Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  On looking through a narrow slit into a small chamber, whose roof, less walls fully admitted the light, he beheld, seated near the door-and busily discussing some crusts of bread and an onion, and with a leathern-cased flask beside him, a man whom he instantly recognized, and at sight of whom he felt for a moment so overcome with horror and dismay, that, had the fiend himself risen up before him in that awful place, he could not have been more overwhelmed and paralysed with terror. The man whose sudden appearance had wrought this terrible revulsion in the feelings of the proprietor of Drumgunniol, though not very prepossessing in his outward aspect, was by no means hideous enough to dismay a man of Tisdal’s firm nerves. He sat upon a low stone by the chamber-door, his provisions in a blue handkerchief between his knees, and his flask by his side; his clothes were not of the coarse cloth used by the Irish peasantry, but like the cast-off finery of gentility in make and texture, and reduced, by overwear and exposure, to a mass of rags and squalor. This tattered figure was that of a man of middle stature, pale and spare, and rendered peculiarly remarkable by a broad deep scar, which, traversing his visage from the right eye to the corner of the mouth, crossed the nose in its passage, and had reduced the bridge of that prominence to a distorted and unsightly level.

  Such a countenance, with its deep and ineffaceable furrow, and partially flattened wry nose, was too remarkable to be easily mistaken or forgotten, and Jeremiah Tisdal, in full recognition, gazed upon it with an aspect almost of despair; while, from his red face — nay even from his purple nose — the blood receded, leaving nothing but a straggling network of livid threads, streaking the sallow cadaverous flesh, from whose every pore the cold sweat was starting, to indicate the region where the fiery purple of his visage had most fiercely predominated. With unutterable horror Tisdal continued for a full minute or more to gaze upon the sitting figure, who, wholly unconscious of the absorbing contemplation of which he was the object, continued with undiminished attention and unabated good will to address himself to the homely viands before him. It was with an effort such as that with which the victim of nightmare at length dispels the frightful illusion which has held him in its fascination, that Tisdal withdrew himself from the narrow aperture through which he had beheld this, to his eyes, most terrific spectre, and instinctively pressing his hat down upon his brow, so that the broad leaf shaded his livid features, and muffling the lower part of his face in the folds of his cloak, he strode with rapid and noiseless steps along the pathway.

  “O God, merciful and terrible!” he muttered in an agony of desperation, when some three or four hundred yards had interposed between aim and the scene of his appalling discovery— “is there then no escape — no pardon for me? What fearful curse pursues me, that even here, buried in the wild inhospitable recesses of a savage and perilous country, I cannot escape the dreadful doom that pursues me. Gracious God, is not the anguish of remorse, are not the pangs of fear, and the terrible images of memory, torment sufficient, that thou must send thine incarnate avenger, after ten long years, to dog me — to destroy me. Yes; I am accursed of God — forsaken — struggle as I may — given over for ever and ever to the evil one.”

  He gnashed his teeth in unutterable anguish, and then stamping: furiously upon the ground, he abruptly stopped short, and turned fiercely toward the mouldering ruin, which lay in all its solemn and melancholy repose some hundred yards behind him.

  “Yes, the die is cast,” said he, while the fearful agitation of the moment before gradually subsided, and his face assumed its wonted character of firmness, gloom, and severity; “he has at last driven me to the wall, and one or other of us two must go down. I cannot escape him; the question is merely who strikes first. But — but, after all, it may be but accident. Be it so; I shall bring it to the test — any thing but doubt. Let the crisis come now.”

