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The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine, a novel by William Carleton |
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Chapter 32. Conclusion |
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_ CHAPTER XXXII. Conclusion The interest excited by the trial, involving as it did so much that concerned the Sullivans, especially the hopes and affections of their daughter Mave, naturally induced them--though not on this latter account--young and old, to attend the assizes, not excepting Mave herself; for her father, much against her inclination, had made a point to bring her with them. On finding, however, how matters turned out, a perfect and hearty reconciliation took place between the two families, in the course of which Mave and the Prophet's wife once more renewed their acquaintance. Some necessary and brief explanation took place, in the course of which allusion was made to Sarah and her state of health. "I hope," said Mave, "you will lose no time in goin' to see her. I know her affectionate heart; an' that when she hears an' feels that she has a mother alive an' well, an' that loves her as she ought to be loved, it will put new life into her." "She is a fine lookin' girl," replied her mother, "an' while I was spakin' to her, I felt my heart warm to her sure enough; but she's a wild crature, they say." "Hasty a little," said Mave; "but then such a heart as she has. You ought to go see her at wanst." "I would, dear, an' my heart is longin' to see her; but I think it's betther that I should not till afther his thrial to-morrow. I'm to be a witness against the unfortunate man." "Against her father!--against your own husband!" exclaimed Mave, looking aghast at this information. "Yes, dear; for it was my brother he murdhered an' he must take the consequences, if he was my husband and her father ten times over. My brother's blood mustn't pass for nothin'. Besides, the hand o' God is in it, an' I must do my duty." The heart of the gentle and heroic Mave, which could encounter contagion and death, from a principle of unconscious magnanimity and affection, that deserved a garland, now shrunk back with pain at the sentiments so coolly expressed by Sarah's mother. She thought for a moment of young Dalton, and that if she were called upon to prosecute him,--but she hastily put the fearful hypothesis aside, and was about to bid her acquaintance good-bye, when the latter said: "To-morrow, or rather the day afther, I'd wish to see her for then I'll know what will happen to him, an' how to act with her; an' if you'd come with me, I'd be glad of it, an' you'd oblige me." Mave's gentle and affectionate spirit was disquieted within her by what she had already heard; but a moment's reflection convinced her that her presence on the occasion might be serviceable to Sarah, whose excitable temperament and delicate state of health required gentle and judicious treatment. "I'm afeard," said Mrs. M'Ivor, "that by the time the trial's over to-morrow, it'll be too late; but let us say the day afther, if it's the same to you." "Well, then," replied Mave, "you can call to our place, as it's on your way, an' we'll both go together." "If she knew her," said Mave to her friends, on her way home, "as I do; if she only knew the heart she has--the lovin', the fearless, the great heart;--oh, if she did, no earthly thing would prevent her from goin' to her without the loss of a minute's time. Poor Sarah!--brave and generous girl--what wouldn't I do to bring her back to health! But ah, mother, I'm afeard;" and as the noble girl spoke, the tears gushed to her eyes--"'It's my last act for you,' she whispered to me, on that night when the house was surrounded by villains--'I know what you risked for me in the shed; I know it, dear Mave, an' I'm now sthrivin' to pay back my debt to you.' Oh, mother!" she exclaimed, "where--where could one look for the like of her! an' yet how little does the world know about her goodness, or her greatness, I may say. Well," proceeded Mave, "she paid that debt; but I'm afeard, mother, it'll turn out that it was with her own life she paid it." At the hour appointed, Mrs. M'Ivor and Mave set out on their visit to Sarah, each now aware of the dreadful and inevitable doom that awaited her father, and of the part which one of them, at least, had taken in bringing it about. About half an hour before their arrival, Sarah, whose anxiety touching the fate of old Dalton could endure no more, lay awaiting the return of her nurse--a simple, good-hearted, matter-of-fact creature, who had no notion of ever concealing the truth under any