As I walked through these melancholy passages—peeping only into some of the rooms, for the flooring was quite gone in the middle, and bowed down toward the centre, and the house was very nearly un-roofed, a state of things which made the exploration a little critical—I began to wonder why so grand a house, in the midst of scenery so picturesque, had been permitted to go to decay; I dreamed of the hospitalities of which it had long ago been the rallying place, and I thought what a scene of Redgauntlet revelries it might disclose at midnight.
The great staircase was of oak, which had stood the weather wonderfully, and I sat down upon its steps, musing vaguely on the transitoriness of all things under the sun.
Except for the hoarse and distant clamour of the rooks, hardly audible where I sat, no sound broke the profound stillness of the spot. Such a sense of solitude I have seldom experienced before. The air was stirless, there was not even the rustle of a withered leaf along the passage. It was oppressive. The tall trees that stood close about the building darkened it, and added something of awe to the melancholy of the scene.
In this mood I heard, with an unpleasant surprise, close to me, a voice that was drawling, and, I fancied, sneering, repeat the words: “Food for worms, dead and rotten; God over all.”
There was a small window in the wall, here very thick, which had been built up, and in the dark recess of this, deep in the shadow, I now saw a sharp-featured man, sitting with his feet dangling. His keen eyes were fixed on me, and he was smiling cynically, and before I had well recovered my surprise, he repeated the distich:
“If death was a thing that money could buy,
The rich they would live, and the poor they would die.
“It was a grand house in its day, sir,” he continued, “Dunoran House, and the Sarsfields. Sir Dominick Sarsfield was the last of the old stock. He lost his life not six foot away from where you are sitting.”
As he thus spoke he let himself down, with a little jump, on to the ground.
He was a dark-faced, sharp-featured, little hunchback, and had a walking-stick in his hand, with the end of which he pointed to a rusty stain in the plaster of the wall.
“Do you mind that mark, sir?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, standing up, and looking at it, with a curious anticipation of something worth hearing.
“That’s about seven or eight feet from the ground, sir, and you’ll not guess what it is.”
“I dare say not,” said I, “unless it is a stain from the weather.”
“ ’Tis nothing so lucky, sir,” he answered, with the same cynical smile and a wag of his head, still pointing at the mark with his stick. “That’s a splash of brains and blood. It’s there this hundhred years; and it will never leave it while the wall stands.”
“He was murdered, then?”
“Worse than that, sir,” he answered.
“He killed himself, perhaps?”
“Worse than that, itself, this cross between us and harm! I’m oulder than I look, sir; you wouldn’t guess my years.”
He became silent, and looked at me, evidently inviting a guess.
“Well, I should guess you to be about five-and-fifty.”
He laughed, and took a pinch of snuff, and said:
“I’m that, your honour, and something to the back of it. I was seventy last Candlemas. You would not a’ thought that, to look at me.”
“Upon my word I should not; I can hardly believe it even now. Still, you don’t remember Sir Dominick Sarsfield’s death?” I said, glancing up at the ominous stain on the wall.
“No, sir, that was a long while before I was born. But my grandfather was butler here long ago, and many a time I heard tell how Sir Dominick came by his death. There was no masther in the great house ever sinst that happened. But there was two sarvants in care of it, and my aunt was one o’ them; and she kep’ me here wid her till I was nine year old, and she was lavin’ the place to go to Dublin; and from that time it was let to go down. The wind sthript the roof, and the rain rotted the timber, and little by little, in sixty years’ time, it kem to what you see. But I have a likin’ for it still, for the sake of ould times; and I never come this way but I take a look in. I don’t think it’s many more times I’ll be turnin’ to see the ould place, for I’ll be undher the sod myself before long.”
“You’ll outlive younger people,” I said.
And, quitting that trite subject, I ran on:
“I don’t wonder that you like this old place; it is a beautiful spot, such noble trees.”
“I wish ye seen the glin when the nuts is ripe; they’re the sweetest nuts in all Ireland, I think,” he rejoined, with a practical sense of the picturesque. “You’d fill your pockets while you’d be lookin’ about you.”
“These are very fine old woods,” I remarked. “I have not seen any in Ireland I thought so beautiful.”
“Eiah! your honour, the woods about here is nothing to what they wor. Al the mountains along here was wood when my father was a gossoon, and Murroa Wood was the grandest of them all. All oak mostly, and all cut down as bare as
