‘There are times,’ I made bold to remark, ‘there are times I feel this house to be haunted;’ for every night during the short spell since I came to see my kinsman, I was sure I heard the fall of footsteps on the floor after the pair of us had gone to our beds. The rattling of the door, if it was not a troubled dream, had also startled me in my sleep. I had begun to ask myself was it one of these houses where the door must be left on the latch and the hearth swept clean for Those who come back. Always at a certain hour Tim was in a hurry to rake the fire and get shut of me out of the kitchen. A pang now shot through my breast. With the poor man hardly able to raise hand or foot, it was not kind to draw down such a thing. But he looked glad that I had given him the chance to speak out.
‘As you make mention of it,’ he said eagerly, ‘I want to let you know the house is haunted, surely! But it is not by any spirit of good or evil from beyond the grave. That is a strange thing, you will be saying.’
‘It is a strange thing,’ I agreed. I had no doubt what he was going to disclose. He had already given me the story of a house built, and not without warning, on a ‘fairy pass’, through which the Sluagh Sidhe in their hosting and revels swept gaily every night. This was the house for sure: The Gentle Folk had never passed the gates of death and know nothing of the grave.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘there is one other thing as strange again. It is that same you will now be hearing, if you pay heed to me.’ ‘You mean that this is the house’ - I began, intending to say that it was the house of the story, but I checked myself - ‘ that it is a case of a fallen angel, hanging between heaven and hell, who never had to pay the penalty of death ? ’
‘If you let me,’ he made answer, ‘I will tell you the truth. The place is haunted by a mortal man!’
‘One still in the world, one who goes about in his clothes, one to be seen by daylight?’ I asked, without drawing breath.
‘In troth,’ he declared, ‘it is haunted by the man who tells it, and no other, if I am still in the flesh itself!’
I lifted him slightly in the bed, not knowing what to say or think. Was this his way of speaking about some common habit, or was his reason leaving him?
‘Whisper!’ he said, and his face was flushed. ‘You came here to gather old stories out of the past, over and above seeing your last living relative in the world, leaving out Michael, my son, who should be here by this. I might do worse than give you the true version of my own trouble.’
This made a double reason why I should hear him out. There is no man but carries in his breast the makings of a story, which, though never told, comes more home to him, than any the mind of another man can find and fashion in words.
‘What harm if my story should turn out a poor thing in the telling?’ he sighed. ‘It will ease my mind, if it does only that.
And who knows: but we will talk of that when the times comes.’ He turned aside from the food I was coaxing him to take, and started:
‘It is now a year since herself was laid to rest. Laid to rest!’ He laughed, a little bitterly. ‘That is what they call it. A week after that again, call it what you like, the graveyard was closed by orders. There are people still to the fore who have their rights under the law; but it is hardly likely that many, if any of them, will try to make good their claim to be buried in Gort na Marbh.’ Gurthnamorrav, the Field of the Dead, that is what those around and about call the lonely patch to this day. Though this generation of them are ‘dull of’ the ancient tongue, such names, of native savour, help to keep them one in soul with the proud children of Banbha who are in eternity. Vivid imagery, symbols drawn, in a manner of speaking, from the brown earth, words of strength and beauty that stud like gems of light and grace the common speech hold not merely an abiding charm in themselves. Such heritages of the mind of the Gael evoke through active fancy the fuller life of the race of kings no less surely than those relics of skill and handicraft found by chance in tilth or red bog, the shrine of bell or battle book, the bronze spear head, the torque of gold.
‘But, surely,’ I objected, ‘those who are able would like to have their bones laid beside their own when their day of nature is past! Surely they would choose such a ground as the place of their resurrection, as the holy men of old used to say!’
‘Time and time again,’ he made answer, ‘people have left it to their deaths not to be buried in Gort na Marbh. Man and wife have been parted, mother and child. What call have I to tell you the reason? You know it rightly. You know it is the lot of the last body brought to its long home to be from that time forth the Watcher o’ the Dead?’