circumstances. The poor girl had sent her to get an account of the trial the best way she could, and, as we said, she now lay awaiting her return. At length she came in. "Well, Biddy, what's the news--or have you got any?" The old woman gently and affectionately put her hand over on Sarah's forehead, as if the act was a religious ceremony, and accompanied an invocation, as, indeed, she intended it to do. "May God in His mercy soon relieve you from your thrials, my poor girl, an' bring you to Himself! but it's the black news I have for you this day." Sarah started. "What news," she asked, hastily--"what black news?" "Husth, now, an' I'll tell you;--in the first place, your mother is alive, an' has come to the counthry." Sarah immediately sat up in the bed, without assistance, and fastening her black, brilliant eyes upon the woman, exclaimed--"My mother--my mother--my own mother!--an' do you dare to tell me that this is black news? Lave the house, I bid you. I'll get up--I'm not sick--I'm well. Great God! yes, I'm well--very well; but how dare you name black news an' my mother--my blessed mother--in the same breath, or on the same day?" "Will you hear me out, then?" continued the nurse. "No," replied Sarah, attempting to get up--"I want to hear no more; now I wish to live--now I am sure of one, an' that one my mother--my own mother--to love me--to guide me--to taich me all that I ought to know; but, above all, to love me. An' my father--my poor unhappy father--an' he is unhappy--he loves me, too. Oh, Biddy, I can forgive you now for what you said--I will be happy still--an' my mother will be happy--an' my father,--my poor father--will be happy yet; he'll reform--repent maybe; an' he'll wanst more get back his early heart--his heart when it was good, an' not hardened, as he says it was, by the world. Biddy, did you ever see any one cry with joy before--ha--ha--did you now?" "God strengthen you, my poor child," exclaimed the nurse, bursting into tears; "for what will become of you? Your father, Sarah dear, is to be hanged for murdher, an' it was your mother's evidence that hanged him. She swore against him on the thrial an' his sentence is passed. Bartle Sullivan wasn't murdhered at all, but another man was, an' it was your father that done it. On next Friday he's to be hanged, an' your mother, they say, swore his life away! If that's not black news, I don't know what is." Sarah's face had been flushed to such a degree by the first portion of the woman's intelligence, that its expression was brilliant and animated beyond belief. On hearing its conclusion, however, the change from joy to horror was instantaneous, shocking, and pitiable, beyond all power of language to express. She was struck perfectly motionless and ghastly; and as she kept her large lucid eyes fixed upon the woman's face, the powers of life, that had been hitherto in such a tumult of delight within her, seemed slowly, and with a deadly and scarcely perceptible motion, to ebb out of her system. The revulsion was too dreadful; and with the appearance of one who was anxious to shrink or hide from something that was painful, she laid her head down on the humble pillow of her bed. "Now, asthore," said the woman, struck by the woeful change--"don't take it too much to. heart; you're young, an' please God, you'll get over it all yet." "No," she replied, in a voice so utterly changed and deprived of its strength, that the woman could with difficulty hear or understand her. "There's but one good bein' in the world," she said to herself, "an' that is Mave Sullivan: I have no mother, no father--all I can love now is Mave Sullivan--that's all." "Every one that knows her does," said the nurse. "Who?" said Sarah, inquiringly. "Why, Mave Sullivan," replied the other; "worn't you spakin' about her?" "Was I?" said she, "maybe so--what was I sayin'?" She then put her hand to her forehead, as if she felt pain and confusion; after which she waved the nurse towards her, but on the woman stooping down, she seemed to forget that she had beckoned to her at all. At this moment Mave and her mother entered, and after looking towards the bed on which she lay, they inquired in a whisper, from her attendant how she was. The woman pointed hopelessly to her own head, and then looked significantly at Sarah, as if to intimate that her brain was then unsettled. "There's something wrong here," she added, in an under tone, and touching her head, "especially since I tould her what had happened." "Is she acquainted with everything?" asked her mother. "She is," replied the other; "she knows that her father is to die on Friday an' that you swore agin' him." "But what on