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The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine by William Carleton

W >> William Carleton >> The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine




At the hour appointed, Mrs. M'Ivor and Mave set out on their visit to
Sarah, each now aware of the dreadful and inevitable doom that awaited
her father, and of the part which one of them, at least, had taken in
bringing it about.

About half an hour before their arrival, Sarah, whose anxiety touching
the fate of old Dalton could endure no more, lay awaiting the return of
her nurse--a simple, good-hearted, matter-of-fact creature, who had no
notion of ever concealing the truth under any circumstances. The poor
girl had sent her to get an account of the trial the best way she could,
and, as we said, she now lay awaiting her return. At length she came in.

"Well, Biddy, what's the news--or have you got any?"

The old woman gently and affectionately put her hand over on Sarah's
forehead, as if the act was a religious ceremony, and accompanied an
invocation, as, indeed, she intended it to do.

"May God in His mercy soon relieve you from your thrials, my poor girl,
an' bring you to Himself! but it's the black news I have for you this
day."

Sarah started.

"What news," she asked, hastily--"what black news?"

"Husth, now, an' I'll tell you;--in the first place, your mother is
alive, an' has come to the counthry."

Sarah immediately sat up in the bed, without assistance, and fastening
her black, brilliant eyes upon the woman, exclaimed--"My mother--my
mother--my own mother!--an' do you dare to tell me that this is black
news? Lave the house, I bid you. I'll get up--I'm not sick--I'm well.
Great God! yes, I'm well--very well; but how dare you name black news
an' my mother--my blessed mother--in the same breath, or on the same
day?"

"Will you hear me out, then?" continued the nurse.

"No," replied Sarah, attempting to get up--"I want to hear no more; now
I wish to live--now I am sure of one, an' that one my mother--my own
mother--to love me--to guide me--to taich me all that I ought to know;
but, above all, to love me. An' my father--my poor unhappy father--an'
he is unhappy--he loves me, too. Oh, Biddy, I can forgive you now for
what you said--I will be happy still--an' my mother will be happy--an'
my father,--my poor father--will be happy yet; he'll reform--repent
maybe; an' he'll wanst more get back his early heart--his heart when it
was good, an' not hardened, as he says it was, by the world. Biddy, did
you ever see any one cry with joy before--ha--ha--did you now?"

"God strengthen you, my poor child," exclaimed the nurse, bursting into
tears; "for what will become of you? Your father, Sarah dear, is to be
hanged for murdher, an' it was your mother's evidence that hanged him.
She swore against him on the thrial an' his sentence is passed. Bartle
Sullivan wasn't murdhered at all, but another man was, an' it was your
father that done it. On next Friday he's to be hanged, an' your mother,
they say, swore his life away! If that's not black news, I don't know
what is."

Sarah's face had been flushed to such a degree by the first portion of
the woman's intelligence, that its expression was brilliant and animated
beyond belief. On hearing its conclusion, however, the change from joy
to horror was instantaneous, shocking, and pitiable, beyond all power
of language to express. She was struck perfectly motionless and ghastly;
and as she kept her large lucid eyes fixed upon the woman's face, the
powers of life, that had been hitherto in such a tumult of delight
within her, seemed slowly, and with a deadly and scarcely perceptible
motion, to ebb out of her system. The revulsion was too dreadful;
and with the appearance of one who was anxious to shrink or hide from
something that was painful, she laid her head down on the humble pillow
of her bed.

"Now, asthore," said the woman, struck by the woeful change--"don't take
it too much to. heart; you're young, an' please God, you'll get over it
all yet."

"No," she replied, in a voice so utterly changed and deprived of its
strength, that the woman could with difficulty hear or understand her.
"There's but one good bein' in the world," she said to herself, "an'
that is Mave Sullivan: I have no mother, no father--all I can love now
is Mave Sullivan--that's all."

"Every one that knows her does," said the nurse.

"Who?" said Sarah, inquiringly.

"Why, Mave Sullivan," replied the other; "worn't you spakin' about her?"

"Was I?" said she, "maybe so--what was I sayin'?"

She then put her hand to her forehead, as if she felt pain and
confusion; after which she waved the nurse towards her, but on the woman
stooping down, she seemed to forget that she had beckoned to her at all.

