“The child you say?” he answered. “Let me see him.”
The Guy’s Hospital of today may be different to the Guy’s Hertford O’Donnell knew so well. Railways have, I believe, swept away the old operating room; railways may have changed the position of the former accident ward, to reach which, in the days of which I am writing, the two surgeons had to pass a staircase leading to the upper stories.
On the lower step of this staircase, partially in shadow, Hertford O’Donnell beheld, as he came forward, an old woman seated.
An old woman with streaming grey hair, with attenuated arms, with head bowed forward, with scanty clothing, with bare feet; who never looked up at their approach, but sat unnoticing, shaking her head and wringing her hands in an extremity of despair.
“Who is that?” asked Mr. O’Donnell, almost involuntarily.
“Who is what?” demanded his companion.
“That—that woman,” was the reply.
“What woman?”
“There—are you blind?—seated on the bottom step of the staircase. What is she doing?” persisted Mr. O’Donnell.
“There is no woman near us,” his companion answered, looking at the rising surgeon very much as though he suspected him of seeing double.
“No woman!” scoffed Hertford. “Do you expect me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes?” and he walked up to the figure, meaning to touch it.
But as he assayed to do so, the woman seemed to rise in the air and float away, with her arms stretched high up-over her head, uttering such a wail of pain, and agony, and distress, as caused the Irishman’s blood to curdle.
“My God! Did you hear that?” he said to his companion.
“What?” was the reply.
Then, although he knew the sound had fallen on deaf ears, he answered:
“The wail of the Banshee! Some of my people are doomed!”
“I trust not,” answered the house-surgeon, who had an idea, nevertheless, that Hertford O’Donnell’s Banshee lived in a whisky bottle, and would at some remote day make an end to the rising and clever operator.
With nerves utterly shaken, Mr. O’Donnell walked forward to the accident ward. There with his face shaded from the light, lay his patient—a young boy, with a compound fracture of the thigh.
In that ward, in the face of actual danger or pain capable of relief the surgeon had never known faltering or fear; and now he carefully examined the injury, felt the pulse, inquired as to the treatment pursued, and ordered the sufferer to be carried to the operating room.
While he was looking out his instruments he heard the boy lying on the table murmur faintly:
“Tell her not to cry so—tell her not to cry.”
“What is he talking about?” Hertford O’Donnell inquired.
“The nurse says he has been speaking about some woman crying ever since he came in—his mother, most likely,” answered one of the attendants.
“He is delirious then?” observed the surgeon.
“No, sir,” pleaded the boy, excitedly, “no; it is that woman—that woman with the grey hair. I saw her looking from the upper window before the balcony gave way. She has never left me since, and she won’t be quiet, wringing her hands and crying.”
“Can you see her now?” Hertford O’Donnell inquired, stepping to the side of the table. “Point out where she is.”
Then the lad stretched forth a feeble finger in the direction of the door, where clearly, as he had seen her seated on the stairs, the surgeon saw a woman standing—a woman with grey hair and scanty clothing, and up-stretched arms and bare feet.
“A word with you, sir,” O’Donnell said to the house-surgeon, drawing him back from the table. “I cannot perform this operation: send for some other person. I am ill; I am incapable.”
“But,” pleaded the other, “there is no time to get anyone else. We sent for Mr. West, before we troubled you, but he was out of town, and all the rest of the surgeons live so far away. Mortification may set in at any moment and—”.
“Do you think you require to teach me my business?” was the reply. “I know the boy’s life hangs on a thread, and that is the very reason I cannot operate. I am not fit for it. I tell you I have seen tonight that which unnerves me utterly. My hand is not steady. Send for someone else without delay. Say I am ill—dead!—what you please. Heavens! There she is again, right over the boy! Do you hear her?” and Hertford O’Donnell fell fainting on the floor.
How long he lay in that death-like swoon I cannot say; but when he returned to consciousness, the principal physician of Guy’s was standing beside him in the cold grey light of the Christmas morning.
