RELATING HOW THE CASTLE WAS TAKEN, AND HOW MISTRESS MOGGY TOOK HEART OF
GRACE.
That evening there came to the door of the Mills, a damsel, with a wide
basket on her arm, the covering of which being removed, a goodly show of
laces, caps, fans, wash-balls, buckles, and other attractions, came out
like a parterre of flowers, with such a glow as dazzled the eyes of
Moggy, at the study window.
'Would you plaze to want any, my lady?' enquired the pedlar.
Moggy thought they were, perhaps, a little bit too fine for her purse,
but she could not forbear longing and looking, and asking the prices of
this bit of finery and that, at the window; and she called Betty, and
the two maids conned over the whole contents of the basket.
At last she made an offer for an irresistible stay-hook of pinchbeck,
set with half-a-dozen resplendent jewels of cut glass, and after
considerable chaffering, and a keen encounter of their wits, they came
at last to terms, and Moggy ran out to the kitchen for her money, which
lay in a brass snuff-box, in a pewter goblet, on the dresser.
As she was counting her coin, and putting back what she did not want,
the latch of the kitchen door was lifted from without, and the door
itself pushed and shaken. Though the last red gleam of a stormy sunset
was glittering among the ivy leaves round the kitchen window, the
terrors of last night's apparition were revived in a moment, and, with a
blanched face, she gazed on the door, expecting, breathlessly, what
would come.
The door was bolted and locked on the inside, in accordance with Doctor
Toole's solemn injunction; and there was no attempt to use violence. But
a brisk knocking began thereat and Moggy, encouraged by hearing the
voices of Betty and the vender of splendours at the little parlour
window, and also by the amber sunlight on the rustling ivy leaves, and
the loud evening gossip of the sparrows, took heart of grace, and
demanded shrilly--
'Who's there?'
A whining beggar's voice asked admission.
'But you can't come in, for the house is shut up for the night, replied
the cook.
''Tis a quare hour you lock your doors at,' said the besieger.
'Mighty quare, but so it is,' she answered.
'But 'tis a message for the misthress I have,' answered the applicant.
'Who from?' demanded the porteress.
''Tis a present o' some wine, acushla.'
'Who from?' repeated she, growing more uneasy.
'Auch! woman, are you going to take it in, or no?'
'Come in the morning, my good man,' said she, 'for sorrow a foot you'll
put inside the house to-night.'
'An' that's what I'm to tell them that sent me.'
'Neither more nor less,' replied she.
And so she heard a heavy foot clank along the pavement, and she tried to
catch a glimpse of the returning figure, but she could not, though she
laid her cheek against the window-pane. However, she heard him whistling
as he went, which gave her a better opinion of him, and she thought she
heard the road gate shut after him.
So feeling relieved, and with a great sigh, she counted her money over;
and answering Betty's shrill summons to the study, as the woman was in
haste, with a 'Coming, coming this minute,' she replaced her treasure,
and got swiftly into poor Charles Nutter's little chamber. There was his
pipe over the chimney, and his green, and gold-laced Sunday waistcoat
folded on the little walnut table by the fire, and his small folio,
'Maison Rustique, the Country Farme,' with his old green worsted purse
set for a marker in it where he had left off reading the night before
all their troubles began; and his silk dressing-gown was hanging by the
window-frame, and his velvet morning-cap on the same peg--the dust had
settled on them now. And after her fright in the kitchen, all these
mementoes smote her with a grim sort of reproach and menace, and she
wished the window barred, and the door of the ominous little chamber
locked for the night.
''Tis growing late,' said the dealer from without, 'and I daren't be on
the road after dark. Gi' me my money, good girl; and here, take your
stay-hook.'
And so saying, she looked a little puzzled up and down, as not well
knowing how they were to make their exchange.
'Here,' says Moggy, 'give it in here.' And removing the fastening, she
shoved the window up a little bit. 'Hould it, Betty; hould it up,' said
she. And in came the woman's hard, brown hand, palm open, for her money,
and the other containing the jewel, after which the vain soul of Moggy
lusted.