‘I have heard tell of that queer - of that belief,’ I replied. ‘That the poor soul cannot go to its rest, if it took years itself, till another comes to fill its place; that it must wander about in the dead of the night amongst the graves where the mortal body is crumbling to dust; and, as one might say in a plain way, keep an eye over the place!’
‘And who would care to be buried in ground that was shut up for ever?’ he asked. ‘Even at the best of times people try their best endeavours to be the first through the gate with the corpse of their own friend and when two funerals happen to fall on the one day.’
And then he went on to tell me, and his voice failing at that, of all he was after going through thinking of his woman, his share of the world, making the weary, dreary, rounds of the graveyard during the best part of the changing year. And, bitter agony! he felt that she could not share in the Communion of Saints, that all his good works for her sake would not hasten her release. But the thing that made it the hardest for him to bear was this: It was through his veneration for the old customs, through his great respect even for the dead, that this awful tribulation had come to the pair of them.
‘Let you not be laughing at what I’m going to tell you now,’ he warned me: ‘for I won’t deny there have been times when I made merry over the like myself. It was a seldom thing two funerals to be on the one day; nor would it have come to happen at the time it did if the other people had the proper spirit, like myself, or the right regard for the things good Christians hold highly. Listen! They knew the order to close the graveyard, the other people knew it was on the road, for the man who was dead and going to be buried on the same day as herself was himself on the Board of Guardians. That was why they waked him for one night only, and they people of means, and rushed with him in unseemly haste to Gort na Marbh. But we got wind of it, and would have been the first, for all that, only we followed the old road, the long road, and in a decent and becoming way walked in through the open gate while they took a short cut and got in over the stile. We did more than that, and so did they. While the savages, for they were little else, while they were trampling above the relics of the dead, we went round about the ground in the track of the sun till we came in the proper course to the side of the open grave.’
This set me thinking of the ancient ritual by which the corpse is brought round to pay its respects, as a body might say, to those who have gone before. I began to ask myself was it a fragment of Druid worship that had come down even to our own day. But this is what I said to my kinsman:
‘You did what was right, and no one would be better pleased than the woman who was gone!’
‘That is the way I felt myself at the first going off,’ he agreed: ‘but soon I began to question myself: When I did the right thing, that the neighbours gave me full credit for, was I thinking more of what was expected from the living or what was due to the dead? Was I thinking of myself, and the great name I’d be getting from the self-same neighbours, or of the woman going into the clay, who only wanted their prayers? Many’s the long night this thought kept me on the rack till I was nigh gone astray in the head. In my mind I saw her, and her brown habit down to her feet, and she looking to me for help, and it my sin of human respect, as I felt, that kept her so long from walking on the sunny hills of Glory! Funeral after funeral went the way, for people have to die; but not a one passed the rusty gate of Gort na Marbh as a poor wom
an of the roads might give the go-by to a stricken house.
‘At length and at last, I could stand it no longer, and one night I got up from my bed and made my way to the graveyard. ‘Twas in the dark hour before the crowing of the cocks, when wandering spirits are warned home to their house of clay.’
‘And did you half expect to see the Watcher o’ the Dead?’ I asked.
‘Did I? And why not?’ he asked in turn, by way of reply.
‘With your mind disturbed that way,’ I went on, ‘the wonder is you didn’t see her, if only in fancy.’
I meant to be kind. He faced me testily.
‘I did see her, as sure as I’m a living man! ’ he declared.
I had not the heart to urge my view that it was only a brain- born figure.
‘I no sooner crossed the stile,’ he said softly, ‘than I got clear sight of herself. She was moving through the graves she guarded, and a kindly look in her two eyes. The dead image I thought her of the Nuns you see in the sick ward of the poorhouse in Bally- brosna, and she taking a look at the beds in their little rows, and fearing to waken the tired sleepers in her charge. There she was, in truth, as I had seen her a thousand times in my own mind.’ ‘In your own mind!’ I said after him. ‘It was on your eyes, so to speak, and you merely saw what was in your mind already. Was it not more natural to see the figment that never left your sight than not to see it at all?’
