Tim Dwyer had never looked so red, so quizzical, and so goodhumoured in all his life before. Even the bilious, sharp-faced Londoner seemed touched and kindled with the expanding influences of good fellowship. And as for Con Donovan, he was the very picture of an ancient butler. Sack, sherry, Canaries, and claret, not to mention brandy and usquebaugh, burned and beamed in his ruby visage, and twinkled and sparkled from under his bushy grey brow. Mingling in the jolly character of his visage, was an expression, half judicious, half severe, which spoke of fifty years of exquisite and unimpeachable tasting, and as many of absolute domination over the keys of office. There was not a pimple on his nose that did not represent whole dozens of emptied wine-flasks; nor a wrinkle in his thoughtful face that did not indicate the subtle critic and the judge supreme; while his long fine hair of snowy white bespoke his own venerable and racy antiquity of date. Such seemed Con Donovan upon ordinary occasions. But when he stood before the dark and ancient cupboard, with all its store of burnished plate and blazing tankards, arrayed in lordly display, tier above tier, and the ponderous key of office in his right hand — at such times the porter of paradise never looked half so sublimely conscious of the good things committed to his charge, and of the unparalleled importance of his function, as did the venerable butler of Glindarragh Castle.
Here then in this calm retreat, which might have made a cell for old Friar Tuck, the three companions plunged without restraint headlong into the joys of giddy wassail. Vain were it, in sooth, to follow Con through all his rambling lore about the O’Briens and the castle; every chamber in the old place had its appropriate tradition — the story of the banshee’s tower, and “the room of the candle,” Crohore’s cellar, the far na phisogue, and the “sperrit of the slasher” that haunted certain chambers of the castle; these and a hundred other tales of wonder and mystery the old domestic recounted to his listening guests.
But as their potations waxed deeper, their conversation waxed louder and more brilliant. Con told his very best stories in his very best style, though his utterance grew somewhat indistinct towards the close, but that did not prevent his enjoying their point prodigiously himself and laughing in proportion. From this mood he gradually slid into another, grew amorous, and sung a piteous love ditty, which, however, was so interpolated with hiccoughs as to be scarce connected and intelligible. Tim Dwyer, in a pathetic vein, with touching confidence, ran through his past career, and shed copious floods of tears, while he fervently wrung the hands of his companions, much to their inconvenience. Even Dick Goslin grew loquacious and took a valiant turn, challenging in his own proper person the whole four provinces of Ireland to mortal combat, and defying them to come on. In this defiance, however, he was interrupted by losing his equilibrium, and falling along with his stool upon the floor, where he continued, nevertheless, with unabated courage to challenge and defy the whole Irish population, together with at the barbarous nations of ancient and modern times, with every species of provocative and contumely most calculated to goad them to the conflict. His two companions, who were themselves hardly in a better plight, had scarcely succeeded in helping him to his feet, when the door opened, and a pair of honest yeomen, hot and out of breath, entered with the alarming intelligence that Drumgunniol was in a blaze and the rapparees already in sight.
This astounding announcement was wonderfully sobering in its effects. Dick Goslin, though in a somewhat serpentine course, made his way out of the room, and neither designing to share in the glories of the triumph, if such it should prove, nor yet to be in the way and visible in case the “land savages,” as he called them, should get in, he directed his course to a small and deserted kitchen which he had that day reconnoitred, and shoving aside the cover of a large metal boiler, upon which he had pitched as his destined asylum in the hour of need, he tumbled himself into it, and with a little trouble slid the cover back again into its place, and here, comfortless and cramped as was his posture, the heaviness of his free libations gradually prevailed, and he sank into a profound and deathlike slumber.