At this moment Mave and her mother entered, and after looking towards
the bed on which she lay, they inquired in a whisper, from her attendant
how she was.

The woman pointed hopelessly to her own head, and then looked
significantly at Sarah, as if to intimate that her brain was then
unsettled.

"There's something wrong here," she added, in an under tone, and
touching her head, "especially since I tould her what had happened."

"Is she acquainted with everything?" asked her mother.

"She is," replied the other; "she knows that her father is to die on
Friday an' that you swore agin' him."

"But what on earth," said Mave, "could make you be so mad as to let her
know anything of that kind?"

"Why, she sent me to get word," replied the simple creature, "and you
wouldn't have me tell her a lie, an' the poor girl on her death-bed, I'm
afeard."

Her mother went over and stood opposite where she lay, that is, near the
foot of her bed, and putting one hand under her chin, looked at her
long and steadily. Mave went to her side and taking her hand gently up,
kissed it, and wept quietly, but bitterly.

It was, indeed, impossible to look upon her without a feeling of
deep and extraordinary interest. Her singularly youthful aspect--her
surprising beauty, to which disease and suffering had given a character
of purity and tenderness almost etherial--the natural symmetry and
elegance of her very arms and hands--the wonderful whiteness of her
skin, which contrasted so strikingly with the raven black of her glossy
hair, and the soul of thought and feeling which lay obviously expressed
by the long silken eye-lashes of her closed eyes--all, when taken in at
a glance, were calculated to impress a beholder with love, and sympathy,
and tenderness, such as no human heart could resist.

Mave, on glancing at her mother, saw a few tears stealing, as it were,
down her cheeks.

"I wish to God, my dear daughter," exclaimed the latter, in a low voice,
"that I had never seen your face, lovely as it is, an' it surely would
be betther for yourself that you had never been born."

She then passed to the bed-side, and taking Mave's place, who withdrew,
she stooped down, and placing her lips upon Sarah's white broad
forehead, exclaimed--"May God bless you, my dear daughter, is the
heart-felt prayer of your unhappy mother!"

Sarah suddenly opened her eyes, and started.--"What is wrong? There is
something wrong. Didn't I hear some one callin' me daughter? Here's a
strange woman--Charley Hanlon's aunt--Biddy, come here!"

"Well, acushla, here I am--keep yourself quiet, achora--what is it?"

"Didn't you tell me that my mother swore my father's life away?"

"It's what they say," replied the matter-of-fact nurse.

"Then it's a lie that's come from hell itself," she replied--"Oh, if I
was only up and strong as I was, let me see the man or woman that durst
say so. My mother! to become unnatural and treacherous, an' I have a
mother--ha, ha--oh, how often have I thought of this--thought of what a
girl I would be if I was to have a mother--how good I would be too--how
kind to her--how I would love her, an' how she would love me, an' then
my heart would sink when I'd think of home--ay, an' when Nelly would
spake cruelly an' harshly to me I'd feel as if I could kill her, or any
one."

Her eye here caught Mave Sullivan's, and she again started.

"What is this?" she exclaimed; "am I still in the shed? Mave
Sullivan!--help me up, Biddy."

"I am here, dear Sarah," replied the gentle girl--"I am here; keep
yourself quiet and don't attempt to sit up; you're not able to do it."

The composed and serene aspect of Mave, and the kind, touching tones
of her voice, seemed to operate favorably upon her, and to aid her
in collecting her confused and scattered thoughts into something like
order.

"Oh, dear Mave," said she, "what is this? What has happened? Isn't there
something wrong? I'm confused. Have I a mother? Have I a livin' mother,
that will love me?"

Her large eyes suddenly sparkled with singular animation as she asked
the last question, and Mave thought it was the most appropriate moment
to make the mother known to her.

"You have, dear Sarah, an' here she is waitin' to clasp you to her
heart, an' give you her blessin'."

"Where?" she exclaimed, starting up in her bed, as if in full health;
"my mother! where?--where?"

She held her arms out towards her, for Mave had again assumed the
mother's station at her bedside, and the latter stood at a little
distance. On seeing her daughter's arms widely extended towards her, she
approached her, but whether checked by Sarah's allusion to her conduct,
or from a wish to spare her excitement, or from some natural coldness
of disposition, it is difficult to say, she did it with so little
appearance of the eager enthusiasm that the heart of the latter
expected, and with a manner so singularly cool and unexcited, that
Sarah, whose feelings were always decisive and rapid as lightning, had
time to recognize her features as Hanlon's aunt whom she had seen and
talked to before.

