Best Horror Novels

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

I now come to the time in which I myself was mixed up with the

people that I have been writing about. And to make you understand

how I became connected with them, I must give you some little

account of myself. My father was the younger son of a Devonshire

gentleman of moderate property; my eldest uncle succeeded to the

estate of his forefathers, my second became an eminent attorney in

London, and my father took orders. Like most poor clergymen, he had

a large family; and I have no doubt was glad enough when my London

uncle, who was a bachelor, offered to take charge of me, and bring

me up to be his successor in business.

In this way I came to live in London, in my uncle's house, not

far from Gray's Inn, and to be treated and esteemed as his son, and

to labour with him in his office. I was very fond of the old

gentleman. He was the confidential agent of many country squires,

and had attained to his present position as much by knowledge of

human nature as by knowledge of law; though he was learned enough

in the latter. He used to say his business was law, his pleasure

heraldry. From his intimate acquaintance with family history, and

all the tragic courses of life therein involved, to hear him talk,

at leisure times, about any coat of arms that came across his path

was as good as a play or a romance. Many cases of disputed

property, dependent on a love of genealogy, were brought to him, as

to a great authority on such points. If the lawyer who came to

consult him was young, he would take no fee, only give him a long

lecture on the importance of attending to heraldry; if the lawyer

was of mature age and good standing, he would mulct him pretty

well, and a***e him to me afterwards as negligent of one great

branch of the profession. His house was in a stately new street

called Ormond Street, and in it he had a handsome library; but all

the books treated of things that were past; none of them planned or

looked forward into the future. I worked away — partly for the sake

of my family at home, partly because my uncle had really taught me

to enjoy the kind of practice in which he himself took such

delight. I suspect I worked too hard; at any rate, in seventeen

hundred and eighteen I was far from well, and my good uncle was

disturbed by my ill looks.

One day, he rang the bell twice into the clerk's room at the

dingy office in Gray's Inn Lane. It was the summons for me, and I

went into his private room just as a gentleman — whom I knew well

enough by sight as an Irish lawyer of more reputation than he

deserved — was leaving.

My uncle was slowly rubbing his hands together and considering.

I was there two or three minutes before he spoke. Then he told me

that I must pack up my portmanteau that very afternoon, and start

that night by post-horse for West Chester. I should get there, if

all went well, at the end of five days' time, and must then wait

for a packet to cross over to Dublin; from thence I must proceed to

a certain town named Kildoon, and in that neighbourhood I was to

remain, making certain inquiries as to the existence of any

descendants of the younger branch of a family to whom some valuable

estates had descended in the female line. The Irish lawyer whom I

had seen was weary of the case, and would willingly have given up

the property, without further ado, to a man who appeared to claim

them; but on laying his tables and trees before my uncle, the

latter had foreseen so many possible prior claimants, that the

lawyer had begged him to undertake the management of the whole

business. In his youth, my uncle would have liked nothing better

than going over to Ireland himself, and ferreting out every scrap

of paper or parchment, and every word of tradition respecting the

family. As it was, old and gouty, he deputed me.

Accordingly, I went to Kildoon. I suspect I had something of my

uncle's delight in following up a genealogical scent, for I very

soon found out, when on the spot, that Mr. Rooney, the Irish

lawyer, would have got both himself and the first claimant into a

terrible scrape, if he had pronounced his opinion that the estates

ought to be given up to him. There were three poor Irish fellows,

each nearer of kin to the last possessor; but, a generation before,

there was a still nearer relation, who had never been accounted

for, nor his existence ever discovered by the lawyers, I venture to

think, till I routed him out from the memory of some of the old

dependants of the family. What had become of him? I travelled

backwards and forwards; I crossed over to France, and came back

again with a slight clue, which ended in my discovering that, wild

and dissipated himself, he had left one child, a son, of yet worse

character than his father; that this same Hugh Fitzgerald had

married a very beautiful serving-woman of the Byrnes — a person

below him in hereditary rank, but above him in character; that he

had died soon after his marriage, leaving one child, whether a boy

or a girl I could not learn, and that the mother had returned to

live in the family of the Byrnes. Now, the chief of this latter

family was serving in the Duke of Berwick's regiment, and it was

long before I could hear from him; it was more than a year before I

got a short, haughty letter — I fancy he had a soldier's contempt

for a civilian, an Irishman's hatred for an Englishman, an exiled

Jacobite's jealousy of one who prospered and lived tranquilly under

the government he looked upon as an usurpation. 'Bridget

Fitzgerald,' he said, 'had been faithful to the fortunes of his

sister — had followed her abroad, and to England when Mrs. Starkey

had thought fit to return. Both her sister and her husband were

dead; he knew nothing of Bridget Fitzgerald at the present time:

probably Sir Philip Tempest, his nephew's guardian, might be able

to give me some information.' I have not given the little

contemptuous terms; the way in which faithful service was meant to

imply more than it said — all that has nothing to do with my story.

Sir Philip, when applied to, told me that he paid an annuity

regularly to an old woman named Fitzgerald, living at Coldholme

(the village near Starkey Manor-House). Whether she had any

descendants he could not say.