It was all very clear to me, and I felt this was sound talk; and isn’t it a caution the way the rage of battle will rise in a body and set the tongue loose! But Tim’s reply put a stop to any dispute or war of words.
‘It was in my mind, for sure,’ he said. ‘But tell me, you who have the book learning, why was it in my mind? When a man’s brain begins to work, what gives it the start, or sets it going - or does it start to go of itself?’
I had to give in that I always left such vexed questions to wiser heads, adding, whimsically enough as it seems to me now, that I was not such a great fool as to attempt an answer where they failed. In a way I was put out by the reflection that this old man, who ‘didn’t know his letters’, was making a mockery of me on the head of my few books and my small store of book learning.
‘There is nothing hard about the case I am after putting before you,’ he said. ‘It was on my mind because the thing was taking place in Gort na Marbh night after night, was taking place in the Field of the Dead, though there was no living eye to see it!’
I had no reply to that, whether it was a head-made ghost or not. Where was the use of starting to argue that nothing really takes place if not within the knowledge of man? I told myself weakly that such visions were due to the queer strain in the old man the neighbours spoke about this day. It might be that, in his present state, all this had only come into his head as the two of us talked together. It did not occur to me then, and I have too much respect for the dead to credit it now, that he was ‘taking a rise’ out of me, as the plain saying is.
Tim became a little rambling in his speech and asked me to let him lie flat in the bed. I gathered from the words he mumbled and jumbled that he made a promise to the departed spirit to take her place till his own time came in real earnest: that he had bid her go to her rest, in the Name of God, much, I could not help but think, as one might banish an evil spirit to the ‘red sea’ to make ropes of the sand; that he had kept his word, which brought great peace to his breast: and that he never set eyes on her again from that hour, there or there else.
I had no doubt he had but laid the ghost of his own troubled thoughts. It is not every poor mortal can do that same, even by dint of hard sacrifice. Tim was growing worse. I tried hard to cheer him. It was all to no use. I talked of his son, Michael, who was far away on the fishing grounds. We had already sent word for him to come home, and he might be here any stroke, if it was a long ways off, itself.
‘Michael will never be here in time !’ the father groaned. ‘That is my great trouble. I never could ask another to do it. It would be again’ reason.’
‘There is nothing you could name I would not gladly do! ’ I declared; and, in all fair speaking, I meant it.
‘There are things no man should ask of his friend,’ he said to that, with a slight shake of the head.
‘And who else should he ask but his friend?’ I laughed, trying to rouse him. ‘But, first, I’ll send for the Doctor
‘The Doctor, how are ye! ’ he broke in on me. ‘That is not what I want. What can the like of himself do for a body who has seen the Watcher o’ the Dead?’
‘What harm if you did itself?’ I asked. ‘The sign of a long life it is, as likely as not. It would be another story, entirely, one’s “fetch” to be seen in the late hours of the day. An early death that would signify.’
‘The man,’ he made answer, ‘the man who lays eyes on the Watcher o’ the Dead, late or early, if the like could come to pass at all before dark, that man will soon be only a shadow himself. I am saying, he will soon be among the silent company. The time I took the woman’s place, the woman who held my heart for years, I knew rightly, it would not be for long. It is for that reason and no other I am after telling you my secret sorrow. I will never be able to put out this night, if I live through this night of the nights, or any night for the future; and if it was a thing I failed her, sure herself would be disturbed in her rest.’
I took a grip of his hand and looked down steadily into his eyes.
‘Put your trust in me!’ I said. ‘I’ll take your place till such time as you are laid in the clay!’
Who is it, though he might throw doubt on the very stars above his head, would not try to humour an old man or a little child?