  He paused again, opened his cloak, and from a buff leathern belt which encircled his doublet, he successively drew two pistols, tried the loading of both with the ramrod, touched the flints, and added a little fresh priming; then replacing them in his girdle, he slowly said —

  “He may not know me, changed as I am; he may not seek me, well for him if he do not. I will enter the chamber, and confront him, and if it prove otherwise— “

  He said no more, but retraced his steps toward the ruined pile, not quite so rapidly as he had left it, and with a countenance, though less agitated, fully as pale as before, and charged with the black and condensed ferocity of a dark and deadly purpose. Thus resolved, Tisdal walked heavily into the silent ruin, and diverging a little from the beaten path, he entered that part of the building upon which the door of the small chamber, into which he had so lately looked, directly opened. For an instant he paused as he approached the narrow portal, and drew one long breath, like a daring swimmer who stakes his life upon one bold plunge into the prevailing sea, and then firmly and collectedly he entered the roofless apartment. But the decisive interview he courted was not then and there to be. The man whose presence had wrought so fearful a revulsion in all his feelings, was gone; and with a strange sensation, at once of disappointment and relief, he looked around upon the deserted walls, and up and down through the long passages and mouldering chambers of the old building. The search, however, was vain; and though he climbed the winding stair of the tower, and looked down from the ivy. bowered windows, like some ill-omened bird shrouded from light, and peering forth with malignant eye in search of its proper prey, his scrutiny from hence was alike unrewarded.

  Buried in his own stormy and remorseful reflections, this grim and brawny personage seated himself upon the worn steps of the spiral stair, his elbows resting upon his knees, and his heavy chin propped upon his clenched hands, while his eyes, gazing vacantly through the arched window of the central tower which he thus occupied, wandered slowly and gloomily over the narrow cloisters and the spreading yew tree beneath, until gradually the mellow blush of sunset melted into the cold gray of twilight, and that in turn gave place to the misty light of the spectral moon. The solemn ruin, with its buried dead, slumbering in the silence of the night, and under the broad cold moonlight, might well have awakened in the heart of the solitary occupant of the abbey tower some feelings of superstitious awe.

  The subsidence of fierce and angry passions is accompanied with a depression and gloom more painful far than the more agitating emotions which have preceded them. In Tisdal’s case the stormy feelings of wrath and terror had acquired a sterner and deadlier character from a thousand thrilling and appalling remembrances associated with the apparition which had evoked them, as well as with the black and revengeful suggestions of his own desperation. As these terrible emotions which had so fiercely shaken him, slowly sank to rest, leaving an awful stillness and blank dismay behind them, he felt in his solitude a horror and a fear he had scarcely ever known before — it was as though he had been for an hour and more unconsciously holding close communion with the tempter himself — yielding up his soul to the powers of the evil influence, and had on a sudden emerged from the awful presence and was alone. With a chill sense of undefined fear, which he in vain attempted to dispel — the Puritan arose — glanced quickly and fearfully around him, and descending the narrow stair of the tall grey tower, entered the shadowy cloister, and accidentally encountered as he did so, the old woman, whom Miles Garret had so lately commissioned with the sinister message which she at once proceeded to deliver.

  Tisdal, however, with his constitutional suspicion and shrewdness, pressed her sternly but unavailingly with close and searching interrogatories, but seeing that the woman obstinately persisted in an entire disregard of his further questioning, he moodily turned from her, and pursuing the solitary pathway toward Glindarragh Castle, he left the ivied chambers of the ruin to the more congenial occupation of the bats and owls, as well as of the scarcely less ominous sample of humanity with whom he had just held such strange and inauspicious intercourse.

  CHAPTER IX.

  THE BOAT ON THE RIVER —— THE MYS
TERIOUS WARNING.

  WE left Jeremiah Tisdal, with moody mien and steady pace, pursuing his way, under the silvery moonlight, toward the old bridge and castle of Glindarragh. If the puritan had possessed an eye for the picturesque, he might have found in the scene before him matter enough for pleasurable contemplation. His path had now reached the river’s bank. Before him wheeled the chafing stream, its foam and eddies glittering like showers and ripples of molten silver in the full radiance of the moon, and overspanned by the high arches of the steep and antique bridge, showing dark and black against the broad and lustrous current of the stream. On the right, hung the massive and sombre outline of the castle — its towers, roofs, and chimneys piled in one dark frowning mass above the murmuring waters; and on the left, rising from the very verge of the river, and stretching far away over the undulating plain, spread the thickets and branching timber of the wild wood in one broad shadowy mass, among whose hollows and nooks the light vapours of night were, slumbering; and far away, melting in the thin shrouds of mist, and well nigh lost to sight, the dim and distant mountains.