“The boy?” murmured O’Donnell, faintly.
“Now, my dear fellow, keep yourself quiet,” was the reply.
“The boy?” he repeated, irritably. “Who operated?”
“No one,” Dr. Lanson answered. “It would have been useless cruelty. Mortification had set in and—”
Hertford O’Donnell turned his face to the wall, and his friend could not see it.
“Do not distress yourself,” went on the physician, kindly. “Allington says he could not have survived the operation in any case. He was quite delirious from the first, raving about a woman with grey hair and—”
“I know,” Hertford O’Donnell interrupted; “and the boy had a mother, they told me, or I dreamt it.”
“Yes, she was bruised and shaken, but not seriously injured.”
“Has she blue eyes and fair hair—fair hair all rippling and wavy? Is she white as a lily, with just a faint flush of colour in her cheek? Is she young and trusting and innocent? No; I am wandering. She must be nearly thirty now. Go, for God’s sake, and tell me if you can find a woman you could imagine having once been as a girl such as I describe.”
“Irish?” asked the doctor; and O’Donnell made a gesture of assent.
“It is she then,” was the reply, “a woman with the face of an angel.”
“A woman who should have been my wife,” the surgeon answered; “whose child was my son.”
“Lord help you!” ejaculated the doctor. Then Hertford O’Donnell raised himself from the sofa where they had laid him, and told his companion the story of his life—how there had been bitter feud between his people and her people—how they were divided by old animosities and by difference of religion—how they had met by stealth, and exchanged rings and vows, all for naught—how his family had insulted hers, so that her father, wishful for her to marry a kinsman of his own, bore her off to a far-away land, and made her write him a letter of eternal farewell—how his own parents had kept all knowledge of the quarrel from him till she was utterly beyond his reach—how they had vowed to discard him unless he agreed to marry according to their wishes—how he left home, and came to London, and sought his fortune. All this Hertford O’Donnell repeated; and when he had finished, the bells were ringing for morning service—ringing loudly, ringing joyfully, “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men”.
But there was little peace that morning for Hertford O’Donnell. He had to look on the face of his dead son, wherein he beheld, as though reflected, the face of the boy in his dream.
Afterwards, stealthily he followed his friend, and beheld, with her eyes closed, her cheeks pale and pinched, her hair thinner but still falling like a veil over her, the love of his youth, the only woman he had ever loved devotedly and unselfishly.
There is little space left her to tell of how the two met at last—of how the stone of the years seemed suddenly rolled away from the tomb of their past, and their youth arose and returned to them, even amid their tears.
She had been true to him, through persecution, through contumely, through kindness, which was more trying; through shame, and grief, and poverty, she had been loyal to the lover of her youth; and before t
he New Year dawned there came a letter from Calgillan, saying that the Banshee’s wail had been heard there, and praying Hertford, if he were still alive, to let bygones be bygones, in consideration of the long years of estrangement—the anguish and remorse of his afflicted parents.
More than that. Hertford O’Donnell, if a reckless man, was honourable; and so, on the Christmas Day when he was to have proposed for Miss Ingot, he went to that lady, and told her how he had wooed and won, in the years of his youth, one who after many days was miraculously restored to him; and from the hour in which he took her into his confidence, he never thought her either vulgar or foolish, but rather he paid homage to the woman who, when she had heard the whole tale repeated, said, simply, “Ask her to come to me till you can claim her—and God bless you both!”
THE SERPENT’S HEAD, by Lady Dilke
Originally published in The Shrine of Death, 1886.
In a castle by the Northern Sea two women, a girl and her mother, dwelt alone; nor, had they wished for friends and neighbours, were there any to find in that desolate country. All the space which was not covered by water was spread with sand, for the hills near the coast, mined by the stealthy advances of the sea, were for ever falling over and strewing the shore with ruin. The only feature of this mournful landscape was a black reef of rocks to the north, the position of which was marked, even at the highest tides, by a crag called “The Serpent’s Head.”
