The Catholic World Volume I Part 31

And again, most touchingly, she says: "A letter from Felicite, which tells me nothing better about you. When will those who know more write? If they knew how a woman's heart beats, they would have more pity."

Maurice recovered from these attacks, and in the autumn of 1836 married a young and pretty Creole lady. He had not the violent attachment as to the "Louise" of his early youth; but the union seemed a suitable one on both sides. One of Eugenie's brief visits to Paris was made for the purpose of being present at her brother's marriage.

It was a romantic scene. It took place in the chapel of the old and quaint Abbaye aux Bois. The church was filled with brilliant and admiring friends. The bride and bridegroom, both so beautiful, knelt before the altar; the Pere Bugnet, who had {223} known Maurice as a boy, blessed the union. The gay procession pa.s.sed from the church, and met a funeral cortege! It fell like an omen on Eugenie's heart. Six short months went by, and Eugenie was again summoned to Paris, to Maurice's sick-bed--his dying-bed it indeed was, but his sister's pa.s.sionate love would not relinquish hope. The physicians, catching at a straw, prescribed native air, and the invalid caught at the proposal with feverish impatience. That eager longing sustained him through the long and terrible journey of twenty days; for, the moment he revived, he would be laid in the salon, and see the home-faces gathered round him. Then he was carried to his room, and soon the end came. At last Eugenie knew that he must go, and all the powers of her soul were gathered into that one prayer, that he might die at peace with G.o.d.

Calmly she bent over him, and kissed the forehead, damp with the dews of death.

"Dearest, M. le Cure is coming, and you will confess. You have no difficulty in speaking to M. le Cure?" "Not at all," he answered. "You will prepare for confession, then?" He asked for his prayer-book, and had the prayers read to him.

When the priest came, he asked for more time to prepare. At last the cure was summoned.

"Never have I heard a confession better made," said the priest afterward. As he was leaving the room, Maurice called him back, and made a solemn retraction of the doctrines of M. de Lamennais. Then came the Viatic.u.m and the last anointing. Life ebbed away; he pressed the hand of the cure, who was by him to the last, he kissed his crucifix, and died. Eugenie's prayer was heard. He died, but at home; a wanderer come back; an erring child, once more forgiven, resting on his Father's breast.

And he was gone!--"king of my heart! my other self!" as she had called him--and Eugenie was left behind. She had loved him too well for her eternal peace, and it was necessary that she should be purified in the crucible of suffering. Very gradually she parted from him; the gates of the tomb closed not on her love; slowly she uprooted the fibres of her nature which had been entwined in his. Her journal did not end, and she wrote still to him--to Maurice in heaven: "Oh, my beloved Maurice! Maurice, art thou far from me? hearest thou me? Sometimes I shed torrents of tears; then the soul is dried up. All my life will be a mourning one; my heart is desolate." Then, reproaching herself, she turns to her only consolation: "Do I not love thee, my G.o.d? only true and Eternal Love! It seems to me that I love thee as the fearful Peter, but not like John, who rested on thy heart--divine repose which I so need. What do I seek in creatures? To make a pillow of a human breast? Alas! I have seen how death can take that from us. Better to lean, Jesus, on thy crown of thorns.

"This day year, we went together to St. Sulpice, to the one o'clock ma.s.s. To-day I have been to Lentin in the rain, with bitter memories, in solitude. But, my soul, calm thyself with thy G.o.d, whom thou hast received to-day, in that little church. He is thy brother, thy friend, the well-beloved above all; whom thou canst never see die; who can never fail thee, in this world or the next. Let us console ourselves with this thought, that in G.o.d we shall find again all we have lost."

One great desire was, however, left to her; that of publis.h.i.+ng the letters and writings of Maurice, and of winning for her beloved one the fame which she so despised for herself. A tribute to his memory appeared the year after his death, in the _Revue des deux Mondes_, from the brilliant pen of Madame Sand; but it was the source of more pain than pleasure to Eugenie. With the want of candor which is so often a characteristic of the cla.s.s of writers to whom Madame Sand {224} belongs, she represented Maurice as a man totally without faith.

Eugenie believed that he had never actually lost it, although it had been darkened and obscured; and she was certainly far more in his confidence than any of his friends.

For some time before his death he had gradually been returning to religious exercises; and, as we have seen, on his death-bed, he had most fully retracted and repented of whatever errors there had been in his life. But Madame Sand was not very likely to trouble herself about the dying moments of her friend, while it was another triumph to infidelity to let the world think this brilliant young man lived and died in its ranks.