Meanwhile the excitement of preparation everywhere continued within the castle walls, and amid all the hurry scurry, the brave old Sir Hugh, his iron gray locks escaping from beneath his broadleafed hat, and his short cloak drawn tightly round his shoulders, armed with carbine and pistols, and accompanied by the stout old Stepney at one side, and at the other by his cousin, Percy Neville, crossed the courtyard with a cool and steady pace, and mounting the steep stairs, entered the narrow stone-floored and stone vaulted chamber which overhung the great gate, and placing himself at the central loop hole, looked forth upon the steep avenue which led upward from the foot of the bridge to the castle, and commanded a wide prospect of the surrounding country.
“As I hope for grace,” said Sir Hugh vehemently, striking the butt of the weapon which he carried upon the floor, “the villains have fired honest Tisdal’s house — that blaze is from Drumgunniol; pray heaven the trusty fellow may not have fallen into their hands.”
They all looked wistfully in the direction which the old knight had indicated, and plainly saw the volumes of smoke rolling and heaving in lurid masses, while showers of sparks and broad sheets of flame from time to time illumined the dusky glow with a more dazzling brightness.
“Neville,” said the old knight with sudden alacrity, after a lengthened pause— “Neville, your young eyes are fitter for this misty light than mine; see you any thing yonder on the bridge near the farther side of the river; methinks I see a horseman.”
“Two horsemen, Sir Hugh, unless I see double,” rejoined the young man; “and as well as I can perceive, a sort of mob about them, moving slowly this way.”
Had they at that moment been enabled to scan the area around the castle walls, upon the other side of the building, they would have beheld much more formidable demonstrations of the enemy; for stealing onward among the orchard trees, and through the garden and at the opposite side of the river, were seen gathering and thickening, moment after moment, dark, dense masses of human figures, until the very copse and underwood seemed instinct with life; and the number of assailants thus silently accumulating, vast as they undoubtedly were, were rendered terrifically undefined by the deep, impenetrable shadows and cover of the surrounding trees and brushwood, which for any thing to the contrary appearing, might all be occupied by the same threatening masses whose van at every side in sinister silence began to close round the devoted building. Still, too, as death, the little garrison within, in breathless suspense, awaited the expected assault of what, with the dreadful sinkings of dismay, they inwardly felt to be an overpowering force; and many a man who had not prayed for a full year before, now muttered fervent appeals to the God of battles, as glancing along the dark line of copse which straggled from the dense wood around the ancient fortress, he marked the gradual swelling of the noiseless and stupendous multitude, and the slow, onward stealing of their dark and ominous front. As this awful and noiseless inundation of human hatred and vengeance rolled onward, and rose, as it were, gradually but steadily around the doomed building, the hearts of even the bravest within it beat fast and thick; and every man of the comparatively little garrison felt, as with set teeth and riveted gaze he breathlessly watched, as under some horrible fascination, the slow advance of the living tide which was sweeping onward, that he would have gladly exchanged the hideous tranquillity of that lulled and quiet approach for all the roar and clangour of the fiercest danger and the maddest strife of actual conflict. Meanwhile Sir Hugh, and those who along with him tenanted the small stone chamber which we have described, watched with cool but anxious scrutiny the movements of the group who had appeared upon the bridge. Two horsemen, as well as the now fast descending moonlight would allow them to discover, well mounted and equipped like gentlemen, and surrounded by a rabble rout of some hundred men, turned slowly up the approach to the castle gate, and dismounting at the far end, left their horses there, and so with a jaunty swagger they both strode up the broken ascent, followed by
their wild myrmidons. The one was a stout, ill-looking, broad-shouldered fellow; the other a dark, swarthy-featured man, of light and wiry build. The reader needs not to be told that he beheld in them “Captain” Hogan and the redoubted Eamon a Knuck, or Ned Ryan of the Hills — O’Moel-Ryan of the race of Cahir-More. Side by side they approached the great gate, and had already come within some ten paces of the arch, when a stern voice from the embrasure over the gateway challenged the leaders of this sinister party.
“Hold,” cried Sir Hugh, for it was he who spoke— “what seek you here, sirs, at this unseemly hour?”
