Clapping my father on the shoulder, by way of encouragement, my mother leaned over him, kissing him, and at last began to cry. He was wringing her hands in his, and seemed in great trouble.
“There was nothin’ came into the house with me?” he asked, in a very low tone, turning to me.
“There was nothin’, father,” I said, “but the saddle and bridle that was in your hand.”
“Nothin’ white kem in at the doore wid me,” he repeated.
“Nothin’ at all,” I answered.
“So best,” said my father, and making the sign of the cross, he began mumbling to himself, and I knew he was saying his prayers.
Waiting for a while, to give him time for this exercise, my mother asked him where he first saw it.
“When I was riding up the bohereen,”—the Irish term meaning a little road, such as leads up to a farmhouse—“I bethought myself that the men was on the road with the cattle, and no one to look to the horse barrin’ myself, so I thought I might as well leave him in the crooked field below, an’ I tuck him there, he bein’ cool, and not a hair turned, for I rode him aisy all the way. It was when I turned, after lettin’ him go—the saddle and bridle bein’ in my hand—that I saw it, pushin’ out o’ the long grass at the side o’ the path, an’ it walked across it, in front of me, an’ then back again, before me, the same way, an’ sometimes at one side, an’ then at the other, lookin’ at me wid them shinin’ eyes; and I consayted I heard it growlin’ as it kep’ beside me—as close as ever you see—till I kem up to the doore, here, an’ knocked an’ called, as ye heerd me.”
Now, what was it, in so simple an incident, that agitated my father, my mother, myself, and finally, every member of this rustic household, with a terrible foreboding? It was this that we, one and all, believed that my father had received, in thus encountering the white cat, a warning of his approaching death.
The omen had never failed hitherto. It did not fail now. In a week after my father took the fever that was going, and before a month he was dead.
My honest friend, Dan Donovan, paused here; I could perceive that he was praying, for his lips were busy, and I concluded that it was for the repose of that departed soul.
In a little while he resumed.
It is eighty years now since that omen first attached to my family. Eighty years? Ay, is it. Ninety is nearer the mark. And I have spoken to many old people, in those earlier times, who had a distinct recollection of everything connected with it.
It happened in this way.
My granduncle, Connor Donovan, had the old farm of Drumgunniol in his day. He was richer than ever my father was, or my father’s father either, for he took a short lease of Balraghan, and made money of it. But money won’t soften a hard heart, and I’m afraid my granduncle was a cruel man—a profligate man he was, surely, and that is mostly a cruel man at heart. He drank his share, too, and cursed and swore, when he was vexed, more than was good for his soul, I’m afraid.
At that time there was a beautiful girl of the Colemans, up in the mountains, not far from Capper Cullen. I’m told that there are no Colemans there now at all, and that family has passed away. The famine years made great changes.
Ellen Coleman was her name. The Colemans were not rich. But, being such a beauty, she might have made a good match. Worse than she did for herself, poor thing, she could not.
Con Donovan—my granduncle, God forgive him!—sometimes in his rambles saw her at fairs or patterns, and he fell in love with her, as who might not?
He used her ill. He promised her marriage, and persuaded her to come away with him; and, after all, he broke his word. It was just the old story. He tired of her, and he wanted to push himself in the world; and he married a girl of the Collopys, that had a great fortune—twenty-four cows, seventy sheep, and a hundred and twenty goats.
He married this Mary Collopy, and grew richer than before; and Ellen Coleman died brokenhearted. But that did not trouble the strong farmer much.
He would have liked to have children, but he had none, and this was the only cross he had to bear, for everything else went much as he wished.
One night he was returning from the fair of Nenagh. A shallow stream at that time crossed the road—they have thrown a bridge over it, I am told, some time since—and its channel was often dry in summer weather. When it was so, as it passes close by the old farmhouse of Drumgunniol, without a great deal of winding, it makes a sort of road, which people then used as a shortcut to reach the house by. Into this dry channel, as there was plenty of light from the moon, my granduncle turned his horse, and when he had reached the two ash-trees at the meering of the farm he turned his horse short into the river-field, intending to ride through the gap at the other end, under the oak-tree, and so he would have been within a few hundred yards of his door.
As he approached the “gap” he saw, or thought he saw, with a slow motion, gliding along the ground toward the same point, and now and then with a soft bound, a white object, which he described as being no bigger than his hat, but what it was he could not see, as it moved along the hedge and disappeared at the point