One bleak March evening, I came in sight of the places described

at the beginning of my story. I could hardly understand the rude

dialect in which the direction to old Bridget's house was

given.

'Yo' see yon furleets,' all run together, gave me no idea that I

was to guide myself by the distant lights that shone in the windows

of the Hall, occupied for the time by a farmer who held the post of

steward, while the Squire, now four or five and twenty, was making

the grand tour. However, at last, I reached Bridget's cottage — a

low, moss-grown place; the palings that had once surrounded it were

broken and gone; and the underwood of the forest came up to the

walls, and must have darkened the windows. It was about seven

o'clock — not late to my London notions — but, after knocking for

some time at the door and receiving no reply, I was driven to

conjecture that the occupant of the house was gone to bed. So I

betook myself to the nearest church I had seen, three miles back on

the road I had come, sure that close to that I should find an inn

of some kind; and early the next morning I set off back to

Coldholme, by a field-path which my host assured me I should find a

shorter cut than the road I had taken the night before. It was a

cold, sharp morning; my feet left prints in the sprinkling of

hoar-frost that covered the ground; nevertheless, I saw an old

woman, whom I instinctively suspected to be the object of my

search, in a sheltered covert on one side of my path. I lingered

and watched her. She must have been considerably above the middle

size in her prime, for when she raised herself from the stooping

position in which I first saw her, there was something fine and

commanding in the erectness of her figure. She drooped again in a

minute or two, and seemed looking for something on the ground, as,

with bent head, she turned off from the spot where I gazed upon

her, and was lost to my sight. I fancy I missed my way, and made a

round in spite of the landlord's directions; for by the time I had

reached Bridget's cottage she was there, with no semblance of

hurried walk or discomposure of any kind. The door was slightly

ajar. I knocked, and the majestic figure stood before me, silently

awaiting the explanation of my errand. Her teeth were all gone, so

the nose and chin were brought near together; the grey eyebrows

were straight, and almost hung over her deep, cavernous eyes, and

the thick white hair lay in silvery masses over the low, wide,

wrinkled forehead. For a moment, I stood uncertain how to shape my

answer to the solemn questioning of her silence.

'Your name is Bridget Fitzgerald, I believe?' She bowed her head

in assent.

'I have something to say to you. May I come in? I am unwilling

to keep you standing.'

'You cannot tire me,' she said, and at first she seemed inclined

to deny me the shelter of her roof. But the next moment — she had

searched the very soul in me with her eyes during that instant —

she led me in, and dropped the shadowing hood of her grey, draping

cloak, which had previously hid part of the character of her

countenance. The cottage was rude and bare enough. But before that

picture of the Virgin, of which I have made mention, there stood a

little cup filled with fresh primroses. While she paid her

reverence to the Madonna, I understood why she had been out seeking

through the clumps of green in the sheltered copse. Then she turned

round, and bade me be seated. The expression of her face, which all

this time I was studying, was not bad, as the stories of my last

night's landlord had led me to expect; it was a wild, stern,

fierce, indomitable countenance, seamed and scarred by agonies of

solitary weeping; but it was neither cunning nor malignant.

'My name is Bridget Fitzgerald,' said she, by way of opening our

conversation.

'And your husband was Hugh Fitzgerald, of Knock-Mahon, near

Kildoon, in Ireland?'

A faint light came into the dark gloom of her eyes.

'He was.'

'May I ask if you had any children by him?'

The light in her eyes grew quick and red. She tried to speak, I

could see; but something rose in her throat, and choked her, and

until she could speak calmly, she would fain not speak at all

before a stranger. In a minute or so she said:

'I had a daughter — one Mary Fitzgerald,' — then her strong

nature mastered her strong will, and she cried out, with a

trembling, wailing cry: 'Oh, man! what of her? — what of her?'

She rose from her seat, and came and clutched at my arm, and

looked in my eyes. There she read, as I suppose, my utter ignorance

of what had become of her child; for she went blindly back to her

chair, and sat rocking herself and softly moaning, as if I were not

there; I not daring to speak to the lone and awful woman. After a

little pause, she knelt down before the picture of our Lady of the

Holy Heart, and spoke to her by all the fanciful and poetic names

of the Litany.

'O Rose of Sharon! O Tower of David! O Star of the Sea! have you

no comfort for my sore heart? Am I for ever to hope? Grant me at

least despair!' — and so on she went, heedless of my presence. Her

prayers grew wilder and wilder, till they seemed to me to touch on

the borders of madness and blasphemy. Almost involuntarily, I spoke

as if to stop her.

'Have you any reason to think that your daughter is dead?'

She rose from her knees, and came and stood before me.

'Mary Fitzgerald is dead,' said she. 'I shall never see her

again in the flesh. No tongue ever told me. But I know she is dead.

I have yearned so to see her, and my heart's will is fearful and

strong: it would have drawn her to me before now, if she had been a

wanderer on the other side of the world. I wonder often it has not

drawn her out of the grave to come and stand before me, and hear me

tell her how I loved her. For, sir, we parted unfriends.'