The Banshee Part 8

It was the day prior to the fall of Badajoz, and O'Farrell, who was in Badajoz at the time, a prisoner of the French, was invited to partake of supper with some Spanish-Irish friends of his of the name of McMahon. The French, it may be observed, were, as a rule, rather more lenient to their Irish prisoners than to their English, and O'Farrell was allowed to ramble about Badajoz in perfect freedom, a mere pledge being extracted from him that he wouldn't stroll outside the boundaries of the town without special permission. On the night in question O'Farrell left his quarters in high spirits. He liked the McMahons, especially the youngest daughter Katherine, with whom he was very much in love. He deemed his case hopeless, however, as Mr McMahon, who was poor, had often said none of his daughters should marry, unless it were someone who was wealthy enough to ensure them being well provided for, should they be left a widow; and as O'Farrell had nothing but his pay, which was meagre enough in all conscience, he saw no prospect of his ever being able to propose to the object of his affections. Had he been strong-minded enough, he told himself, he would have at once said good-bye to Katherine, and never have allowed himself to see or even think of her again; but, poor weakling that he was, he could not bear the idea of taking a final peep into her eyes--the eyes that he had idealised into his heaven and everything that made life worth living for--and so he kept accepting invitations to their house and throwing himself across her path, whenever the slightest opportunity presented itself.

And now he found himself once more speeding to meet her, telling himself repeatedly that it should be the last time, but at the same time making up his mind that it should be nothing of the sort. He arrived at the house far too early, of course--he always did--and was shown into a room to wait there till the family had finished their evening toilets. Large gla.s.s doors opened out of the room on to a veranda, and O'Farrell, stepping out on to the latter, leaned over the iron railings, and gazed into the semi-courtyard, semi-garden below, in the centre of which was a fountain surmounted by the marble statue of a very beautiful maiden, that his instinct told him was an exact image of his beloved Katherine. He was gazing at it, revelling in the delightful antic.i.p.ation of meeting the flesh and blood counterpart of it in a very short time, when sounds of music, of someone playing a very, very sad and plaintive air on the harp, came to him through the open doorway. Much surprised, for none of the family as far as he knew were harpists, nor had he, indeed, ever seen a harp in the house, he turned round; but, to add to his astonishment, no one was there. The room was apparently just as empty as when he had been ushered into it, and yet the music unquestionably emanated from it.

Considerably mystified, for every now and then there was a peculiar far-offness in the sounds which he could liken to nothing he had ever heard before, he remained on the veranda, prevented by a strange feeling of awe, and something very akin to dread, from venturing into the room.

He was thus occupied, half standing and half leaning against the framework of the gla.s.s door, when the harping abruptly ceased, and he heard moanings and sobbings as of a woman suffering from paroxysms of the most intense and violent grief. Combatting with a great fear that now began to seize him, he summed up the resolution to peep once more into the room, but though his eyes took in the whole range of the room, he could perceive no spot where anyone could possibly be in hiding, and nothing that would in any way account for the sounds. There was nothing in front of him but walls, furniture, and--s.p.a.ce. Not a living creature. What then caused those sounds? He was asking himself this question, when the door opened, and Mr McMahon, followed by Katherine and all of the other girls, came into the apartment; and, with their entry, the strange sounds at once ceased.

"Why, what's the matter, Mr O'Farrell," the girls said, laughingly. "You are as white as a sheet and trembling all over. You haven't seen a ghost, have you?"

"I haven't seen anything," O'Farrell retorted, a trifle nettled at their gaiety, "but I've heard some rather extraordinary sounds."

"Extraordinary sounds," Katherine laughed. "What on earth do you mean?"

"Just what I say," O'Farrell remarked. "When I was on the veranda just now I distinctly heard the sound of a harp in this room, and shortly afterwards I heard a woman weeping."

"It must have been someone outside in the street," Mr McMahon observed hastily, at the same time giving O'Farrell a warning glance from his dark and penetrating eyes. "We do occasionally receive visits from street musicians. I have something to say to you about the English and their rumoured new attack on the town," and drawing O'Farrell aside he whispered to him: "On no account refer to that music again. It was undoubtedly the Banshee, the ghost that my forefathers brought over from Ireland, and it is only heard before some very dreadful catastrophe to the family."

The following day Badajoz was stormed and entered by the English, and in the wild scenes that ensued, scenes in which the drunken English soldiery got completely out of hands, many Spanish--Spanish men and women--perished, as well as French, and among the casualties were the entire McMahon family.

