Stories of Lough Guir
When the present writer was a boy of twelve or thirteen, he first madethe acquaintance of Miss Anne Baily, of Lough Guir, in the county ofLimerick. She and her sister were the last representatives at thatplace, of an extremely good old name in the county. They were bothwhat is termed "old maids," and at that time past sixty. But neverwere old ladies more hospitable, lively, and kind, especially to youngpeople. They were both remarkably agreeable and clever. Like all oldcounty ladies of their time, they were great genealogists, and couldrecount the origin, generations, and intermarriages, of every countyfamily of note.These ladies were visited at their house at Lough Guir by Mr. CroftonCroker; and are, I think, mentioned, by name, in the second series ofhis fairy legends; the series in which (probably communicated by MissAnne Baily), he recounts some of the picturesque traditions of thosebeautiful lakes--lakes, I should no longer say, for the smaller andprettier has since been drained, and gave up from its depths some longlost and very interesting relics.In their drawing-room stood a curious relic of another sort: oldenough, too, though belonging to a much more modern period. It was theancient stirrup cup of the hospitable house of Lough Guir. CroftonCroker has preserved a sketch of this curious glass. I have often hadit in my hand. It had a short stem; and the cup part, having thebottom rounded, rose cylindrically, and, being of a capacity tocontain a whole bottle of claret, and almost as narrow as anold-fashioned ale glass, was tall to a degree that filled me withwonder. As it obliged the rider to extend his arm as he raised theglass, it must have tried a tipsy man, sitting in the saddle, prettyseverely. The wonder was that the marvellous tall glass had come downto our times without a crack.There was another glass worthy of remark in the same drawing-room. Itwas gigantic, and shaped conically, like one of those old-fashionedjelly glasses which used to be seen upon the shelves of confectioners.It was engraved round the rim with the words, "The glorious, pious,and immortal memory"; and on grand occasions, was filled to the brim,and after the manner of a loving cup, made the circuit of the Whigguests, who owed all to the hero whose memory its legend invoked.It was now but the transparent phantom of those solemn convivialitiesof a generation, who lived, as it were, within hearing of the cannonand shoutings of those stirring times. When I saw it, this glass hadlong retired from politics and carousals, and stood peacefully on alittle table in the drawing-room, where ladies' hands replenished itwith fair water, and crowned it daily with flowers from the garden.Miss Anne Baily's conversation ran oftener than her sister's upon thelegendary and supernatural; she told her stories with the sympathy,the colour, and the mysterious air which contribute so powerfully toeffect, and never wearied of answering questions about the old castle,and amusing her young audience with fascinating little glimpses of oldadventure and bygone days. My memory retains the picture of my earlyfriend very distinctly. A slim straight figure, above the middleheight; a general likeness to the full-length portrait of thatdelightful Countess d'Aulnois, to whom we all owe our earliest andmost brilliant glimpses of fairy-land; something of hergravely-pleasant countenance, plain, but refined and ladylike, withthat kindly mystery in her side-long glance and uplifted finger, whichindicated the approaching climax of a tale of wonder.Lough Guir is a kind of centre of the operations of the Munsterfairies. When a child is stolen by the "good people," Lough Guir isconjectured to be the place of its unearthly transmutation from thehuman to the fairy state. And beneath its waters lie enchanted, thegrand old castle of the Desmonds, the great earl himself, hisbeautiful young countess, and all the retinue that surrounded him inthe years of his splendour, and at the moment of his catastrophe.Here, too, are historic associations. The huge square tower that risesat one side of the stable-yard close to the old house, to a heightthat amazed my young eyes, though robbed of its battlements and onestory, was a stronghold of the last rebellious Earl of Desmond, and isspecially mentioned in that delightful old folio, the HiberniaPacata, as having, with its Irish garrison on the battlements, defiedthe army of the lord deputy, then marching by upon the summits of theoverhanging hills. The house, built under shelter of this strongholdof the once proud and turbulent Desmonds, is old, but snug, with amultitude of small low rooms, such as I have seen in houses of thesame age in Shropshire and the neighbouring English