Short Fiction

was, as I have said, an old man; he was small, lean, and upright, with a mahogany complexion, and a wooden inflexibility of face; he was a man, besides, of few words, and if he was old, it follows plainly that his mother was older still. Nobody could guess or tell how old, but it was admitted that her own generation had long passed away, and that she had not a competitor left. She had French blood in her veins, and although she did not retain her charms quite so well as Ninon de l’Enclos, she was in full possession of all her mental activity, and talked quite enough for herself and the Major.

“So, Peter,” she said, “you have seen the dear, old Royal Irish again in the streets of Chapelizod. Make him a tumbler of punch, Frank; and Peter, sit down, and while you take it let us have the story.”

Peter accordingly, seated, near the door, with a tumbler of the nectarian stimulant steaming beside him, proceeded with marvellous courage, considering they had no light but the uncertain glare of the fire, to relate with minute particularity his awful adventure. The old lady listened at first with a smile of good-natured incredulity; her cross-examination touching the drinking-bout at Palmerstown had been teazing, but as the narrative proceeded she became attentive, and at length absorbed, and once or twice she uttered ejaculations of pity or awe. When it was over, the old lady looked with a somewhat sad and stern abstraction on the table, patting her cat assiduously meanwhile, and then suddenly looking upon her son, the Major, she said⁠—

“Frank, as sure as I live he has seen the wicked Captain Devereux.”

The Major uttered an inarticulate expression of wonder.

“The house was precisely that he has described. I have told you the story often, as I heard it from your dear grandmother, about the poor young lady he ruined, and the dreadful suspicion about the little baby. She, poor thing, died in that house heartbroken, and you know he was shot shortly after in a duel.”

This was the only light that Peter ever received respecting his adventure. It was supposed, however, that he still clung to the hope that treasure of some sort was hidden about the old house, for he was often seen lurking about its walls, and at last his fate overtook him, poor fellow, in the pursuit; for climbing near the summit one day, his holding gave way, and he fell upon the hard uneven ground, fracturing a leg and a rib, and after a short interval died, and he, like the other heroes of these true tales, lies buried in the little churchyard of Chapelizod.

Some Gossip About Chapelizod

Ghosts in Chapelizod, my good sir! “Why who knows not so?” A place that is itself a shadow of things past, the living spectre of old times. Chapelizod is all a ghost. If anyone desires to see a suburban village of the once proud city of Dublin reduced to a marrowless skeleton, without a single speculation in its eye by which it can ever hope to rise again, let him go to Chapelizod. Dead walls; dead trees overhanging them; dead lights instead of windows in the houses; the men grave, the women lifeless, the little spirits squeaking and gibbering in the muddy streets! A veritable caput mortuum is Chapelizod. No wonder that Bob Martin should fancy he saw a ghost, for he was always looking at one.

It is just fifty years since Chapelizod was marked for the silent tomb, and condemned to perish by a lingering death. The cold hand of Centralisation, long before the insatiable monster was known by that name, clutched its first victim in Chapelizod. I barely remember the event. A heavy storm came down from the west; great rains had previously descended, and the angry spirit of the river screeched. I heard it myself running under the skew arch of the old bridge. There was lightning in the sky, and the clouds flew across the face of the moon like mad things. As yet the air was calm on the surface of the earth, but towards midnight the gale arose and tore up a number of trees in the Park. Before twenty-four hours we all perceived how easy it would have been to foresee what was coming, for in the course of the forenoon the order arrived for disbanding the Royal Irish Artillery. It was now no longer a mystery why it had blown great guns all the night.

That was the first special act of centralisation⁠—always excepting the fatal centripetal movement from the house in College-green⁠—which was perpetrated against Ireland. The glory of our national service was then extinguished, and Woolwich was made the arsenal sole of the United Kingdom. The royal regiment was broken up, its guns transferred to Sarah Bridge, its veterans drafted⁠—as many of them as thought proper to merge their name in an undistinguished throng⁠—into the general service, and not a few who had grown old in the troop found an asylum in the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham.

The transition of an old soldier from Chapelizod to Kilmainham was easy, the principal change consisting in putting off a blue coat to put on a red. They were not required to seek unaccustomed seats, or new associations among strangers, in whom the very accents of their tongue would awaken a prejudice against them, and make them objects of vulgar derision; but they dropped gently down the vale of years, amongst their own countrymen, near scenes hallowed to memory, still looking upon those hills which had exhilarated their hearts in the pride and prime of life, and inhaling breezes, wafted down the stream, which had braced and invigorated their lusty sinews, when they were “strong swimmers.” They had friends and kindred at the old quarter, whom they continued to visit on festive occasions, “at the season of the year;” and it was pleasant to see the hearty old