CHAPTER IX

THE BANSHEE AT SEA

Talking of phantom music, there is a widespread belief among Celtic races that whenever it is heard proceeding from the sea, either a death or some other great calamity is prognosticated. Such a belief is very prevalent along the coasts of Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall, and Mr Dyer, in his "Ghost World," p. 413, refers to it in Ireland. "Sometimes," he says, "music is heard at sea, and it is believed in Ireland that, when a friend or relative dies, a warning voice is discernible." To what extent this music is connected with Banshee hauntings it is, of course, impossible to say; but I have known cases in which it has owed its origin to the Banshee and to the Banshee only.

During the Civil War in America, for example, a transport of Confederate soldiers was making for Charlestown one evening, when a young Irish officer, who was leaning over the bulwarks and gazing pensively into the sea, was astonished to hear the very sweetest sounds of music coming from, so it seemed to him, the very depths of the blue waters. Thinking he must be dreaming, he called a brother officer to his side and asked him if he could hear anything.

"Yes," the latter responded, "music, and what is more, singing. It is a woman, and she is singing some very tender and plaintive air. How the deuce do you account for it?"

"I don't know," the young Irishman replied, "unless it is the Banshee, and it sounds very like the description of it that my mother used to give me.

I only hope it does not predict the death of any one of my very near relatives."

It did not do that, but oddly enough, and unknown to him at the time, a namesake of his, whom he subsequently discovered was a second cousin, stood not ten yards from him at the very moment he was listening to the music, and was killed in action in a sortie from Charlestown on the following day.

A story of a similar nature was told me in Oregon by an old Irish Federal soldier, who was in the temporary employ of an apple merchant at Medford, Jackson County. I don't in any way vouch for its truth, but give it just as it was related to me.

"You ask me if I have ever come across any ghosts in America. Well, I guess I have, several, and amongst others the Banshee. Oh, yes, I am Irish, although I speak with the nasal tw.a.n.g of the regular Yank. Everyone does who has lived in the Eastern States for any length of time. It's the climate. My name, however, is O'Hagan, and I was born in County Clare; and though my father was only a peasant, I'm a darned sight more Irish than half the people who possess t.i.tles and big estates in the old country to-day.

"I emigrated from Ireland with my parents, when I was only a few weeks old, and we settled in New York, where I was working as a porter on the quays when the Civil War broke out. Like me, the majority of Irishmen who, as you know, are always ready to go wherever there's the chance of doing a bit of fighting, I at once enlisted in the Marines, for I was pa.s.sionately fond of the sea, and in due course of time was transferred to a gunboat that patrolled the Carolina Coast on the lookout for Confederate blockade runners. Well, one night, shortly after I had turned in and was lying in my hammock, trying to get to sleep, which was none too easy, for one of my mates, an ex-actor, was snoring loud enough to wake the whole s.h.i.+p, I suddenly heard a tapping on the porthole close beside me. 'h.e.l.lo,' says I to myself, 'that's an odd noise. It can't be the water, nor yet the wind; maybe it's a bird, a gull or albatross,' and I listened very attentively.

The sound went on, but it had none of that hardness and sharpness about it that is occasioned by a beak, it was softer and more lingering, more like the tapping of fingers. Every now and then it left off, to go on again, tap, tap, tap, until, at last, it unnerved me to such an extent that I jumped out of my hammock and had a peep to see what it was. To my astonishment I saw a very white face pressed against the porthole, looking in at me. It was the face of a woman with raven black hair that fell in long ringlets about her neck and shoulders. She had big golden rings in her ears, that shone like anything as the moonbeams caught them, as did her teeth, too, which were the loveliest bits of ivory I have ever seen, absolutely even and without the slightest mar.

"But it was her eyes that fascinated me most. They were large, not too large, however, but in strict proportion to the rest of her face, and as far as I could judge in the moonlight, either blue or grey, but indescribably beautiful, and, at the same time, indescribably sad. As I drew nearer, she shrank back, and pointed with a white and slender hand at a spot on the sea, and then suddenly I heard music, the far-away sound of a harp, proceeding, so it seemed to me, from about the place she had indicated. It was a very still night, and the sounds came to me very distinctly, above the soft lap, lap of the water against the vessel's side, and the mechanical squish, squish made by the bows each time they rose and fell, as the s.h.i.+p gently ploughed her way onwards. I was so intent on listening that I quite forgot the figure of the woman with the beautiful face, and when I turned to look at her again, she had gone, and there was nothing in front of me but an endless expanse of heaving, tossing, moonlit water. Then the music ceased, too, and all was still again, wondrously still, and feeling unaccountably sad and lonely--for I had taken a great fancy to that woman's face, the only what you might term really lovely woman's face that had ever looked kindly on me--I got back again into my hammock, and was soon fast asleep. On my touching at port, the first letter I received from home informed me of the death of my father, who had died the same night and just about the same time I had seen that fairy vision and heard that fairy music.