The castle itself, which was on an eminence completely isolated from the surrounding country, showed but the scanty remains of its ancient glories; the great tower yet stood on the north proudly intact within the inner series of fortifications, but facing it on the south and east were nought but ruins, whilst on the west a disused building called “The Chamber on the Wall” presented a gloomy and deserted aspect. Such life as yet lingered within a fortress meant to contain a thousand men was apparently confined to the tower, and centered on the existence of two women.
In a vast and vaulted chamber, the sides of which were riddled with strange closets, and mantled with books, the mother constantly sat; but her gaze was more often on the deserted courts below than on the pages before her, and oftenest of all her eyes would seek the black reef on the north, and spy out the antics of her daughter, diving and swimming about the Serpent’s Head.
The girl, in her childish days, had been content, finding infinite amusement, as the fisher children did, in the wonders of the sands; in the hollows of the great drifts she had built for herself many a fairy chamber; but as she grew older these sports were all outworn, and of all her delights one only remained to her, for she was a fearless swimmer, and to dive into the deep waters off the Serpent’s Head was ever a pleasure to her.
There, too, she would sit for hours gazing seawards. No tiniest speck of sail that crossed the waters could escape her watchful eyes, and as she watched she dreamed that some day one of these distant sails should bear down towards her, and one should come, in whose hand she would lay her own, and they two would flee to the far East. But as the changeless years went by and brought him not, the girl grew sullen, and a sense of wrong possessed her, for the older she grew, the clearer became her consciousness of a world beyond her, and the greater her longing to seek it.
So the sea, with its journeying ships, appeared to her as the path of deliverance, and the way of escape, and the castle in which she dwelt was a prison to her; and sometimes sudden fits of gusty passion would overtake her, for weariness grew to hate, and hate to wrath, and rising to her feet she would clench and shake her impotent hands at the grey walls above her, frowning motionless at the ever-moving sea. Then her mother, if by chance she saw these demoniacal gestures, would smile a bitter smile, and when they met her eyes would have a challenge in them, so that the girl’s passion, which the moment before had risen high with questioning, fell before her gaze, nor did it ever seem possible to her to speak her thoughts, and there was never any confidence between them.
Thus it was that the girl went always alone, and one morning in the late autumn, having risen from a bed fevered with evil dreams, she betook herself, as was her wont, to the Serpent’s Head. It was low water, and stepping lightly from point to point, she soon reached the utmost projecting crag, and sat herself down upon it. Now as she sat, she looked into the waters below, and her eyes fastened on two long ribands of seaweed which floated out of a cave beneath, or were sucked back as the tide ebbed or flowed. As she looked on them, these ribands of weed seemed to her like two long arms stretching and reaching out to her. Then, suddenly she remembered her dream, for in her dream it had seemed to her that her own heart lay in her hands, and as she held it before her, lo! two arms had stretched themselves out of the darkness, and her heart lay no longer in her own hands, but in those of her mother, and she heard her mother’s voice saying, “It is mine!” and a great anguish had come upon her, as she felt her mother’s fingers in her heart-strings, and she awoke.
Now when the girl remembered her dream, the fever of the night ran yet in her veins, and she continued to watch the witchlike movements of the weeds upon the water, until it was as though she felt the clasp of their slimy tendrils drawing her downwards, and yielding to a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet, cast her garments from her, and hastily girding on a little blue gown which she had brought with her, she threw herself into the sea. Once she had touched the water, her dream faded, and she forgot her meaning to enter the cave below, and struck out from the land. Nor was it long before all the blackness in her heart vanished, and she began to laugh, joying and sporting in the boundless waters. But soon there arose a sea fog such as afflict those coasts, and in a moment, the shore and the sea were as one, for on all sides the impenetrable mist had fallen.