‘God sent you for a friend,’ he said, ‘praised be His holy Name! For all I know, I may not want you to do so much: I may want you to do a little more, but in another way. I want you to take my place till Michael comes, and not an hour more; I want you, as well as that, to tell him all I have told you and to give him my dying wish, if it is a thing he does not come before I go for ever. Whisper! You’ll tell Michael, in case I’m too far through myself, that I am dying happy knowing he will not refuse a last favour to the father who reared him. It is this: That he will become the Watcher o’ the Dead, though a living man, like myself, and let me, after so much fret and torment, go straight to herself, to his mother, in Heaven. Tell him I know he will do this, for the rest of his mortal days, if it comes to that. Tell him I know that, after that again, if he gets no release he will have his bones laid in Gort na Marbh and wait his own turn. I have done my share of watching, God knows!’
Some kind neighbours gathered during the course of the day, and the priest of the parish was sent for. Father Malachy was a man of the world, without being worldly. It is not for the knowing, and never will be in this world, whether Tim told him about the Watcher o’ the Dead. As a man, his reverence knew all the customs and beliefs of the people, for he was one of them himself. Deep in his nature a body might expect to find a kindly toleration for the harmless ‘superstitions’, as some would call them, lingering from the pagan days of Firbolg or Tuatha de Danaan. As a priest, he had, no doubt, full knowledge of the rites of the Church for dealing with ‘appearances’ from the other world, which shows it to be no harm to give heed to such things.
Tim kept quiet till the night wore on. Then he got restless and began to mutter to himself. The use of his speech was well-nigh gone. I caught such words as ‘Gort na Marbh’, and ‘Herself’, and ‘the Watcher o’ the Dead’. His grip was tight on my fist when I said in his ear that I would not fail him, dead or alive, till Michael came. The kind neighbours did not let on to hear the pair of us, and I left him in their charge while I set out for the strange duty I had taken on myself so lightly, taken on, indeed, with a certain zest, in the vague hope of enlarging my experience. It was clear from Tim’s behaviour that the hour of the night had come when he felt the ‘call’ to the graveyard, and still there was no sign of Michael. The moon was in the sky. The night was col
d. There was no stir. The place held no terrors for me. I set little store by Tim’s story, except as a ‘study’ in delusion. The old man was much in my thoughts, for he was passing rapidly away. I saw him in my mind, as he us£d to say, and he walking here and there through the graves that now held nothing but cold clay, passing by fallen stones, broken and moss-grown. I tried hard to banish such airy pictures, for I did not want to begin seeing sights.
What was that story Tim told me a few days ago as we stood before a headstone in Gort na Marbh? It was a true tale of revenge, revenge both on the living and the dead, and it was a poor sort of revenge at that. Before long I would be seeing again the spot where the dead man he spoke about was laid in the clay. His relations, in blood and law, hoped to benefit largely by his death. But he left all to his son. The boy was an only child whose mother died the hour he came into the world. He came home, a likely youth, to be at the father’s funeral. For the first time in his young life he saw the place that was now to be his own. It was natural for him to ask why the usual black plumes did not wave above the hearse instead of white. The errors of the past, if any, should have been covered by charity. Feuds are forgiven, if not forgotten, in the hour of death. It is what they told him, with wild malice, that black plumes were only for people who were lawfully joined in wedlock.
Here I found the elements of tragedy, but the story only helped to keep the figure of Tim before me. I was stepping over the stile and thinking of the nights he spent walking about in the dreary waste, for, after so much neglect, that is what it had by now sunk to. I felt the nettles rank and dank as I set foot on the ground; and then - it was not wild phantasy! -I got sight of Tim moving in the moonlight among the shadows of the headstones and the trees.
‘In the Name of God!’ I cried, profanely, I am half afraid, ‘leave the place at once, and let me keep my promise in peace.’
I was furious with the neighbours for letting him rise and he in a fever. But were they to be blamed? I crossed hastily and found myself alone! This gave me a start, and I began to wonder whether in that strange ground - for, surely, the place was not ‘right’! - I, in my turn, saw what was on my eyes only! Had Tim been there in the flesh or was it that I, in my turn, had laid but the ghost of a deranged imagination? Could it be that the queer strain of the family, if there is such a thing, runs in my own blood? Or does a sane man put such a question to himself? Without waiting for the crowing of the cocks, I made haste back to the house. My heart was beating loudly.
THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS Page 74