"When I told my mother about it, some long time afterwards, she said it was the Banshee, and that it had haunted the O'Hagan family for hundreds and hundreds of years."

This, as I have already said, is merely a trooper's story, unconfirmed by anyone else's evidence, and, of course, not up to the standard of S.P.R.

authority. Yet, I believe, it was related to me in perfect sincerity, and the narrator had nothing whatever to gain through making it up. I did not even offer him a chew of tobacco, for at that moment I was pretty nearly, if not, indeed, quite as hard up as he was himself.

And now, before I finish altogether with Banshee hauntings that are a.s.sociated with war, I feel I must refer to a statement in Mr McAnnaly's book, "Irish Wonders," to the effect that when the Duke of Wellington died, the Banshee was heard wailing round the house of his ancestors. This statement does not, in my opinion, bear inspection. I am quite ready to grant that some kind of apparition--perhaps a family ghost he had inherited from one or other of his Anglo-Irish ancestry--was heard lamenting outside the domain in question; but as the family to whom the Duke belonged could not be said to be of even anything approaching ancient Irish extraction, I cannot conceive it possible that the disturbances experienced were in any way due to the genuine Banshee.

To revert to the sea, and Banshee haunting. On the coast of Donegal there is an estuary called "The Rosses," and this at one time was said to be haunted by several kinds of phantoms, including the Banshee, which was reported to have manifested itself on quite a number of occasions.

Under the heading of "An Irish Water-fiend," Bourke, in his "Anecdotes of the Aristocracy" (i. 329), relates the following case of a ghostly happening there, which, although not due to a Banshee, is so characteristic of Irish supernatural phenomena that I cannot refrain from quoting it.

In the autumn of 1777 the Rev. James Crawford, rector of the parish of Killina, County Leitrim, was riding on horseback with his sister-in-law, Miss Hannah Wilson, on a pillion behind him, along the road leading to the "The Rosses," and, on reaching the estuary, he at once proceeded to cross it. After they had gone some distance, Miss Wilson, noticing that the water touched the saddle laps, became so alarmed that she cried out and besought Mr Crawford to turn the horse round and get back to land as quickly as possible.

"I do not think there can be danger," Mr Crawford answered, "for I see a horseman crossing the ford not twenty yards before us."

To this Miss Wilson, who also saw the horseman, replied:

"You had better hail him and inquire the depth of the intervening water."

Mr Crawford at once did so, whereupon the horseman stopped and, turning round, revealed a face distorted by the most hideous grin conceivable, and so frightfully white and evil that the luckless clergyman promptly beat a retreat, and made no attempt to check the mad haste of his panicked steed till he had left the estuary many miles behind him.

On arriving home he narrated the incident to his wife and family, and subsequently learned that the estuary was well known to be haunted by several phantoms, whose mission was invariably the same, either to foretell the doom by drowning of the person to whom they appeared, or else to actually bring about the death of that person by luring them on and on, until they got out of their depth, and so perished.

One would have thought that Mr Crawford, after the experience just narrated, would have given the estuary a very wide berth in future; but no such thing. He again attempted to cross the ford of "The Rosses" on 27th September, 1777, and was drowned in the endeavour.

Among many thrilling and (so it struck me at the time) authentic stories told me in my youth by a Mrs Broderick, a well-known vendor of oranges and chocolate in Bristol, were several stirring accounts of the Banshee. I was at the time a day boy at Clifton College, residing not very far from the school, and Mrs Broderick, who used to visit our house every week with her wares, took a particular interest in me because I was Irish--one of "the real old O'Donnells." She was a native of Cork, and had, I believe, migrated from that city in the _Juno_, an old cattle boat, that for more than twenty years plied regularly every week between Cork and Bristol carrying a handful of pa.s.sengers, who, for the cheapness of the fare, made the best of the rolling and tossing and extremely limited s.p.a.ce allotted for their accommodation. In later years I often travelled to and from Dublin and Bristol in the _Argo_, the _Juno's_ sister s.h.i.+p, so I speak feelingly and from experience. But to proceed with Mrs Broderick's Banshee stories.