But that was not all; she perceived not in her these external
manifestations of strong affection and natural tenderness for which her
own heart yearned almost convulsively; there was no sparkling glance--no
precipitate emotion--no gushing of tears--no mother's love--in short,
nothing of what her noble and loving spirit could, recognize as
kindred to itself, and to her warm and impulsive heart. The moment--the
glance--that sought and found not what it looked for--were decisive: the
arms that had been extended remained extended still, but the spirit
of that attitude was changed, as was that eager and tumultuous delight
which had just flashed from her countenance. Her thoughts, as we said,
were quick, and in almost a moment's time she appeared to be altogether
a different individual.

"Stop!" she exclaimed, now repelling instead of soliciting the
embrace--"there isn't the love of a mother in that woman's heart--an'
what did I hear?--that she swore my father's life away--her husband's
life away. No, no; I'm changed--I see my father's blood, shed by her,
too, his own wife! Look at her features, they're hard and harsh--there's
no love in her eyes--they're cowld and sevare. No, no; there's something
wrong there--I feel that--I feel it--it's here--the feelin's in my
heart--oh, what a dark hour this is! You were right, Biddy, you brought
me black news this day--but it won't--it won't throuble me long--it
won't trouble this poor brain long--it won't pierce this poor heart
long--I hope not. Oh!" she exclaimed, turning to Mave, and extending her
arms towards her, "Mave Sullivan, let me die!"

The affectionate but disappointed girl had all Mave's sympathies, whose
warm and affectionate feelings recoiled from the coldness and apparent
want of natural tenderness which characterized the mother's manner,
under circumstances in themselves so affecting. Still, after having
soothed Sarah for a few minutes, and placed her head once more upon the
pillow, she whispered to the mother, who seemed to think more than to
feel:

"Don't be surprised; when you consider the state she's in--and indeed
it isn't to be wondered at after what she has heard--you must make every
allowance for the poor girl."

Sarah's emotions were now evidently in incessant play.

"Biddy," said she, "come here again; help me up."

"Dear Sarah," said Mave, "you are not able to bear all this; if you
could compose yourself an' forget everything unpleasant for a while,
till you grow strong--"

"If I could forget that my mother has no heart to love me with--that
she's cowld and strange to me: if I could forget that she's brought my
father to a shameful death--my father's heart wasn't altogether bad; no,
an' he was wanst--I mane in his early life--a good man. I know that--I
feel that--'dear Sarah, sleep--deep, dear Sarah'--no, bad as he is,
there was a thousand times more love and nature in the voice that spoke
them words than in a hundred women like my mother, that hasn't yet
kissed my lips. Biddy, come here, I say--here--lift me up again."

There was such energy, and fire, and command, in her voice and words
now, that Mave could not remonstrate any longer, nor the nurse refuse to
obey her. When she was once more placed sitting, she looked about her--

"Mother," she said, "come here!"

And as she pronounced the word mother, a trait so beautiful, so
exquisite, so natural, and so pathetic, accompanied it, that Mave once
more wept. Her voice, in uttering the word, quivered, and softened
into tenderness, with the affection which nature itself seems to have
associated with it. Sarah herself remarked this, even in the anguish of
the moment.

"My very heart knows and loves the word," she said. "Oh! why is it that
I am to suffer this? Is it possible that the empty name is all that's
left me afther all? Mother, come here--I am pleadin' for my father
now--you pleaded against him, but I always took the weakest side--here
is God now among us--you must stand before him--look your daughter in
the face--an' answer her as you expect to meet God, when you leave this
throubled life--truth--truth now, mother, an' nothin' else. Mother, I
am dyin'. Now, as God is to judge you, did you ever love my father as a
wife ought?"

There was some irresistible spirit, some unaccountable power, in her
manner and language,--such command and such wonderful love of candor in
her full dark eye--that it was impossible to gainsay or withstand her.

"I will spake the thruth," replied her mother, evidently borne away and
subdued, "although it's against myself--to my shame an' to my sorrow
I say it--that when I married your father, another man had my
affections--but, as I'm to appear before God, I never wronged him. I
don't know how it is that you've made me confess it; but at any rate
you're the first that ever wrung it out o' me."

