CHAPTER XXIII.—THE BANSHEE OF CASTLE ABBEY.
One may become accustomed to anything, even the notion of visiting a real lord in an ancient abbey.
“We owe this to you, Maria,” cried Billie ecstatically, as the motor car climbed slowly up a wooded hill, on the summit of which stood Lord Glenarm’s Irish home.
“Remember how much I owe to you, Billie,” answered Maria. “I might never have been here now, but for you. It was the jewels you guarded so carefully for me that furnished the funds for my trip abroad and a year’s study in Paris, before I finally began singing again in opera. I feel that there is nothing too good for the Motor Maids and Miss Campbell.”
“That was just an act of friendship,” protested Billie.
“There are not many acts of real friendship,” said Maria, “and not many young girls who would have endured what the Motor Maids endured for my sake. Lord Glenarm has heard the whole story and I can assure you he is as proud to know you as I am.”
There is no getting around a good, substantial, sincere compliment, and the four young girls could not conceal the pride they felt in Maria’s praises.
“They are four sweet lassies, as David Ramsay remarked,” observed Miss Campbell, and everybody smiled; for Miss Campbell often quoted David Ramsay lately and had received two long letters from him since she had been in the land of the Shamrock.
As they neared the top of the hill, the landscape unfolded before them in a splendid panorama,—fields and meadows; dark splashes of green marking forests of oak and beech trees, and here and there a thin haze of smoke curling up from the chimney of a farm house. Toward the west was the soft blue expanse of the sea.
“They do say that the good Saint Patrick preached the gospel once on this hillside and converted a king and hundreds of his people to Christianity,” Maria was saying, when they heard a voice calling excitedly:
“Billie, Elinor, Nancy, Mary!” and Beatrice Colchester dashed up. She was riding a fat gray pony which was puffing indignantly like an apoplectic old gentleman who had been made to climb a steep hill against his will.
Behind her rode Lord Glenarm on a hunting-horse, and barking and yelping at his heels were half a dozen dogs.
It was all very jolly and natural,—no pomp and ceremony about visiting a real lord who was as simple and unaffected as Billie’s own father. At last they drew up at the gate of the Abbey, and for once in his useful life the “Comet” seemed decidedly out of place and inappropriate.
The left wing of Castle Abbey was a picturesque pile of crumbling ruins overhung with ivy and climbing rose bushes. Here had been the chapel of the monks and the cloistered walk wherein they had paced up and down telling their beads. In this quadrangle, also, had been the original garden of the monastery and a garden it still was, carefully tended by an aged Irish gardener and his assistants, and filled with bright masses of old-fashioned flowers. The other wing of the Abbey, where had once been many of the cells and the monks’ refectory or dining-hall, was now the dwelling place of Lord Glenarm for at least six weeks in the year.
“Uncle says that one wing is a ‘reflectory’ and the other is a ‘refectory,’” Beatrice informed the four girls, while she conducted them on a flying trip over the entire place. “The old cloisters are the reflectory and the refectory is now our living-room, a sort of dining-room and drawing-room combined.”
The ancient dining-hall, however, was quite large enough for all its present purposes and could have accommodated a good-sized household with ease. The old carved black oak dining-table was lost in the vastness of the apartment. Suits of armor were ranged along the walls at intervals, and Billie was amazed to find that one or two of them were not a whit taller than she was herself. From a gallery running around two sides of the hall hung several faded battle flags. There were a few portraits on the walls of dark-haired, rather fierce-looking knights and their beguiling ladies, also dark-haired with gentle blue eyes. The only modern object in the entire room was a grand piano at the far end under a stained glass window.
“Beatrice, do we sleep in cells?” demanded Mary Price.
“Yes,” answered the English girl. “There are dozens of them opening on the galleries. They are just as they were centuries ago, rather small for sleeping-rooms, but, as Uncle says, it’s quite like camping out to come up here for a visit; and the cells are much larger than tents.”
“Are they haunted?” asked Mary.
Beatrice smiled mysteriously.
“People claim to have seen things,” she said, “but I never did. Almost every castle in Ireland has its banshee, you know, but it only appears before a death in the family.”
“And what is the banshee of Castle Abbey?” the four girls asked in an excited chorus.
“Now, if I tell you,” exclaimed Beatrice, her blue eyes twinkling with fun, “you will be afraid to go to bed alone, and you know there is only one bed to a cell and it’s a very small bed indeed!”
“Oh, please, please tell!” they cried.
“Well,” said Beatrice, “the banshee of Castle Abbey isn’t anybody at all. It’s a noise——”
“A what?”
“It’s a bell and it rings to announce an approaching death in the family.”
“Where is the bell?”