"Madame Sand makes Maurice a skeptic, a great poet, like Byron, and it afflicts me to see the name of my brother--a name which was free from these lamentable errors--thus falsely represented to the world." And again: "Oh, Madame Sand is right when she says that his words are like the diamonds linked together, which make a diadem; or, rather, my Maurice was all one diamond. Blessed be those who estimated his price; blessed be the voice which praises him, which places him so high, with so much respect and enthusiasm! But on one point this voice is mistaken--when she says he had no faith. No; faith was not wanting in him. I proclaim it, and attest it by what I have seen and heard; by his prayers, his pious reading; by the sacraments he received; by all his Christian actions; by the death which opened life unto him--a death with his crucifix."

This article of Madame Sand only increased Eugenie's desire to vindicate her brother, by letting the world judge from his own writings and letters what Maurice really was. Many projects were set on foot for publis.h.i.+ng this work. Rather than leave it undone, Eugenie would have undertaken it herself, though her broken spirit shrank more than ever from any sort of notoriety, or communication with the busy world outside her quiet home. But she would greatly have preferred the task should be accomplished by one of his friends; and much of her correspondence was devoted to the purpose. Time pa.s.sed, and plan after plan fell to the ground. This last satisfaction was not to be hers.

She was to see, as she thought, the name of her beloved one gradually fading away, and forgotten as years went on. To the very last drop she was to drain the cup of disappointment and loss. Her journal ceased, and its last sentence was, "Truly did the saint speak who said, 'Let us throw our hearts into eternity.'"

There are a few fragments and letters, which carry us on some years later; and in one of the last of these letters, dated 15th of June, 1845, we find these consoling words: "I have suffered; but G.o.d teaches us thus, and leads us to willingly place our hearts above. You are again in mourning, and I have felt your loss deeply. I mean the death of your poor brother. Alas! what is life but a continual separation?

But you will meet in heaven, and there will be no more mourning nor tears; and there the society of saints will reward us for what we have suffered in the society of men. And, while waiting, there is nothing else to do than to humble one's self, as the Apostle says, 'under the mighty hand of G.o.d, that he may exalt you in the time of visitation; casting all your care upon him, for he hath care of you.'"

These are almost her closing words; and thus we see G.o.d comforted her.

Three years more pa.s.sed, of which we have no record; and we cannot but deeply regret the determination of M. Trebutien not to give any account of her beyond her own words. As long as they lasted, they are indeed sufficient; but we would have fain followed her into the silence of those last years, and have seen the soul gradually pa.s.sing to its rest. We would have liked to know if the friends she loved soothed her dying hours--whether M. Bories, with his "strong {225} and powerful words," was by her side in her last earthly struggle. But a veil falls over it all. We feel a.s.sured, as we close the volume, that whatever human means were wanting, the G.o.d she had faithfully served consoled his child to the last, and sustained her mortal weakness till she reposed in him. After her death, her heart's wish was fulfilled, and abundant honor has been rendered to Maurice de Guerin. Nay, more; for homage is ever given to the majesty of unselfish love; and from henceforth, if Maurice the poet shall be forgotten, Maurice the brother of Eugenie will never be. She has embalmed his memory with her deep and fond devotion; and she has left a living record of how, in the midst of a wearisome, an objectless, a monotonous life, a woman may find work to do, and doing it, like Eugenie, with all her might, leave behind her a track of light by which others may follow after her, encouraged and consoled.

F.

THE BUILDING OF MOURNE.

A LEGEND OF THE BLACKWATER.

BY ROBERT D. JOYCE.

Rome, according to the old aphorism, was not built in a day. Neither was the old town of Mourne, although it was destroyed in a day, and made fit almost for the sowing of salt upon its foundations, by the great Lord of Th.o.m.ond, Murrough of the Ferns, when he gathered around it his rakeh.e.l.ly kerns, as Spenser in his spleen called them, and his fierce gallogla.s.ses and roving hobbelers. But the present story has naught to do with the spoliation and burning of towns. Far different, indeed, was the founding of Mourne, to the story of the disastrous termination of its prosperity. You will look in vain to the histories for a succinct or circ.u.mstantial account of the building of this ancient town; but many a more famous city has its early annals involved in equal obscurity--Rome, for instance. What tangible fact can be laid hold of with regard to its early history, save the will-o'-the-wisp light emanating from the traditions of a more modern day? A cimmerian cloud of darkness overhangs its founding and youthful progress, through which the double-distilled microscopic eyes of the historian are unable to penetrate with any degree of certainty.