  But Tisdal had no sense of the merely beautiful; his eyes were busy in the jealous scrutiny of the straggling copse, which, at either side, skirted his path, or in watching and avoiding the difficulties of his broken way. Safe and sound, he stood at last under the shadowy arch of the great gate of the castle, and with a heavy stone battered the iron-studded oak, until tower and forest echoed to the din; while, from the inner yard, his summons was answered by the clamorous challenge of a dozen dogs, baying and barking in furious rivalry.

  “What’s your business, neighbour?” inquired a gruff voice, through the narrow bow-slit that flanked the gate.

  “That voice is Phil Gorman’s. Look, man — look at me,” rejoined the puritan. “Know you not Jeremiah Tisdal, of Drumgunniol?”

  “Aiah, wisha! sure enough — sure enough,” replied the porter, in a tone of lazy recognition. “Wait a bit, an’ I’ll draw the boults this minute, wid a heart an’ a half, Mr. Tisdal, I will. Them’s quare times,” he resumed, after a minute’s interval, as, unbarring the small door which was cut in the great gate, he gave admission to the sombre visitant— “quare times, when the ould gate is barred as regular as the night falls — quare times, Mr. Tisdal, when there’s need for the likes — and need enough there is, too,” he continued, while he barred the door again, as Tisdal walked into the castleyard— “need enough, an’ too much, for it’s only tonight our young lady, God bless her, was freckened a’most out iv her senses wid a thievin’ rogue — one iv them plundherin’ viliians that’s robbin’ an’ hangin’, an’has no other thrade to live by — divil take the bloody breed iv them — over there in the wood, jist, as I may say, in undher the very walls.”

  The old man continued to ramble on in the same style, while Tisdal crossed to the door of the great hall, which stood half open at the other side of the yard. He entered this rude apartment, within the canopy of whose mighty chimney sate two or three fellows smoking and chatting listlessly in the flickering light of the wood and turf fire; and hardly pausing for a word of inquiry, he proceeded through several chambers and passages, guided by so much moonlight as could make its way through the narrow windows, until having reached the first landing of a winding stone stair, he knocked at a chamber door, and in the next moment found himself in the apartment of Sir Hugh Willoughby.

  The old knight sate in gloomy excitement, still booted and spurred as he had dismounted two hours before, by the expiring fire which smouldered in the ashes of his broad hearth, his high and handsome features fixed in the stern lines of condensed anger, and still glowing with the swarthy fires of outraged pride.

  “Ha, Tisdal, gad’s my life, you’re welcome. Tisdal, what do you think of all this? A strange pass we’ve come to — eh? when highwaymen and ruffians infest our fields and farms, and hem us into our strongholds — scarce leave us safety in our very dwellings; what think you — but you have heard of it — my daughter was this very evening menaced by an armed scoundrel in the wood yonder, and within sight of these very windows. As I stand here,” he continued, starting to his feet, and stamping furiously upon the floor, “had I but met the ruffian this evening, when I sought him yonder with my men, I would, so help me heaven, have set up a gallows on the castle hill, and at my own risk hung him high enough before an hour, to warn his friends for six miles round, that old Hugh Willoughby knows how to deal with villains.”

  “It’s well you do know how, Sir Hugh,” rejoined the puritan, coolly, “because it is a knowledge you’ll need ere two days more have passed. We’re all in danger,” he continued, “all — great as well as small; you, Sir Hugh, within your fenced towers, as well as I within my poor farmhouse — all in sore peril. Would God we were safely through tomorrow night!”

  “Sit down, Tisdal, sit down, man, and speak your tidings plainly,” said Sir Hugh. “What hast thou heard, and from whom, to fill thy mind with such fearful auguries? Speak, man.”

  Tisdal briefly stated the substance of his interview with the crone ill the ruined abbey, while the old knight listened with deep and stern attention.