counties.The hills that overhang the lakes appeared to me, in my young days(and I have not seen them since), to be clothed with a short softverdure, of a hue so dark and vivid as I had never seen before.In one of the lakes is a small island, rocky and wooded, which isbelieved by the peasantry to represent the top of the highest tower ofthe castle which sank, under a spell, to the bottom. In certain statesof the atmosphere, I have heard educated people say, when in a boatyou have reached a certain distance, the island appears to rise somefeet from the water, its rocks assume the appearance of masonry, andthe whole circuit presents very much the effect of the battlements ofa castle rising above the surface of the lake.This was Miss Anne Baily's story of the submersion of this lostcastle:The Magician EarlIt is well known that the great Earl of Desmond, though historypretends to dispose of him differently, lives to this hour enchantedin his castle, with all his household, at the bottom of the lake.There was not, in his day, in all the world, so accomplished amagician as he. His fairest castle stood upon an island in the lake,and to this he brought his young and beautiful bride, whom he lovedbut too well; for she prevailed upon his folly to risk all to gratifyher imperious caprice.They had not been long in this beautiful castle, when she one daypresented herself in the chamber in which her husband studied hisforbidden art, and there implored him to exhibit before her some ofthe wonders of his evil science. He resisted long; but her entreaties,tears, and wheedlings were at length too much for him and heconsented.But before beginning those astonishing transformations with which hewas about to amaze her, he explained to her the awful conditions anddangers of the experiment.Alone in this vast apartment, the walls of which were lapped, farbelow, by the lake whose dark waters lay waiting to swallow them, shemust witness a certain series of frightful phenomena, which oncecommenced, he could neither abridge nor mitigate; and if throughouttheir ghastly succession she spoke one word, or uttered oneexclamation, the castle and all that it contained would in one instantsubside to the bottom of the lake, there to remain, under theservitude of a strong spell, for ages.The dauntless curiosity of the lady having prevailed, and the oakendoor of the study being locked and barred, the fatal experimentscommenced.Muttering a spell, as he stood before her, feathers sprouted thicklyover him, his face became contracted and hooked, a cadaverous smellfilled the air, and, with heavy winnowing wings, a gigantic vulturerose in his stead, and swept round and round the room, as if on thepoint of pouncing upon her.The lady commanded herself through this trial, and instantly anotherbegan.The bird alighted near the door, and in less than a minute changed,she saw not how, into a horribly deformed and dwarfish hag: who, withyellow skin hanging about her face and enormous eyes, swung herself oncrutches toward the lady, her mouth foaming with fury, and hergrimaces and contortions becoming more and more hideous every moment,till she rolled with a yell on the floor, in a horrible convulsion, atthe lady's feet, and then changed into a huge serpent, with cresterect, and quivering tongue. Suddenly, as it seemed on the point ofdarting at her, she saw her husband in its stead, standing pale beforeher, and, with his finger on his lip, enforcing the continuednecessity of silence. He then placed himself at his length on thefloor, and began to stretch himself out and out, longer and longer,until his head nearly reached to one end of the vast room, and hisfeet to the other.This horror overcame her. The ill-starred lady uttered a wild scream,whereupon the castle and all that was within it, sank in a moment tothe bottom of the lake.But, once in every seven years, by night, the Earl of Desmond and hisretinue emerge, and cross the lake, in shadowy cavalcade. His whitehorse is shod with silver. On that one night, the earl may ride tilldaybreak, and it behoves him to make good use of his time; for, untilthe silver shoes of his steed be worn through, the spell that holdshim and his beneath the lake, will retain its power.When I (Miss Anne Baily) was a child, there was still living a mannamed Teigue O'Neill, who had a strange story to tell.He was a smith, and his forge stood on the brow of the hill,overlooking the lake, on a lonely part of the road to Cahir Conlish.One bright moonlight night, he was working very late, and quite alone.The clink of his hammer, and the wavering glow reflected through theopen door on the bushes at the other side of the narrow road, were theonly tokens that told of life and vigil for miles around.In one