"That will do," replied her daughter, calmly; "that sounds like murdher
from a mother's lips! Lay me down now, Biddy."

Mave, who had scarcely ever taken her eyes from off her varying and busy
features, was now struck by a singular change which she observed come
over them--a change that was nothing but the shadow of death, and cannot
be described.

"Sarah!" she exclaimed; "dear, darling Sarah, what is the matter with
you? Have you got ill again?"

"Oh! my child!" exclaimed her mother--"am I to lose you this way at
last? Oh! dear Sarah, forgive me--I'm you mother, and you'll forgive
me."

"Mave," said Sarah, "take this--I remember seein' yours and mine
together not very long ago--take this lock of my hair--I think you'll
get a pair of scissors on the corner of the shelf--cut it off with
your own hands--let it be sent to my father--an' when he's dyin' a
disgraceful death, let him wear it next his heart--an' wherever he's to
be buried, let him have this buried with him. Let whoever will give it
to him, say that it comes from Sarah--an' that, if she was able, she
would be with him through shame, an' disgrace, an' death; that she'd
support him as well as she could in his trouble--that she'd scorn the
world for him--an' that because he said wanst in his life that he loved
her; she'd forgive him all a thousand times, an' would lay down her life
for him."

"You would do that, my noble girl!" exclaimed Mave, with a choking
voice.

"An' above all things," proceeded Sarah, "let him be told, if it can be
done, that Sarah said to him to die without fear--to bear it up like
a man, an' not like a coward--to look manfully about him on the very
scaffold--an'--an' to die as a man ought to die--bravely an' without
fear--bravely an' without fear!"

Her voice and strength were, since the last change that Mave observed,
both rapidly sinking, and her mother, anxious, if possible, to have her
forgiveness, again approached her and said:

"Dear Sarah you are angry with me. Oh! forgive me--am I not your
mother?"

The girl's resentments, however, had all passed, and the business of her
life, and its functions, she now felt were all over--she said so--

"It's all over, at last now, mother," she replied--"I have no anger
now--come and kiss me. Whatever you have done, you are still my mother.
Bless me--bless your daughter Sarah, I have nothing now in my heart but
love for everybody. Tell Nelly, dear Mave, that Sarah forgave her, an'
hoped that she'd forgive Sarah. Mave, I trust that you an' he will be
happy--that's my last wish, an' tell him so. Mave, there's sweet faces
about me, sich as I seen in the shed; they're smilin' upon me--smilin'
upon Sarah--upon poor, hasty Sarah McGowan--that would have loved every
one. Mave, think of me sometimes--an' let him, when he thinks of the
wild girl that loved him, look upon you, dearest Mave, an' love you,
if possible, better for her sake. These sweet faces are about me again.
Father, I'll be before you--die--die like a man."

While uttering these last few sentences, which were spoken with great
difficulty, she began to pull the bedclothes about with her hands, and
whilst uttering the last word, her beautiful hand was slightly clenched,
as if helping out a sentiment so completely in accordance with her brave
spirit. These motions, however, ceased suddenly--she heaved a deep
sigh, and the troubled spirit of the kind, the generous, the erring, but
affectionate Sarah M'Gowan--as we shall call her still--passed away to
another, and, we trust, a better life. The storms of her heart and brain
were at rest forever.

Thus perished in early life one of those creatures, that sometimes seem
as if they were placed by mistake in a wrong sphere of existence. It is
impossible to say to what a height of moral grandeur and true greatness,
culture and education might have elevated, her, or to say with what
brilliancy her virtues might have shone, had heart and affections been
properly cultivated. Like some beautiful and luxuriant flower, however,
she was permitted to run into wildness and disorder for want of a
guiding hand; but no want, no absence of training, could ever destroy
its natural delicacy, nor prevent its fragrance from smelling sweet,
even in the neglected situation where it was left to pine and die.

There is little now to be added. "Time, the consoler," passes not in
vain even over the abodes of wretchedness and misery. The sufferings
of that year of famine we have endeavored to bring before those who may
have the power in their hands of assuaging the similar horrors which are
likely to visit this. The pictures we have given are not exaggerated,
but drawn from memory and the terrible realities of 1817.

