When he reached the gap the horse stopped short. He urged and coaxed it in vain. He got down to lead it through, but it recoiled, snorted, and fell into a wild trembling fit. He mounted it again. But its terror continued, and it obstinately resisted his caresses and his whip. It was bright moonlight, and my granduncle was chafed by the horse’s resistance, and, seeing nothing to account for it, and being so near home, what little patience he possessed forsook him, and, plying his whip and spur in earnest, he broke into oaths and curses.
All on a sudden the horse sprang through, and Con Donovan, as he passed under the broad branch of the oak, saw clearly a woman standing on the bank beside him, her arm extended, with the hand of which, as he flew by, she struck him a blow upon the shoulders. It threw him forward upon the neck of the horse, which, in wild terror, reached the door at a gallop, and stood there quivering and steaming all over.
Less alive than dead, my granduncle got in. He told his story, at least, so much as he chose. His wife did not quite know what to think. But that something very bad had happened she could not doubt. He was very faint and ill, and begged that the priest should be sent for forthwith. When they were getting him to his bed they saw distinctly the marks of five fingerpoints on the flesh of his shoulder, where the spectral blow had fallen. These singular marks—which they said resembled in tint the hue of a body struck by lightning—remained imprinted on his flesh, and were buried with him.
When he had recovered sufficiently to talk with the people about him—speaking, like a man at his last hour, from a burdened heart, and troubled conscience—he repeated his story, but said he did not see, or, at all events, know, the face of the figure that stood in the gap. No one believed him. He told more about it to the priest than to others. He certainly had a secret to tell. He might as well have divulged it frankly, for the neighbours all knew well enough that it was the face of dead Ellen Coleman that he had seen.
From that moment my granduncle never raised his head. He was a scared, silent, broken-spirited man. It was early summer then, and at the fall of the leaf in the same year he died.
Of course there was a wake, such as beseemed a strong farmer so rich as he. For some reason the arrangements of this ceremonial were a little different from the usual routine.
The usual practice is to place the body in the great room, or kitchen, as it is called, of the house. In this particular case there was, as I told you, for some reason, an unusual arrangement. The body was placed in a small room that opened upon the greater one. The door of this, during the wake, stood open. There were candles about the bed, and pipes and tobacco on the table, and stools for such guests as chose to enter, the door standing open for their reception.
The body, having been laid out, was left alone, in this smaller room, during the preparations for the wake. After nightfall one of the women, approaching the bed to get a chair which she had left near it, rushed from the room with a scream, and, having recovered her speech at the further end of the “kitchen,” and surrounded by a gaping audience, she said, at last:
“May I never sin, if his face bain’t riz up again the back o’ the bed, and he starin’ down to the doore, wid eyes as big as pewter plates, that id be shinin’ in the moon!”
“Arra, woman! Is it cracked you are?” said one of the farm boys as they are termed, being men of any age you please.
“Agh, Molly, don’t be talkin’, woman! ’Tis what ye consayted it, goin’ into the dark room, out o’ the light. Why didn’t ye take a candle in your fingers, ye aumadhaun?” said one of her female companions.
“Candle, or no candle; I seen it,” insisted Molly. “An’ what’s more, I could a’most tak’ my oath I seen his arum, too, stretchin’ out o’ the bed along the flure, three times as long as it should be, to take hould o’ me be the fut.”
“Nansinse, ye fool, what id he want o’ yer fut?” exclaimed one scornfully.
“Gi’ me the candle, some o’ yez—in the name o’ God,” said old Sal Doolan, that was straight and lean, and a woman that could pray like a priest almost.
“Give her a candle,” agreed all.
But whatever they might say, there wasn’t one among them that did not look pale and stern enough as they followed Mrs. Doolan, who was praying as fast as her lips could patter, and leading the van with a tallow candle, held like a taper, in her fingers.
The door was half open, as the panic-stricken girl had left it; and holding the candle on high the better to examine the room, she made a step or so into it.
If my granduncle’s hand had been stretched along the floor, in the unnatural way described, he had drawn it back again under the sheet that covered him. And tall Mrs. Doolan was in no danger of tripping over his arm as she entered. But she had not gone more than a step or two with her candle aloft, when, with a drowning face, she suddenly stopped short, staring at the bed which was now fully in view.
“Lord, bless us, Mrs. Doolan, ma’am, come back,” said the woman next her, who had fast hold of her dress, or her “coat,” as they call it, and drawing her backwards with a frightened pluck, while a general recoil among her followers betokened the alarm which her hesitation had inspired.
“Whisht, will yez?” said the leader, peremptorily,