of the pauses of his work, he heard the ring of many hoofsascending the steep road that passed his forge, and, standing in thisdoorway, he was just in time to see a gentleman, on a white horse, whowas dressed in a fashion the like of which the smith had never seenbefore. This man was accompanied and followed by a mounted retinue, asstrangely dressed as he.They seemed, by the clang and clatter that announced their approach,to be riding up the hill at a hard hurry-scurry gallop; but the paceabated as they drew near, and the rider of the white horse who, fromhis grave and lordly air, he assumed to be a man of rank, andaccustomed to command, drew bridle and came to a halt before thesmith's door.He did not speak, and all his train were silent, but he beckoned tothe smith, and pointed down to one of his horse's hoofs.Teigue stooped and raised it, and held it just long enough to see thatit was shod with a silver shoe; which, in one place, he said, was wornas thin as a shilling. Instantaneously, his situation was madeapparent to him by this sign, and he recoiled with a terrified prayer.The lordly rider, with a look of pain and fury, struck at himsuddenly, with something that whistled in the air like a whip; and anicy streak seemed to traverse his body as if he had been cut throughwith a leaf of steel. But he was without scathe or scar, as heafterwards found. At the same moment he saw the whole cavalcade breakinto a gallop and disappear down the hill, with a momentary hurtlingin the air, like the flight of a volley of cannon shot.Here had been the earl himself. He had tried one of his accustomedstratagems to lead the smith to speak to him. For it is well knownthat either for the purpose of abridging or of mitigating his periodof enchantment, he seeks to lead people to accost him. But what, inthe event of his succeeding, would befall the person whom he had thusensnared, no one knows.Moll Rial's AdventureWhen Miss Anne Baily was a child, Moll Rial was an old woman. She hadlived all her days with the Bailys of Lough Guir; in and about whosehouse, as was the Irish custom of those days, were a troop ofbare-footed country girls, scullery maids, or laundresses, or employedabout the poultry yard, or running of errands.Among these was Moll Rial, then a stout good-humoured lass, withlittle to think of, and nothing to fret about. She was once washingclothes by the process known universally in Munster as beetling. Thewasher stands up to her ankles in water, in which she has immersed theclothes, which she lays in that state on a great flat stone, andsmacks with lusty strokes of an instrument which bears a ruderesemblance to a cricket bat, only shorter, broader, and light enoughto be wielded freely with one hand. Thus, they smack the drippingclothes, turning them over and over, sousing them in the water, andreplacing them on the same stone, to undergo a repetition of theprocess, until they are thoroughly washed.Moll Rial was plying her "beetle" at the margin of the lake, closeunder the old house and castle. It was between eight and nine o'clockon a fine summer morning, everything looked bright and beautiful.Though quite alone, and though she could not see even the windows ofthe house (hidden from her view by the irregular ascent and someinterposing bushes), her loneliness was not depressing.Standing up from her work, she saw a gentleman walking slowly down theslope toward her. He was a "grand-looking" gentleman, arrayed in aflowered silk dressing-gown, with a cap of velvet on his head; and ashe stepped toward her, in his slippered feet, he showed a veryhandsome leg. He was smiling graciously as he approached, and drawinga ring from his finger with an air of gracious meaning, which seemedto imply that he wished to make her a present, he raised it in hisfingers with a pleased look, and placed it on the flat stones besidethe clothes she had been beetling so industriously.He drew back a little, and continued to look at her with anencouraging smile, which seemed to say: "You have earned your reward;you must not be afraid to take it."The girl fancied that this was some gentleman who had arrived, asoften happened in those hospitable and haphazard times, late andunexpectedly the night before, and who was now taking a littleindolent ramble before breakfast.Moll Rial was a little shy, and more so at having been discovered byso grand a gentleman with her petticoats gathered a little high abouther bare shins. She looked down, therefore, upon the water at herfeet, and then she saw a ripple of blood, and then another, ring afterring, coming and going to and from her feet. She cried out the sacredname in horror, and, lifting her eyes, the courtly gentleman was gone,but the blood-rings about her feet spread