“We demand admission under a search-warrant,” replied Ned Ryan, as promptly and as sternly.
“A search-warrant! — search — and for what?” demanded the old knight from the narrow embrasure.
“What for? — why, for my gray coppul!” retorted the burly ruffian, Hogan, swaggering in front of his slighter companion— “for my coppul beg greagh and my elegant cow, Dhrimandhu. My darlin girl, will I never see your blue coat and the white twist iv your horns again. Och voh! agus ochone, Dhrimandhu!”
The end of this apostrophe went off into the Irish chorus of the well-known humorous song, which he chanted with stentorian lungs, and a burlesque exaggeration of the extremest woe. There was a cool insolence in this buffoonery which stirred the blood in the old knight’s veins.
“Have a care, fellow,” said he, with difficulty mastering his rage— “have a care, sirrah, and keep your ribaldry within your teeth. It is no light matter, as you shall find, in troublous times like these, and at such an hour, to beset a gentleman’s dwelling. Show me the authority on which you presume to disturb the quiet of my household, or by Saint George I’ll make my people clear the road, and set you singing to another tune.”
“Then you are old Willoughby in person?” said Ryan.
“I am Sir Hugh Willoughby, fellow?” replied the knight.
“Well, old Hugh,” continued the rapparee, “you shall be gratified. You want to see the warrant?”
“I demand it,” replied he.
“Then look at it,” retorted the rapparee, folding the paper closely, and fixing it firmly upon a pike’s point, he raised it to the aperture within which Sir Hugh was standing.
The old knight, in the now declining beams of the moon, was with difficulty enabled to decypher a few words of the warrant, but at the foot of it he read in large and marked characters the hated name of “Miles Garrett.” Without uttering one syllable, he tore the paper across and across, and stretching his arm from the casement, with indignant vehemence he flung the fragments to the night wind, which whisked them up, and whirled them in an instant over the battlements in a mimic snow shower.
“Is it so you treat the warrant of the king’s justice, old rebel,” fiercely exclaimed the redoubted Edmond Ryan, who had now fallen back a little, and resumed his station close in front of the crowd who had accompanied him.
“Ay, and even so will I give your soul to the night blast, robber and murderer, if you loiter here another minute” retorted Sir Hugh, bitterly.
The rapparee turned to the crowd who followed them, waved his hand, and in a moment the dense mob had dissolved and glided under cover of the bushes, and the turf and corn stacks, which stood ranged along the steep road. At the same instant he blew a piercing whistle, which rung through the old walls, and awoke the shrill echo of the wood, until it was lost in the wail of the rising wind.
“Och vo-agus, och hone, Drimandhu,” struck up the burly companion of Ned o’ the Hills, as with a dramatic assumption of the most extravagant transports of grief and desolation, he walked down the broken road to a more prudent distance, where he suddenly threw himself flat in the grass behind a furze.
“You refuse, then, peremptorily to admit this poor gentleman, and to open your door to the king’s warrant?” said Ned o’ the Hills, slightly hitching his shoulders, and squaring himself like a man preparing for action.
“I refuse to admit notorious ruffians and their hordes of savage banditti within my house, now and at all times,” replied the old knight, firmly.
“Then you are a traitor to King James, detected, avowed, and punished.”
As he spoke the last word, with the quickness of light, he levelled and discharged his carbine full at the shot-hole at which the master of Glindarragh had conducted this strange parley.