Mourne, however, though it cannot boast of a long-written history, possesses an oral one of remarkable perspicuity and certainty. The men are on the spot who, with a mathematical precision worthy of Archimedes or Newton, will relate everything about it, from its foundation to its fall. The only darkness cast upon their most circ.u.mstantial history is the elysian cloud from their luxuriant dudheens, as they whiff away occasionally, and relate--

That there was long ago a certain Dhonal, a n.o.bleman of the warlike race of Mac Caurha, who ruled over Duhallow, and the wild mountainous territories extending downward along the banks of the Blackwater. This n.o.bleman, after a long rule of prosperity and peace, at length grew weary of inaction, and manufactured in his pugnacious brain some cause of mortal affront and complaint against a neighboring potentate, whose territory extended in a westerly direction on the opposite sh.o.r.e of the river. So he mustered his va.s.sals with all imaginable speed, and prepared to set out for the domains of his foe on a foray of unusual ferocity and magnitude. Before departing from his castle, which stood some miles above Mallow, on the banks of the river, he held a long and confidential parley with his wife, in which he told her, if he were defeated or slain, and if the foe should cross the Blackwater to make reprisals, that she should hold out the fortress while one stone would stand upon another, and especially that she should guard their three young sons well, whom, he doubted not, whatever might happen, would one day gain prosperity and renown. After this, he set out on his expedition, at the head of a formidable array of turbulent kerns and marauding hors.e.m.e.n. But his neighbor was not a man to be caught sleeping; for, at the crossing of a ford near Kanturk, he attacked Dhonal, slew him in single combat, and put his followers to the sword, almost to a man. After this he crossed the Blackwater, laid waste the territories of the invader, and at length besieged the castle, where the widowed lady and her three sons had taken refuge. For a long time she held her own bravely against her enemy; but in the end the castle was taken by a.s.sault, and she and her three young sons narrowly escaped with their lives out into the wild recesses of the forest.

After wandering about for some time, the poor lady built a little hut of brambles on the sh.o.r.e of the Clydagh, near the spot where stand the ruins of the preceptory of Mourne, or Ballinamona, as it is sometimes called. Here she dwelt with her children for a long time, in want and misery. Her sons grew up without receiving any of those accomplishments befitting their birth, and gained their subsistence, like the children of the common people around, by tilling a little plot of land before their hut, and by the products of the chase in the surrounding forest. One day, as Diarmid, the eldest, with his bow and arrows ready for the chase, was crossing a narrow valley, he met a kern, one of the followers of the great lord who had slain his father.

Now, neither Diarmid nor his brothers recollected who had killed their father, nor the high estate from which they had fallen, for their mother kept them carefully in ignorance of all, fearing that they might become known, and that their enemies would kill them also. So the kern and himself wended their way for some time together along the side of the valley. At length they started a deer from its bed in the green ferns. Each shot his arrow at the same moment, and each struck the deer, which ran downward for a short s.p.a.ce, and at last fell dead beside the little stream in the bottom of the valley.

"The deer is mine!" said the strange kern, as they stood over its body.

"No!" answered Diarmid, "it is not. See! your arrow is only stickin'

in the skin of his neck, an' mine is afther rattlin' into his heart, through an' through!"

"No matther," exclaimed the kern, with a menacing look. "I don't care how he kem by his death, but the deer I must have, body an' bones, whatever comes of it! Do you think sich a _sprissawn_ as you could keep me from it, an' I wantin' its darlin' carkiss for the table o' my lord, the Mac Donogh?"

Now Diarmid recollected that his mother and brothers were at the same time almost dying in their little hut for want of food. So without further parley he drew his long skian from its sheath.

"Very well," said he, "take it, if you're a man; but before it goes, my carkiss must lie stiff an' b.l.o.o.d.y in its place!"

The kern drew his skian at the word, and there, over the body of the fallen deer, ensued a combat stern and fierce, which at last resulted in Diarmid's plunging his skian through and through the body of his foe into the gritty sand beneath them.

{227}

Diarmid then took the spear and other weapons of the dead kern, put the deer upon his broad shoulders, and marching off in triumph, soon gained his mother's little hut. There, after eating a comfortable meal, and telling his adventure, Diarmid began to lay down his future plans.