It is unnecessary to add, that when sickness and the severity of winter
passed away, our lovers, Mave and young Condy Dalton, were happily
married, as they deserved to be, and occupied the farm from which the
good old man had been so unjustly expelled.

It was on the first social evening that the two families, now so happily
reconciled, spent together subsequent to the trial, that Bartle Sullivan
gratified them with the following account of his history:

"I remimber fightin'," he proceeded, "wid Condy on that night, an' the
devil's own _bulliah battha_ he was. We went into a corner of the field
near the Grey Stone to decide it. All at wanst I forgot what happened,
till I found myself lyin' upon a car wid the M'Mahons of Edinburg, that
lived ten or twelve miles beyant the mountains, at the foot of Carnmore.
They knew me, and good right they had, for I had been spakin' to their
sister Shibby, but she wasn't for me at the time, although I was ready
to kick my own shadow about her, God knows. Well, you see, I felt
disgraced at bein' beaten by Con Dalton, an I was fond of her, so what
'ud you have of us but off we went together to America, for you see she
promised to marry me if I'd go.

"They had taken me up on one of their carts, thinkin' I was dhrunk, to
lave me for safety in the next neighbor's house we came to. Well, she
an' I married when we got to Boston; but God never blessed us wid a
family; and Toddy here, who tuk the life of a pedlar, came back afther
many a long year, with a good purse, and lived with us. At last I began
to long for home, and so we all came together. The Prophet's wife was
wid us, an' another passenger tould me that Con here had been suspected
of murdherin' me. I got unwell in Liverpool, but I sent Toddy on before
me to make their minds aisy. As we wor talkin' over these matthers, I
happened to mention to the woman what I had seen the night the carman
was murdhered, and I wondhered at the way she looked on hearin' it. She
went on, but afther a time came back to Liverpool for me, an' took the
typhus on her way home, but thank God, we were all in time to clear
the innocent and punish the guilty; ay, an' reward the good, too, eh,
Toddy?'"

"I'll give Mave away," replied Toddy, "if there wasn't another man in
Europe; an' when I'm puttin' your hand into Con's, Mave, it won't be an
empty one. Ay, an' if your friend Sarah, the wild girl, had lived--but
it can't be helped--death takes the young as well as the ould; and may
God prepare us all to meet Him!"

Young Richard Henderson's anticipations were, unfortunately, too true.
On leaving Mr. Travers' office, he returned home, took his bed, and;
in the course of one short week, had paid, by a kind of judicial
punishment, the fatal penalty of his contemplated profligacy. His father
survived him only a few months, so that there is not at this moment, one
of the name or blood of Henderson in the Grange. The old man died of a
quarrel with Jemmy Branigan, to whom he left a pension of fifty pounds a
year; and truly the grief of this aged servant after him was unique and
original.

"What's to come o' me?" said Jemmy, with tears in his eye; "I have
nothing to do, nobody to attend to, nobody to fight with, nothing to
disturb me or put me out of timper; I knew, however, that he would stick
to his wickedness to the last--an' so he did, for the devil tempted him,
out of sheer malice, when he could get at me no way else, to lave me
fifty pounds a year, to kape me aisy! Sich revenge and villany, by a
dyin' man, was never heard of. God help me, what am I to do now, or what
hand will I turn to? What is there before me but peace and quietness for
the remainder of my life?--but I won't stand that long--an' to lave me
fifty pounds a year, to kape me aisy! God forgive him!"

The Prophet suffered the sentence of the law, but refused all religious
consolation. Whether his daughter's message ever reached him or not,
we have had no means of ascertaining. He died, however, as she wished,
firmly, but sullenly, and as if he despised and defied the world and
its laws. He neither admitted his guilt, nor attempted to maintain
his innocence, but passed out of existence like a man who was already
wearied with its cares, and who now felt satisfied, when it was too
late, that contempt for the laws of God and man, never leads to safety,
much loss to happiness. His only observation was the following--

"When I dreamt that young Dalton drove a nail in my coffin, little I
thought it would end this way."

We have simply to conclude by saying that Rody Duncan was transported
for perjury; and that Nelly became a devotee, or voteen, and, as far as
one could judge, exhibited something like repentance for the sinful life
she had led with the Prophet.

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