earth," said Mave, "could make you be so mad as to let her know anything of that kind?" "Why, she sent me to get word," replied the simple creature, "and you wouldn't have me tell her a lie, an' the poor girl on her death-bed, I'm afeard." Her mother went over and stood opposite where she lay, that is, near the foot of her bed, and putting one hand under her chin, looked at her long and steadily. Mave went to her side and taking her hand gently up, kissed it, and wept quietly, but bitterly. It was, indeed, impossible to look upon her without a feeling of deep and extraordinary interest. Her singularly youthful aspect--her surprising beauty, to which disease and suffering had given a character of purity and tenderness almost etherial--the natural symmetry and elegance of her very arms and hands--the wonderful whiteness of her skin, which contrasted so strikingly with the raven black of her glossy hair, and the soul of thought and feeling which lay obviously expressed by the long silken eye-lashes of her closed eyes--all, when taken in at a glance, were calculated to impress a beholder with love, and sympathy, and tenderness, such as no human heart could resist. Mave, on glancing at her mother, saw a few tears stealing, as it were, down her cheeks. "I wish to God, my dear daughter," exclaimed the latter, in a low voice, "that I had never seen your face, lovely as it is, an' it surely would be betther for yourself that you had never been born." She then passed to the bed-side, and taking Mave's place, who withdrew, she stooped down, and placing her lips upon Sarah's white broad forehead, exclaimed--"May God bless you, my dear daughter, is the heart-felt prayer of your unhappy mother!" Sarah suddenly opened her eyes, and started.--"What is wrong? There is something wrong. Didn't I hear some one callin' me daughter? Here's a strange woman--Charley Hanlon's aunt--Biddy, come here!" "Well, acushla, here I am--keep yourself quiet, achora--what is it?" "Didn't you tell me that my mother swore my father's life away?" "It's what they say," replied the matter-of-fact nurse. "Then it's a lie that's come from hell itself," she replied--"Oh, if I was only up and strong as I was, let me see the man or woman that durst say so. My mother! to become unnatural and treacherous, an' I have a mother--ha, ha--oh, how often have I thought of this--thought of what a girl I would be if I was to have a mother--how good I would be too--how kind to her--how I would love her, an' how she would love me, an' then my heart would sink when I'd think of home--ay, an' when Nelly would spake cruelly an' harshly to me I'd feel as if I could kill her, or any one." Her eye here caught Mave Sullivan's, and she again started. "What is this?" she exclaimed; "am I still in the shed? Mave Sullivan!--help me up, Biddy." "I am here, dear Sarah," replied the gentle girl--"I am here; keep yourself quiet and don't attempt to sit up; you're not able to do it." The composed and serene aspect of Mave, and the kind, touching tones of her voice, seemed to operate favorably upon her, and to aid her in collecting her confused and scattered thoughts into something like order. "Oh, dear Mave," said she, "what is this? What has happened? Isn't there something wrong? I'm confused. Have I a mother? Have I a livin' mother, that will love me?" Her large eyes suddenly sparkled with singular animation as she asked the last question, and Mave thought it was the most appropriate moment to make the mother known to her. "You have, dear Sarah, an' here she is waitin' to clasp you to her heart, an' give you her blessin'." "Where?" she exclaimed, starting up in her bed, as if in full health; "my mother! where?--where?" She held her arms out towards her, for Mave had again assumed the mother's station at her bedside, and the latter stood at a little distance. On seeing her daughter's arms widely extended towards her, she approached her, but whether checked by Sarah's allusion to her conduct, or from a wish to spare her excitement, or from some natural coldness of disposition, it is difficult to say, she did it with so little appearance of the eager enthusiasm that the heart of the latter expected, and with a manner so singularly cool and unexcited, that Sarah, whose feelings were always decisive and rapid as lightning, had time to recognize her features as Hanlon's aunt whom she had seen and talked to before. But that was not all; she perceived not in her these external manifestations of strong affection and natural tenderness for which her own heart yearned almost convulsively; there was no sparkling glance--no precipitate emotion--no gushing of tears--no mother's love--in short, nothing of what her noble and loving spirit could, recognize as kindred to itself, and to her warm and impulsive heart. The moment--the glance--that sought and found not what it looked for--were decisive: the arms that had been extended remained extended still, but the spirit of that attitude was changed, as was that eager and tumultuous delight which had just flashed from her countenance. Her thoughts, as we said, were quick, and in almost a moment's time she appeared to be altogether a different individual. "Stop!" she exclaimed, now repelling instead of soliciting the embrace--"there isn't the love of a mother in that woman's heart--an' what did I hear?