At this the girl made, as she thought, for the point whence she had come, and she did not discover that she had utterly lost her bearings till the sound of the signal, fired from the castle walls, rolled past her through the waves of shivering mist. She was now weary, but the sound was no sure guide, for, having reached the shore, she found herself still so far out of her course that her feet were in the quicksands which lay to the south of the Serpent’s Head. Now anger and fear laid hold upon her, for the tide was coming in fast, and she knew that no man might land at that point with his life; so, turning to the north, she struck out again for the rocks, and the old fever mounted to her brain, and she fancied that the hand of her mother lay heavy on her life, and her thought was, “I will not die, but live. I will be-stronger than thou!” And even when, in her extremity, the end seemed very close to her, the fog began to lift, and before her she saw the black shape of the Serpent’s Head. Then, with a desperate effort, she drew near it, and the fog lifted altogether, and she saw that no other part of the reef was visible; but though she laid her hands upon it, the numbness of her body was such that she could get no footing, nor by any means could she raise herself on to the rock.
There was one, however, who now watched her, one who had ridden from afar, and caught by the fog and the rising tide had tarried near the rocks. When this one saw the girl clinging to the Serpent’s Head, he rode his horse a little way up the shore, till he could put him in the curve of the breakers, and thus, like one who had often done the same, he strove to reach her; but by this means he could not, so next, letting go his horse, he made himself ready, and fetching a wide circle, he reached her and brought her safely to land.
When he touched the shore, he laid her on the sands and knelt beside her, and she, half conscious only, opening her eyes and seeing him thus close, made one of her dreams and of her escape from death, and putting her arms about him said, “I have saved my heart, and it is yours;” and she thrust her mouth to his and she kissed him. After this, she lay still as in a swoon, and he was amazed; but the girl was very beautiful, and great pity and tenderness possessed him as he saw her thus. Then he looked about for help, and so looking he espied a narrow path embedded in the grass-grown sand,
and leading to the postern gate of the castle. Taking her then in his arms, he bore her slowly thither, for the way was steep, and pausing now and again, he felt that the pressure of her arms about him tightened until she held him so close that when he had brought her into the presence of her mother scarcely might her stiffened fingers be unclasped from about his neck.
Now when at last she opened her eyes, she lay in her own room, and her mother stood near, and she heard her mother say, “Would God that she had perished in the sea!” and she saw her mother’s face that it was very stern as she said this. But the heart of the girl was glad; she felt neither fear nor anger, and hate seemed harmless, so great a love within an hour past had leapt up within her. And, though no word had passed, she knew that he who had fetched her from the sea was her lover, and that even as it was with her so it was with him.
Next day, and each day after, they met again by the Serpent’s Head; but her mother watched her, and looking towards the rocks at sunset she saw them together. Then neither that night nor the next did she take any rest, and on the morning of the second day, when the girl would have gone forth, her mother met her and said, “I have somewhat to say unto you.” And the girl, suspecting her purpose, stood still before her, and folding her arms across her breast she answered, “He is my lover, and shall be my husband.” And the mother at this cried, “Are you hot so soon? But I have that to tell you which shall put out your fires. There is a curse on you, even the curse of your accursed father and his race. O God!” she continued, “shall not one life suffice, and shall his seed drag yet another and another down into the abyss? Shall a son born of your body live to rivet these devil’s chains on another life as fair as mine?”
And a great shiver passed over her, and she closed her eyes a space before she spoke again, and then it was in a different tone, a tone of pitiful pleading, that she said, “Child! for the sake of your love, put him from you; die sooner than bring this death to his soul;” and in so saying she averted her eyes, for she knew that if she looked upon the girl and saw in her her father’s features, the dregs of hate, grown cold, would be as gall within her, and turn her words to bitter. So laying her hands on the hangings of the wall her lips moved silently as in prayer, and she went on, as one in a trance, “I gave my soul to him who was your father, and here for years, I served him, but by no service could his spirit be appeased, and the hour came that I knew him to be mad, and he knew it also, but the world knew it not, and a great fear came upon him that I who knew it should betray him. Day and night, he watched me, nor could I by any means elude his cunning, till at the last he had me at his will.”
The Fifth Ghost Story Megapack 25 Classic Haunts Page 35