with the speed of light overthe surface of the lake, which for a moment glowed like one vastestuary of blood.Here was the earl once again, and Moll Rial declared that if it hadnot been for that frightful transformation of the water she would havespoken to him next minute, and would thus have passed under a spell,perhaps as direful as his own.The BansheeSo old a Munster family as the Bailys, of Lough Guir, could not failto have their attendant banshee. Everyone attached to the family knewthis well, and could cite evidences of that unearthly distinction. Iheard Miss Baily relate the only experience she had personally had ofthat wild spiritual sympathy.She said that, being then young, she and Miss Susan undertook a longattendance upon the sick bed of their sister, Miss Kitty, whom I haveheard remembered among her contemporaries as the merriest and mostentertaining of human beings. This light-hearted young lady was dyingof consumption. The sad duties of such attendance being divided amongmany sisters, as there then were, the night watches devolved upon thetwo ladies I have named: I think, as being the eldest.It is not improbable that these long and melancholy vigils, loweringthe spirits and exciting the nervous system, prepared them forillusions. At all events, one night at dead of night, Miss Baily andher sister, sitting in the dying lady's room, heard such sweet andmelancholy music as they had never heard before. It seemed to themlike distant cathedral music. The room of the dying girl had itswindows toward the yard, and the old castle stood near, and full insight. The music was not in the house, but seemed to come from theyard, or beyond it. Miss Anne Baily took a candle, and went down theback stairs. She opened the back door, and, standing there, heard thesame faint but solemn harmony, and could not tell whether it mostresembled the distant music of instruments, or a choir of voices. Itseemed to come through the windows of the old castle, high in theair. But when she approached the tower, the music, she thought, camefrom above the house, at the other side of the yard; and thusperplexed, and at last frightened, she returned.This aerial music both she and her sister, Miss Susan Baily, avowedthat they distinctly heard, and for a long time. Of the fact she wasclear, and she spoke of it with great awe.The Governess's DreamThis lady, one morning, with a grave countenance that indicatedsomething weighty upon her mind, told her pupils that she had, on thenight before, had a very remarkable dream.The first room you enter in the old castle, having reached the foot ofthe spiral stone stair, is a large hall, dim and lofty, having only asmall window or two, set high in deep recesses in the wall. When I sawthe castle many years ago, a portion of this capacious chamber wasused as a store for the turf laid in to last the year.Her dream placed her, alone, in this room, and there entered agrave-looking man, having something very remarkable in hiscountenance: which impressed her, as a fine portrait sometimes will,with a haunting sense of character and individuality.In his hand this man carried a wand, about the length of an ordinarywalking cane. He told her to observe and remember its length, and tomark well the measurements he was about to make, the result of whichshe was to communicate to Mr. Baily of Lough Guir.From a certain point in the wall, with this wand, he measured alongthe floor, at right angles with the wall, a certain number of itslengths, which he counted aloud; and then, in the same way, from theadjoining wall he measured a certain number of its lengths, which healso counted distinctly. He then told her that at the point wherethese two lines met, at a depth of a certain number of feet which healso told her, treasure lay buried. And so the dream broke up, and herremarkable visitant vanished.She took the girls with her to the old castle, where, having cut aswitch to the length represented to her in her dream, she measured thedistances, and ascertained, as she supposed, the point on the floorbeneath which the treasure lay. The same day she related her dream toMr. Baily. But he treated it laughingly, and took no step inconsequence.Some time after this, she again saw, in a dream, the sameremarkable-looking man, who repeated his message, and appeareddispleased. But the dream was treated by Mr. Baily as before.The same dream occurred again, and the children became so clamorous tohave the castle floor explored, with pick and shovel, at the pointindicated by the thrice-seen messenger, that at length Mr. Bailyconsented, and the floor was opened, and a trench was sunk at the spotwhich the governess had pointed out.Miss Anne Baily, and nearly all the members of the family, her