--that she swore my father's life away--her husband's life away. No, no; I'm changed--I see my father's blood, shed by her, too, his own wife! Look at her features, they're hard and harsh--there's no love in her eyes--they're cowld and sevare. No, no; there's something wrong there--I feel that--I feel it--it's here--the feelin's in my heart--oh, what a dark hour this is! You were right, Biddy, you brought me black news this day--but it won't--it won't throuble me long--it won't trouble this poor brain long--it won't pierce this poor heart long--I hope not. Oh!" she exclaimed, turning to Mave, and extending her arms towards her, "Mave Sullivan, let me die!" The affectionate but disappointed girl had all Mave's sympathies, whose warm and affectionate feelings recoiled from the coldness and apparent want of natural tenderness which characterized the mother's manner, under circumstances in themselves so affecting. Still, after having soothed Sarah for a few minutes, and placed her head once more upon the pillow, she whispered to the mother, who seemed to think more than to feel: "Don't be surprised; when you consider the state she's in--and indeed it isn't to be wondered at after what she has heard--you must make every allowance for the poor girl." Sarah's emotions were now evidently in incessant play. "Biddy," said she, "come here again; help me up." "Dear Sarah," said Mave, "you are not able to bear all this; if you could compose yourself an' forget everything unpleasant for a while, till you grow strong--" "If I could forget that my mother has no heart to love me with--that she's cowld and strange to me: if I could forget that she's brought my father to a shameful death--my father's heart wasn't altogether bad; no, an' he was wanst--I mane in his early life--a good man. I know that--I feel that--'dear Sarah, sleep--deep, dear Sarah'--no, bad as he is, there was a thousand times more love and nature in the voice that spoke them words than in a hundred women like my mother, that hasn't yet kissed my lips. Biddy, come here, I say--here--lift me up again." There was such energy, and fire, and command, in her voice and words now, that Mave could not remonstrate any longer, nor the nurse refuse to obey her. When she was once more placed sitting, she looked about her-- "Mother," she said, "come here!" And as she pronounced the word mother, a trait so beautiful, so exquisite, so natural, and so pathetic, accompanied it, that Mave once more wept. Her voice, in uttering the word, quivered, and softened into tenderness, with the affection which nature itself seems to have associated with it. Sarah herself remarked this, even in the anguish of the moment. "My very heart knows and loves the word," she said. "Oh! why is it that I am to suffer this? Is it possible that the empty name is all that's left me afther all? Mother, come here--I am pleadin' for my father now--you pleaded against him, but I always took the weakest side--here is God now among us--you must stand before him--look your daughter in the face--an' answer her as you expect to meet God, when you leave this throubled life--truth--truth now, mother, an' nothin' else. Mother, I am dyin'. Now, as God is to judge you, did you ever love my father as a wife ought?" There was some irresistible spirit, some unaccountable power, in her manner and language,--such command and such wonderful love of candor in her full dark eye--that it was impossible to gainsay or withstand her. "I will spake the thruth," replied her mother, evidently borne away and subdued, "although it's against myself--to my shame an' to my sorrow I say it--that when I married your father, another man had my affections--but, as I'm to appear before God, I never wronged him. I don't know how it is that you've made me confess it; but at any rate you're the first that ever wrung it out o' me." "That will do," replied her daughter, calmly; "that sounds like murdher from a mother's lips! Lay me down now, Biddy." Mave, who had scarcely