"Mother," he said, "the time is come at last when this little cabin is too small for me. I'm a man now, an' able to meet a man, body to body, as I met him to-day; so I'll brighten up my weapons, an' set off on my adventures, that I may gain renown in the wars. Donogh here, too, has the four bones of a man," continued he, turning to his second brother; "so let him prepare, an' we'll thramp off together as soon as we can, an' perhaps afther all we'd have a castle of our own, where you could reign in glory, as big an' grand as Queen Cleena o' the Crag!"

"Well, then," answered his mother, "if you must go, before you leave me, you and your brothers must hunt in the forest for a month, and bring in as much food as will do me and Rory here for a year and a day."

"But," said Rory, the youngest, or Roreen Shouragh, or the Lively, as he was called, in consequence of the 'cute and merry temperament of his mind--"but, Diarmid, you know I am now beyant fifteen years of age, an' so, if you go, I'll folly you to the worldt's end!"

"You presumptious little atomy of a barebones," answered his eldest brother, "if I only see the size of a thrush's ankle of you follyin'

us on the road, I'll turn back an' bate that wiry an' freckled little carkiss o' yours into frog's jelly! So stay at home in pace an'

quietness, an' perhaps when I come back I might give you a good purse o' goold to begin your forthin with."

"That for your mane an' ludiacrous purse o' goold!" exclaimed Roreen Shouragh, at the same time snapping his fingers in the face of his brother. "Arrah! do you hear him, mother? But never mind. Let us be off into the forest to-morrow, an' we'll see who'll bring home the most food before night!"

"Well," said his mother, "whether he stays at home or goes away, I fear he'll come to some bad end with that sharp tongue of his, and his wild capers."

"With all jonteel respect, mother," answered Shouragh again, "I mane to do no such thing. I think myself as good a hairo this minnit--because I have the sowl an' heart o' one as King Dathi, who was killed in some furrin place that I don't recklect the jography of, or as Con o' the Hundhert Battles, or as the best man amongst them, Fion himself--an' I'll do as great actions as any o' them yet!"

This grandiloquent boast of Roreen Shouragh's set his mother and brothers into a fit of laughter, from which they only recovered when it was time to retire to rest. In the morning the three brothers betook themselves to the forest, and at the fall of night returned with a great spoil of game. From morning till night they hunted thus every day for a month, at the end of which time Diarmid said that they had as much food stored in as would last his mother and Rory for a year and a day.

On a hot summer noon the two brothers left the little hut, with their mother's blessing on their heads, and set off on their adventures.

After crossing a few valleys, they came at length to the sh.o.r.e of the Blackwater, and sat down in the shade of a huge oak-tree on the bank to rest themselves. Beneath them, in a clear, shady pool, a huge pike, with his voracious jaws ready for a plunge, was watching a merry little speckled trout, which in its turn was regarding with most affectionate eyes a bright blue fly, that was disporting overhead on the surface of the water. Suddenly the trout darted upward into the air, catching the ill-starred fly, but, in its return to the element beneath, unfortunately plumped itself into the Charybdis-like jaws of the villanous {228} pike, and was from that in one moment quietly deposited in his stomach.

"Look at that!" said Diarmid to his brother. "That's the way with a man that works an' watches everything with a keen eye. He'll have all in the end, just as the pike has both fly and throut--an' just as I have both fly, an' throut, an' pike!" continued he, giving his spear a quick dart into the deep pool, and then landing the luckless pike, transfixed through and through, upon the green bank. "That's the way to manage, and the divvle a betther sign o' good luck we could have in the beginning of our journey, than to get a good male so aisy!"

"Hooray!" exclaimed a voice behind them. "That's the way to manage most galliantly. What a nate dinner the thurminjous monsther will make for the three of us!" and on turning round, the two brothers beheld Roreen Shouragh, accoutred like themselves, and dancing with most exuberant delight at the feat beside them on the gra.s.s.

"An' so you have follied us afther all my warnin', you outragious little vagabone!" exclaimed Diarmid, making a wrathful dart at Roreen, who, however, eluding the grasp, ran and doubled hither and thither with the swiftness of a hare, around the trunks of the huge oak-trees on the sh.o.r.e. In vain Diarmid tried every ruse of the chase to catch him. Roreen Shouragh could not be captured. At length the elder brother, wearied out, returned to Donogh, who, during the chase, was tumbling about on the gra.s.s in convulsions of laughter.

"'Tis no use, Donogh," he said, "we must only let him come with us.

He'll never go back. Come here, you aggravatin' young robber,"