fatherincluded, were present at this operation. As the workmen approachedthe depth described in the vision, the interest and suspense of allincreased; and when the iron implements met the solid resistance of abroad flagstone, which returned a cavernous sound to the stroke, theexcitement of all present rose to its acme.With some difficulty the flag was raised, and a chamber of stone work,large enough to receive a moderately-sized crock or pit, wasdisclosed. Alas! it was empty. But in the earth at the bottom of it,Miss Baily said, she herself saw, as every other bystander plainlydid, the circular impression of a vessel: which had stood there, asthe mark seemed to indicate, for a very long time.Both the Miss Bailys were strong in their belief hereafterwards, thatthe treasure which they were convinced had actually been depositedthere, had been removed by some more trusting and active listener thantheir father had proved.This same governess remained with them to the time of her death, whichoccurred some years later, under the following circumstances asextraordinary as her dream.The Earl's HallThe good governess had a particular liking for the old castle, andwhen lessons were over, would take her book or her work into a largeroom in the ancient building, called the Earl's Hall. Here she causeda table and chair to be placed for her use, and in the chiaroscurowould so sit at her favourite occupations, with just a little ray ofsubdued light, admitted through one of the glassless windows aboveher, and falling upon her table.The Earl's Hall is entered by a narrow-arched door, opening close tothe winding stair. It is a very large and gloomy room, pretty nearlysquare, with a lofty vaulted ceiling, and a stone floor. Beingsituated high in the castle, the walls of which are immensely thick,and the windows very small and few, the silence that reigns here islike that of a subterranean cavern. You hear nothing in this solitude,except perhaps twice in a day, the twitter of a swallow in one of thesmall windows high in the wall.This good lady having one day retired to her accustomed solitude, wasmissed from the house at her wonted hour of return. This in a countryhouse, such as Irish houses were in those days, excited littlesurprise, and no harm. But when the dinner hour came, which was then,in country houses, five o'clock, and the governess had not appeared,some of her young friends, it being not yet winter, and sufficientlight remaining to guide them through the gloom of the dim ascent andpassages, mounted the old stone stair to the level of the Earl's Hall,gaily calling to her as they approached.There was no answer. On the stone floor, outside the door of theEarl's Hall, to their horror, they found her lying insensible. By theusual means she was restored to consciousness; but she continued veryill, and was conveyed to the house, where she took to her bed.It was there and then that she related what had occurred to her. Shehad placed herself, as usual, at her little work table, and had beeneither working or reading--I forget which--for some time, and felt inher usual health and serene spirits. Raising her eyes, and lookingtowards the door, she saw a horrible-looking little man enter. He wasdressed in red, was very short, had a singularly dark face, and a mostatrocious countenance. Having walked some steps into the room, withhis eyes fixed on her, he stopped, and beckoning to her to follow,moved back toward the door. About half way, again he stopped once moreand turned. She was so terrified that she sat staring at theapparition without moving or speaking. Seeing that she had not obeyedhim, his face became more frightful and menacing, and as it underwentthis change, he raised his hand and stamped on the floor. Gesture,look, and all, expressed diabolical fury. Through sheer extremity ofterror she did rise, and, as he turned again, followed him a step ortwo in the direction of the door. He again stopped, and with the samemute menace, compelled her again to follow him.She reached the narrow stone doorway of the Earl's Hall, through whichhe had passed; from the threshold she saw him standing a little wayoff, with his eyes still fixed on her. Again he signed to her, andbegan to move along the short passage that leads to the winding stair.But instead of following him further, she fell on the floor in a fit.The poor lady was thoroughly persuaded that she was not long tosurvive this vision, and her foreboding proved true. From her bed shenever rose. Fever and delirium supervened in a few days and she died.Of course it is possible that fever, already approaching, had touchedher brain when she was visited by the phantom, and that it had noexternal existence.
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