ever taken her eyes from off her varying and busy features, was now struck by a singular change which she observed come over them--a change that was nothing but the shadow of death, and cannot be described. "Sarah!" she exclaimed; "dear, darling Sarah, what is the matter with you? Have you got ill again?" "Oh! my child!" exclaimed her mother--"am I to lose you this way at last? Oh! dear Sarah, forgive me--I'm you mother, and you'll forgive me." "Mave," said Sarah, "take this--I remember seein' yours and mine together not very long ago--take this lock of my hair--I think you'll get a pair of scissors on the corner of the shelf--cut it off with your own hands--let it be sent to my father--an' when he's dyin' a disgraceful death, let him wear it next his heart--an' wherever he's to be buried, let him have this buried with him. Let whoever will give it to him, say that it comes from Sarah--an' that, if she was able, she would be with him through shame, an' disgrace, an' death; that she'd support him as well as she could in his trouble--that she'd scorn the world for him--an' that because he said wanst in his life that he loved her; she'd forgive him all a thousand times, an' would lay down her life for him." "You would do that, my noble girl!" exclaimed Mave, with a choking voice. "An' above all things," proceeded Sarah, "let him be told, if it can be done, that Sarah said to him to die without fear--to bear it up like a man, an' not like a coward--to look manfully about him on the very scaffold--an'--an' to die as a man ought to die--bravely an' without fear--bravely an' without fear!" Her voice and strength were, since the last change that Mave observed, both rapidly sinking, and her mother, anxious, if possible, to have her forgiveness, again approached her and said: "Dear Sarah you are angry with me. Oh! forgive me--am I not your mother?" The girl's resentments, however, had all passed, and the business of her life, and its functions, she now felt were all over--she said so-- "It's all over, at last now, mother," she replied--"I have no anger now--come and kiss me. Whatever you have done, you are still my mother. Bless me--bless your daughter Sarah, I have nothing now in my heart but love for everybody. Tell Nelly, dear Mave, that Sarah forgave her, an' hoped that she'd forgive Sarah. Mave, I trust that you an' he will be happy--that's my last wish, an' tell him so. Mave, there's sweet faces about me, sich as I seen in the shed; they're smilin' upon me--smilin' upon Sarah--upon poor, hasty Sarah McGowan--that would have loved every one. Mave, think of me sometimes--an' let him, when he thinks of the wild girl that loved him, look upon you, dearest Mave, an' love you, if possible, better for her sake. These sweet faces are about me again. Father, I'll be before you--die--die like a man." While uttering these last few sentences, which were spoken with great difficulty, she began to pull the bedclothes about with her hands, and whilst uttering the last word, her beautiful hand was slightly clenched, as if helping out a sentiment so completely in accordance with her brave spirit. These motions, however, ceased suddenly--she heaved a deep sigh, and the troubled spirit of the kind, the generous, the erring, but affectionate Sarah M'Gowan--as we shall call her still--passed away to another, and, we trust, a better life. The storms of her heart and brain were at rest forever. Thus perished in early life one of those creatures, that sometimes seem as if they were placed by mistake in a wrong sphere of existence. It is impossible to say to what a height of moral grandeur and true greatness, culture and education might have elevated, her, or to say with what brilliancy her virtues might have shone, had heart and affections been properly cultivated. Like some beautiful and luxuriant flower, however, she was permitted to run into wildness and disorder for want of a guiding hand; but no want, no absence of training, could ever destroy its natural delicacy, nor prevent its fragrance from smelling sweet, even in the neglected situation where it was left to pine and die. There is little now to be added. "Time, the consoler," passes not in vain even over the abodes of wretchedness and misery. The sufferings of that year of famine we have endeavored to bring before those who may have the power in their hands of assuaging the similar horrors which are likely to visit this. The pictures we have given are not exaggerated, but drawn from memory and the terrible realities of 1817. It is unnecessary to add, that when sickness and the severity of winter passed away, our lovers, Mave and young Condy Dalton, were