boundaries of that old place. But, long ere they
reached it, the sun had gone down behind the distant hills, under his
dusky canopy of crimson clouds, and the pale moon had thrown its broad
light and shadows over the misty landscape. Under the soft splendour of
the moon, chequered by the moving shadows of the tall and ancient
trees, they rode into the humble village--no sound arose to greet them
but the desultory baying of the village dogs, and the soft sighing of
the light breeze through the spreading boughs--and no signal of waking
life was seen, except, few and far between, the red level beam of some
still glowing turf fire, shining through the rude and narrow aperture
that served the simple rustic instead of casement.
At one of these humble dwellings Larry Toole applied for information,
and with ready courtesy the "man of the house," in person, walked with
them to the entrance of the place, and shoved open one of the valves of
the crazy old gate, and O'Connor rode slowly in, following, with his
best caution, the directions of his guide. His honest squire, Larry,
meanwhile, loitered a little behind, in conference with the courteous
peasant, and with the laudable intention of procuring some trifling
refection, which, however, he determined to swallow without
dismounting, and with all convenient dispatch, bearing in mind a
wholesome remembrance of the disasters which followed his convivial
indulgence in the little town of Chapelizod. While Larry thus loitered,
O'Connor followed the wild winding avenue which formed the only
approach to the old mansion. This rude track led him a devious way over
slopes, and through hollows, and by the broad grey rocks, white as
sheeted phantoms in the moonlight, and the thick weeds and brushwood
glittering with the heavy dew of night, and through the beautiful misty
vistas of the ancient wild wood, now still and solemn as old cathedral
aisles. Thus, under the serene and cloudless light of the sailing moon,
he had reached the bank of the broad and shallow brook whose shadowy
nooks and gleaming eddies were canopied under the gnarled and arching
boughs of the hoary thorn and oak--and here tradition tells a
marvellous tale.
It is narrated that when O'Connor reached this point, his jaded horse
stopped short, refusing to cross the stream, and when urged by voice
and spur, reared, snorted, and by every indication exhibited the
extremest terror and an obstinate reluctance to pass the brook. The
rider dismounted--took his steed by the head, patted and caressed him,
and by every art endeavoured to induce him to traverse the little
stream, but in vain; while thus fruitlessly employed, his attention was
arrested by the sounds of a female voice, in low and singularly sweet
and plaintive lamentation, and looking across the water, for the first
time he beheld the object which so affrighted his steed. It was a
female figure arrayed in a mantle of dusky red, the hood of which hung
forward so as to hide the face and head: she was seated upon a broad
grey rock by the brook's side, and her head leaned forward so as to
rest upon her knees; her bare arm hung by her side, and the white
fingers played listlessly in the clear waters of the brook, while with
a wild and piteous chaunt, which grew louder and clearer as he gazed,
she still sang on her strange mournful song. Spellbound and entranced,
he knew not why, O'Connor gazed on in speechless and breathless awe,
until at length the tall form arose and disappeared among the old
trees, and the sounds melted away and were lost among the soft chiming
of the brook, and heard no more. He dared not say whether it was
reality or illusion, he felt like one suddenly recalled from a dream,
and a certain awe, and horror, and dismay still hung upon him, for
which he scarcely could account.
Without further resistance, the horse now crossed the brook; O'Connor
remounted, and followed the shadowy track; but again he was destined to
meet with interruption; the pathway which he followed, embowered among
the branching trees and bushes, at one point wound beneath a low,
ivy-mantled rock; he was turning this point, when his horse, snorting
loudly, checked his pace with a recoil so sudden that he threw himself
back upon his haunches, and remained, except for his violent trembling,
fixed and motionless. O'Connor raised his eyes, and standing upon the
rock which overhung the avenue, he beheld, for a moment, a tall female
form clothed in an ample cloak of dusky red. The arms with the hands
clasped, as if in the extremity of woe, firmly together, were extended
above her head, the face white as the foam of the river, and the eyes
preternaturally large and wild, were raised fixedly toward the broad
bright moon; this phantom, for such it was, for a moment occupied his
gaze, and in the next, with a scream so piercing and appalling that his
very marrow seemed to freeze at the sound, she threw herself forward as
though she would cast herself upon the horse and rider--and, was gone.
[Illustration: "His horse, snorting loudly, checked his pace."
_To face page 354._]
The horse started wildly off and galloped at headlong speed up the
broken ascent, and for some time O'Connor had not collectedness to
check his frantic course, or even to think; at length, however, he
succeeded in calming the terrified animal--and, uttering a fervent
prayer, he proceeded, without further adventure, till the tall gable of
the old mansion in the spectral light of the moon among its thick
embowering trees and rich ivy-mantles, with all its tall white chimney
stacks and narrow windows with their thousand glittering panes, arose
before his anxious gaze.