  “The channel through which the news hath reached you, Tisdal, alone inclines me much to believe it false,” said Sir Hugh, slowly and hesitatingly; “but — but as you say, the burthen of the tale is but too likely to prove true; and that miscreant whose insolence affrighted my child to-day, in his person and attire accords well with what I have heard of certain ruffian adventurers whom these perilous times have tempted into lawless enterprise; there was waiting upon him, too, a wild, savage, Irish boy with a skean. Ay, ay, it may prove even too true. Spies, spies, Tisdal, rapparees!”

  “Counting the plunder and marking your bulwarks of defence,” chimed in the master of Drumgunniol.

  “True, true, and — but they shall be defeated; I will show the savage marauders I can maintain my house against them — I will, if it be God’s will, against all odds defend my property, my home, and my people.”

  “’Tis safest ever to act as if a threatened danger were an actual one, and sure to come,” replied Tisdal.

  “And so will I act, my friend,” rejoined the old knight, promptly; “I will prepare for the threatened mischief, leave no precaution untaken, call in my friends and my people, gather my best cattle within the castle walls, bar the gates, man the towers, and then with a firm heart leave the issue to Almighty God.”

  “Well and wisely said, Sir Hugh,” rejoined Jeremiah Tisdal; “and such small portion of my worldly substance as I can conveniently remove, with your permission, I will lodge within these walls, and I and my trusty man Bligh will come hither with such store of arms and ammunition as we can muster betimes in the day; for unless matters turn out smoother than I apprehend, we’ll need good store of powder and lead, and that, right well delivered, to hold this place against the odds with which’t will be encompassed.”

  “Do so, do so, honest Tisdal; and — and let me see, what friends I may I reckon on in this strait,” continued Willoughby. “There is Wilson, of Drumboy, too old himself, but his nephew will come, an active, bold young fellow — egad, worth two in himself — he will bring at least one man with him; and then the two Browns, of Lisnagarriff good shots and staunch friends both; and there is Bill Stepney, of Clonsallagh, and his three stout sons — four muskets from Clonsallagh — God grant they may not yet have given them up; and then Garret Lloyd — odd’s life, I must send to him tonight, he starts tomorrow for Clonmel — we can’t spare the best duck-shot in the country.”

  And thus the old knight went on summing up, as nearly as he might, the volunteer contingent, upon whom he might reckon from among his friends and neighbours. But while employed in these hurried and exciting calculations, he was on a sudden interrupted by a noise which startled him and his companion, brought both of them in an instant to their feet, and fixed their astounded gaze upon the window of the apartment in which they stood.

  With a stunning crash the casement of t
he chamber was burst asunder, and a heavy body, which might have been a paving-stone or a hand-grenade, smote with an astounding din, and amid a shower of shattered glass upon the floor and bounded and rumbled to the far end of the room. The old knight stood in amazement, glancing from the shattered window to the missile which now lay quietly settled upon the floor, as if it were a piece of the proper furniture of the apartment. Jeremiah Tisdal meanwhile, with instantaneous promptitude, had planted himself at the aperture, through which the night-wind was now freely and fitfully playing, and stretching forward through the depth of the recess, advanced his bullet head through the casement, and beheld drifting slowly down the moonlit current toward the shadowy bridge, a small boat, usually moored at the opposite side of the stream, and which, as it seemed to him, now contained two dark forms. While Tisdal was employed, as we have described, in scrambling on all fours along the narrow stone windowsill, and keenly searching through the uncertain light for the cause of the strange and startling interruption which had so unseasonably broken in upon their conference, Sir Hugh Willoughby cautiously approached the mysterious projectile which lay upon the floor, half expecting every moment to see it explode, and blow himself and the other occupant of the room to fragments; he turned it over suspiciously with his toe, and alike to his relief and his surprise discovered it to be, after all, but a large smooth stone, with a piece of paper tied firmly against its surface. The paper was addressed— “To Sir Hugh Willoughby, Knight, at his house of Glindarragh Castle and in an instant he had disengaged and opened the letter. His eye had no sooner rested upon the character in which it was traced, than every faculty and feeling of his nature became at once absorbed in its perusal. It was briefly expressed in the following terms: —