The bullet rang shrilly through the low crown of the old man’s hat, grazing the very hair of his head, and without further effect smote upon the opposing wall, and fell flat as a crown piece upon the floor. The sharp report of the rapparee’s shot had hardly ceased to vibrate in the echoes, when half a dozen muskets flashing with rapid explosion from the walls, sent their leaden missives chirping by his pars, as cowering low, he ran for a little space down the roadway, and throwing himself under cover, whistled again and again the same shrilly signal; and now were seen dense formidable masses pouring over the bridge, and at a running pace beginning to traverse the upward road toward the castle gate, while from the walls the musketry rattled sharply, and the returning fire from the road side covered the wild advance of the desperate column who rushed upward toward the gate; and now from every side growing, swelling, as the darkness deepened, arose the wild and fearful yell of the assailants, gathering, and strengthening, and rolling in stunning confluence over the old building like conflicting thundery and piercing the ear of night with the savage hootings of hate and defiance. Spreading, and pealing, and soaring rose the sound, in an uproar so terrific and gigantic, that the very storm seemed to sink in hushed dismay; and it grew almost a marvel that the ancient walls did not rock and topple to the ground like those of Jericho of old, under the stupendous vibrations of the mighty chorus of wild menace and vengeance that rushed, and trembled, and towered in the troubled night air. Within the intervals of this fearful hurricane, but comparatively faint as the “wild farewell” of the crew over whom are closing for ever the black waves of the ocean, might be heard the answering shout of the garrison from the walls, and towers, and shot holes, as with resolute defiance they anxiously awaited the decisive tug of actual conflict.
And now with terrific hubbub and thundering war-whoop the dark and savage multitude, bearing in their van a ponderous beam, dislodged from the mill close by, came rushing madly like a dark wave rolling and pealing up the shingles on the shore, toward the castle gate; bang, bang goes the musketry from the castle — rattle go the shots in return from the cover: hiss and whistle — the bullets sing through the darksome air; and now the dense multitudes are up — are thronging and hustling one another beneath the very walls, and cover in undulating masses of heaving black the steep surface of the road from the bridge, a sea of wild haggard heads swaying and rolling this way and that, and flowing like conflicting tides, so that those who from the castle walls beheld the giddy spectacle, felt their very brains to swim and sicken as they looked. The assailants drive madly onward, they rush and thunder at the oak gate of the castle, driving the huge beam they bear with crashing and stunning reverberation and infernal uproar, against the ancient and iron-studded planks. Well was it for those within that they had so effectually propped and strengthened it in time, with solid stone and rubbish, and carts and logs heaped up and packed together in dense and deep support, else the good planks, hard and massive as they were, must have yielded to the gigantic concussions under which the very walls seem to ring and tremble.
And now, with a stunning report, the cannon on the flanking tower explodes, and wraps the gate and its assailants alike, for a moment, in sulphurous smoke and eddying sparks; but the howling blast soon sweeps and whirls the mephitic cloud away, and reveals the rapparees, unflinching and ferocious as ever, still driving on their desperate assault; groans and wild shrieks of agony are lost amid other sounds. A rabid yell of maddened defiance rising from all sides of the beleaguered building, answers the thunder of the cannon, and with fury whetted and courage confirmed, the wild Irish sustain their as yet fruitless attack, redou
bling the echoing shocks which batter at the gate, and momentarily expecting to burst the old oak planking, and to rush pellmell with all their skeans, and pikes, and matchlocks, into the devoted fortress, and make short work with the garrison.
While the dreadful din stunning the ear of night, shook the old building to its very foundations, the fair Grace Willoughby, with parted lips, and face pale as marble, but lofty mien and kindling eye, looked from the narrow windows of the stone vaulted chamber, in which, as the safest in the building, she and the other females of the household had been placed. It commanded no view but of the castle yard; and as she watched the opposing side, in which the great gate lay, at every thundering shout almost expecting to see the human torrent of destruction burst into the enclosure, she walked from window to window in all the wild but nobly curbed intensity of excitement and suspense. Behind her moved poor Phebe Tisdal, in silent agony of terror, now wringing her hands, and anon clasping them together, and vainly seeking words to form a prayer; while at the further end of the chamber, in unrestrained extravagance of clamorous panic, a group of females wailed and wept with all the wild cadences and frantic gestures of Irish women keening for the dead.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 61