happily married, as they deserved to be, and occupied the farm from which the good old man had been so unjustly expelled. It was on the first social evening that the two families, now so happily reconciled, spent together subsequent to the trial, that Bartle Sullivan gratified them with the following account of his history: "I remimber fightin'," he proceeded, "wid Condy on that night, an' the devil's own bulliah battha he was. We went into a corner of the field near the Grey Stone to decide it. All at wanst I forgot what happened, till I found myself lyin' upon a car wid the M'Mahons of Edinburg, that lived ten or twelve miles beyant the mountains, at the foot of Carnmore. They knew me, and good right they had, for I had been spakin' to their sister Shibby, but she wasn't for me at the time, although I was ready to kick my own shadow about her, God knows. Well, you see, I felt disgraced at bein' beaten by Con Dalton, an I was fond of her, so what 'ud you have of us but off we went together to America, for you see she promised to marry me if I'd go. "They had taken me up on one of their carts, thinkin' I was dhrunk, to lave me for safety in the next neighbor's house we came to. Well, she an' I married when we got to Boston; but God never blessed us wid a family; and Toddy here, who tuk the life of a pedlar, came back afther many a long year, with a good purse, and lived with us. At last I began to long for home, and so we all came together. The Prophet's wife was wid us, an' another passenger tould me that Con here had been suspected of murdherin' me. I got unwell in Liverpool, but I sent Toddy on before me to make their minds aisy. As we wor talkin' over these matthers, I happened to mention to the woman what I had seen the night the carman was murdhered, and I wondhered at the way she looked on hearin' it. She went on, but afther a time came back to Liverpool for me, an' took the typhus on her way home, but thank God, we were all in time to clear the innocent and punish the guilty; ay, an' reward the good, too, eh, Toddy?'" "I'll give Mave away," replied Toddy, "if there wasn't another man in Europe; an' when I'm puttin' your hand into Con's, Mave, it won't be an empty one. Ay, an' if your friend Sarah, the wild girl, had lived--but it can't be helped--death takes the young as well as the ould; and may God prepare us all to meet Him!" Young Richard Henderson's anticipations were, unfortunately, too true. On leaving Mr. Travers' office, he returned home, took his bed, and; in the course of one short week, had paid, by a kind of judicial punishment, the fatal penalty of his contemplated profligacy. His father survived him only a few months, so that there is not at this moment, one of the name or blood of Henderson in the Grange. The old man died of a quarrel with Jemmy Branigan, to whom he left a pension of fifty pounds a year; and truly the grief of this aged servant after him was unique and original. "What's to come o' me?" said Jemmy, with tears in his eye; "I have nothing to do, nobody to attend to, nobody to fight with, nothing to disturb me or put me out of timper; I knew, however, that he would stick to his wickedness to the last--an' so he did, for the devil tempted him, out of sheer malice, when he could get at me no way else, to lave me fifty pounds a year, to kape me aisy! Sich revenge and villany, by a dyin' man, was never heard of. God help me, what am I to do now, or what hand will I turn to? What is there before me but peace and quietness for the remainder of my life?--but I won't stand that long--an' to lave me fifty pounds a year, to kape me aisy! God forgive him!" The Prophet suffered the sentence of the law, but refused all religious consolation. Whether his daughter's message ever reached him or not, we have had no means of ascertaining. He died, however, as she wished, firmly, but sullenly, and as if he despised and defied the world and its laws. He neither admitted his guilt, nor attempted to maintain his innocence, but passed out of existence like a man who was already wearied with its cares, and who now felt satisfied, when it was too late, that contempt for the laws of God and man, never leads to safety, much loss to happiness. His only observation was the following-- "When I dreamt that young Dalton drove a nail in my coffin, little I thought it would end this way." We have simply to conclude by saying that Rody Duncan was transported for perjury; and that Nelly became a devotee, or voteen, and, as far as one could judge, exhibited something like repentance for the sinful life she had led with the Prophet. [THE END] _ |
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