'That'll do,' said she; and crying shrilly, 'Give us a lift,
sweetheart,' in a twinkling she shoved the window up, at the same time
kneeling, with a spring, upon the sill, and getting her long leg into
the room, with her shoulder under the window-sash, her foot firmly
planted on the floor, and her face and head in the apartment. Almost at
the same instant she was followed by an ill-looking fellow, buttoned up
in a surtout, whose stature seemed enormous, and at sight of whom the
two women shrieked as if soul and body were parting.
The lady was now quite in the room, and standing upright showed the tall
shape and stern lineaments of Mary Matchwell. And as she stood she
laughed a sort of shuddering laugh, like a person who had just had a
plunge in cold water.
'Stop that noise,' said she, recognising Betty, who saw her with
unspeakable terror. 'I'm the lady that came here, you know, some months
ago, with Mrs. Macnamara; and I'm Mrs. Nutter, which the woman up stairs
_is not_. I'm Mrs. Nutter, and _you're my_ servants, do ye mind? and
I'll act a fair mistress by you, if you do me honest service. Open the
hall-door,' she said to the man, who was by this time also in the room.
And forth he went to do her bidding, and a gentleman, who turned out to
be that respectable pillar of the law whom Mr. Gamble in the morning had
referred to as 'Dirty Davy,' entered. He was followed by Mrs. Mary
Matchwell's maid, a giggling, cat-like gipsy, with a lot of gaudy finery
about her, and a withered, devilment leering in her face; and a
hackney-coach drove up to the door, which had conveyed the party from
town; and the driver railing in loud tones, after the manner of his kind
in old times, at all things, reeking of whiskey and stale tobacco, and
cursing freely, pitched in several trunks, one after the other; and, in
fact, it became perfectly clear that M. M. was taking possession. And
Betty and Moggy, at their wits' end between terror and bewilderment,
were altogether powerless to resist, and could only whimper a protest
against the monstrous invasion, while poor little Sally Nutter up
stairs, roused by the wild chorus of strange voices from the lethargy of
her grief, and even spurred into active alarm, locked her door, and then
hammered with a chair upon the floor, under a maniacal hallucination
that she was calling I know not what or whom to the rescue.
Then Dirty Davy read aloud, with due emphasis, to the maids, copies, as
he stated, of the affidavits sworn to that day by Mistress Mary
Matchwell, or as he called her, Mrs. Nutter, relict of the late Charles
Nutter, gentleman, of the Mills, in the parish of Chapelizod, barony of
Castleknock, and county of Dublin, deposing to her marriage with the
said Charles Nutter having been celebrated in the Church of St. Clement
Danes, in London, on the 7th of April, 1750. And then came a copy of the
marriage certificate, and then a statement how, believing that deceased
had left no 'will' making any disposition of his property, or naming an
executor, she applied to the Court of Prerogative for letters of
administration to the deceased, which letters would be granted in a few
days; and in the meantime the bereaved lady would remain in possession
of the house and chattels of her late husband.
All this, of course, was so much 'Hebrew-Greek,' as honest Father Roach
was wont to phrase it, to the scared women. But M. M.--[Greek: nykti
eoikôst]--fixing them both with her cold and terrible gaze, said quite
intelligibly--
'What's your name?'
'Moggy Sullivan, if you please, Ma'am.'
'And what's yours?'
'Lizabet--Betty they call me--Madam; Lizabet Burke, if you please,
Madam.'
'Well, then, Moggy Sullivan and Elizabeth Burke, harkee both, while I
tell you a thing. I'm mistress here by law, as you've just heard, and
you're my servants; and if you so much as wind the jack or move a
tea-cup, except as I tell you, I'll find a way to punish you; and if I
miss to the value of a pin's head, I'll indict you for a felony, and
have you whipped and burnt in the hand--you know what that means. And
now, where's Mistress Sarah Harty? for she must pack and away.'
'Oh! Ma'am, jewel, the poor misthress.'
'_I'm_ the mistress, slut.'
'Ma'am, dear, she's very bad.'