The one containing an account of a Banshee haunting on the sea I will narrate in this chapter, and the other, which has no connection with either sea or river, I will deal with later on.

Before I commence either story, however, I would like to say that though Mrs Broderick spoke with a rich brogue and was really Irish, she used few, if any, of those words and expressions that certain professors of the Dublin Academic School apparently consider inseparable from the speech of the Irish peasant cla.s.s. I cannot, for example, remember her ever saying Musha, or Arrah, or Oro; and, as for Erse, I am quite certain she did not know a word of it. Yet, as I have said, she was Irish, and far more Irish than many of the Gaelic scholars of to-day who, insufferably proud of their knowledge of the Celtic tongue, bore one stiff by their feeble and futile attempts to acquire something of the real Irish wit and proverbial humour.

Mrs Broderick did not often speak of her parents; they were, I fancy, peasants, or, perhaps, what we should term "small farmers," and from what I could gather they lived, at one time, in a little village just outside Cork; but Mrs Broderick was, she told me, very fond of the sea, and often, when a girl, walked into Cork and went out boating with her young friends in Queenstown harbour.

On one occasion, she and another girl and two young men went for a sail with an old fisherman they knew, who took them some distance up the coast in the direction of Kinsale. There had been a slight breeze when they started, but it dropped suddenly as they were tacking to come back home, and since the sails had to be taken down and oars used, both the young men volunteered to row. Their offer being accepted by the old fisherman, they pulled away steadily till they espied an old s.h.i.+p, so battered and worn away as to be little more than a mere sh.e.l.l, lying half in and half out of the water in a tiny cove. Then, as the weather was beautifully fine and no one was in a hurry to get home, it was proposed that they pull up to the wreck and examine it. The old fisherman demurred, but he was soon won over, and the two young men and Mrs Broderick's girl friend boarded the old hulk, leaving Mrs Broderick and the old fisherman in the boat. The shadows from the trees and rocks had already manifested themselves on the glistening s.h.i.+ngles of the beach, and a glow, emanating from the rapidly rising moon and myriads of scintillating stars that every moment shone forth with increased brilliancy, showed up every object around them with startling distinctness.

Always in her element in scenes of this description, Mrs Broderick was enjoying herself to the utmost. Leaning on the side of the boat and trailing one hand in the water, she drank in the fresh night air, redolent with the scent of flowers and ozone. She could hear her friends talking and laughing as they tried to steady themselves on the sloping boards of the old hulk; and presently, one of them, O'Connell, proposed that they should descend below deck and explore the cabins. Then their voices gradually grew fainter and fainter, until eventually all was still, save for the lapping of the sea against the sides of the boat, and the gentle ripple of the wavelets as they broke on the beach, and the occasional far-away barkings of a dog--noises that somehow seem to belong to summer more than to any other period of the year.

Mrs Broderick's memory, awakened by these sounds, travelled back to past seasons, and she was depicting some of the old scenes over again, when all at once, from the wreck, from that side of it, so it seemed to her, that was partly under water, there rang out a series of the most appalling screams, just like the screams of a woman who had been suddenly pounced upon and either stabbed, or treated in some equally savage and violent manner.

Mrs Broderick, of course, at once thought of her friend, Mary Rooney, and, clutching the boatman by the arm, she exclaimed:

"The Saints above, it's Mary. They're murdering her."

"'Tis no woman, that," the old boatman said hoa.r.s.ely. "'Tis the Banshee, and I would not have had this have happened for the whole blessed world. I with my mother so ill in bed with the rheumatism and a cold she got all through her with sitting out on the wet gra.s.s the night before last."

"Are you sure?" Mrs Broderick whispered, clutching him tighter, whilst her teeth chattered. "Are you sure it isn't Mary, and they are not killing her?"

"Sure," replied the boatman, "that's the way the Banshee always screams--'tis her, right enough, 'tis no human woman," and like the good Catholic that he was, he crossed himself, and, dipping the oars gently into the water, he began to pull slowly and quietly away.

By and by the screaming ceased, and a moment later the three explorers came trooping on to the deck, showing no signs whatever of alarm, and when questioned as to whether they had heard anything, laughingly replied in the negative.

"Only," O'Connell added facetiously, "the kiss Mike Power stole from Mary.

That was all."