'_Where_ is she?'
'In her room, Ma'am,' answered Betty, with blubbered cheeks.
'Where are you going, minx?' cried M. M., with a terrible voice and look,
and striding toward the door, from which Moggy was about to escape.
Now, Moggy was a sort of heroine, not in the vain matter of beauty, for
she had high cheek bones, a snub nose, and her figure had no more waist,
or other feminine undulations, than the clock in the hall; but like that
useful piece of furniture, presented an oblong parallelogram, unassisted
by art; for, except on gala days, these homely maidens never sported
hoops. But she was, nevertheless, a heroine of the Amazonian species.
She tripped up Pat Morgan, and laid that athlete suddenly on his back,
upon the grass plot before the hall door, to his eternal disgrace, when
he 'offered' to kiss her, while the fiddler and tambourine-man were
playing. She used to wring big boys by the ears; overawe fishwives with
her voluble invective; put dangerous dogs to rout with sticks and
stones, and evince, in all emergencies, an adventurous spirit and an
alacrity for battle.
For her, indeed, as for others, the spell of 'M. M.'s' evil eye and
witchlike presence was at first too much; but Moggy rallied, and, thus
challenged, she turned about at the door and stoutly confronted the
intruder.
'Minx, yourself, you black baste; I'm goin' just wherever it plases me
best, and I'd like to know who'll stop me; and first, Ma'am, be your
lave, I'll tell the mistress to lock her door, and keep you and your
rake-helly squad at the wrong side of it, and then, Ma'am, wherever the
fancy takes me next--and that's how it is, and my sarvice to your
ladyship.'
Off went Moggy, with a leer of defiance and a snap of her fingers,
cutting a clumsy caper, and rushed like a mad cow up the stairs,
shouting all the way, 'Lock your door, Ma'am--lock your door.'
Growing two or three degrees whiter, M. M., so soon as she recovered
herself, glided in pursuit, like the embodiment of an evil spirit, as
perhaps she was, and with a gleam of insanity, or murder, in her eye,
which always supervened when her wrath was moved.
The sullen face of the bailiff half lighted up with a cynical grin of
expectation, for he saw that both ladies were game, and looked for a
spirited encounter. But Dirty Davy spoiled all by interposing his
person, and arresting the pursuit of his client, and delivering a wheezy
expostulation close in her ear.
''Tis a strange thing if I can't do what I will with my own--fine laws,
i'faith!'
'I only tell you, Madam, and if you do, it may embarrass us mightily
by-and-by.'
'I'd wring her neck across the banister,' murmured M. M.
'An' now, plase your ladyship, will I bring your sarvice to the ladies
and gentlemen down in the town, for 'tis there I'm going next,' said
Moggy, popping in at the door, with a mock courtesy, and a pugnacious
cock in her eye, and a look altogether so provoking and warlike as
almost tempted the bailiff at the door to clap her on the back, and cry,
had he spoken Latin, _macte virtute puer_!
'Catch the slut. You sha'n't budge--not a foot--hold her,' cried M. M. to
the bailiff.
'Baugh!' was his answer.
'See, now,' said Davy, 'Madam Nutter's not serious--you're _not_, Ma'am?
We don't detain you, mind. The door's open. There's no false
imprisonment or duress, mind ye, thanking you all the same, Miss, for
your offer. We won't detain you, ah, ah. No, I thank you. Chalk the road
for the young lady, Mr. Redmond.'
And Davy fell to whisper energetically again in M. M.'s ear.
And Moggy disappeared. Straight down to the town she went, and to the
friendly Dr. Toole's house, but he was not expected home from Dublin
till morning. Then she had thoughts of going to the barrack, and
applying for a company of soldiers, with a cannon, if necessary, to
retake the Mills. Then she bethought her o' good Dr. Walsingham, but he
was too simple to cope with such seasoned rogues. General Chattesworth
was too far away, and not quite the man either, no more than Colonel
Stafford; and the young beaux, 'them captains, and the like, 'id only be
funnin' me, and knows nothing of law business.' So she pitched upon
Father Roach.