“It is in the belfry of the old tower. But there is simply no way to climb to the top if anybody wanted to. No one can remember when steps have been there.”
“Did you ever hear it?” asked Mary.
“No, indeed, and I hope I never shall, but the night Grandpapa died in London, old Michael, the gardener, claims to have heard it ring out three times.”
It all sounded very remote and interesting to the four young Americans, who had been brought up in a place that did not antedate a hundred years, and still had once seemed old enough to them.
“Why don’t they take down the bell?” asked Mary.
“Oh, there’s a superstition about that, too, and an old verse:
“‘The hour the iron bell doth fall
Brings trouble to Kilkenty Hall;
If hatred turns to love before,
Trouble will not cross the door.’”
“What does that mean?” inquired Mary.
“Nobody has any more idea than you have. It is just an old saying that has always been connected with the bell. Kilkenty Hall, you know, is the home of my other uncle, the Duke. You see, the Hall always goes to the eldest son and the Abbey to the second son for his lifetime.”
“Suppose there isn’t any second son?” persisted Mary.
“But there always has been,” laughed Beatrice.
“Then little Arthur will be master of the Abbey some day,” thought Billie, but as Beatrice had kept well away from the subject of her lost cousin, the girls were careful not to mention his name. Billie’s mind was filled with vague suspicions and conjectures still too lost in the mists of uncertainty to put into words. Suppose, for instance, she sought out the terrible Duke of Kilkenty and told him—well, what would she tell him? Would it be a friendly act to bring certain disaster on the heads of probably innocent people just because she had seen a pair of small-sized man’s slippers and a child’s book of animals in a tenement house room in Edinburgh? Wherever little Arthur was, no doubt he was happier than he had ever been before.
All these thoughts were flying through her head, while she sipped her tea in the old garden late that afternoon. After tea, the five young girls went for a walk, Miss Campbell repaired to her room for a nap, and Maria and Lord Glenarm remained in the garden chatting.
In the valley back of the Abbey, Beatrice pointed out to them Kilkenty Hall, which was comparatively modern, having been burned to the ground and rebuilt within the last hundred years. Because it was like walking on a soft carpet to step on the springy turf and because also the air was cool and sweet, the friends joined hands and ran down the hillside laughing and shrieking at the tops of their voices. At the foot, following a path through a woodland, they presently came out near a little village, picturesque enough at a distance, but wretched in the extreme on closer view.
“These are the tenants of the Hall,” Beatrice explained. “The Duke has always detested Ireland and he won’t do anything for his Irish tenants.”
“What a shame,” exclaimed Billie. Everything she heard of this man painted him in more detestable colors.
As Beatrice led the way down the village street, ragged women and children, barefooted and unkempt, bobbed and courtesied to her. The alley, for it was hardly broader than one, widened at length into a broad sweep of green, on one side of which stood a very old church and, adjoining that, a small stone cottage in a garden. A priest was standing at the garden gate intently watching three men at work on the green with a measuring line and surveyor’s instruments.
“Good-day to you, my lady,” cried the old priest, whose jovial round face was wreathed in smiles. “And have you or your uncle heard some of the good news that’s floating about the valley this day?”
“Why, no, Father O’Toole, what is it?” asked Beatrice surprised.
“Thanks be to God and all his holy saints, our prayers have been answered, and His Grace is turning the green into a new model village for his tenants. There’s to be a schoolhouse on it, your ladyship. It’s myself that has seen the plans with my own eyes, and, what is more, the church is to be rebuilt and no expense to be spared, and the rectory greatly enlarged.”
“Why, Father O’Toole, I can’t believe you!” cried Beatrice. “It seems too good to be true.”
“’Tis true, though, my lady, and more to come. The O’Connors this very morning returned to their old home and word is out that Feargus may come back and no fear of arrest at all, at all.”
Here was news, indeed, for the Motor Maids!
“But, Father O’Toole,” cried Beatrice, “what has happened to His Grace?”
She had never called him uncle in all her life.
“It’s maybe a penance to bring back the little Lord Arthur,” said the good priest; “and I’m thinkin’, too,” he added in a lower voice, “the lad might be better off where he is, poor child. He wouldn’t have lasted another year under that blackguard of a doctor.”
The walk was cut short by the astounding news of the Duke of Kilkenty’s penance. Beatrice could scarcely wait to tell it to her uncle, and the girls presently left the two together in the garden while they retired to their rooms to rest before dinner.
This formal meal was served at eight o’clock and Miss Campbell had earnestly adjured them to wear their very best, having overheard Lord Glenarm say that some of the county people were driving over for dinner.
“What luxurious lives these people lead,” she had exclaimed to Billie, “and they call themselves poor! Think of their servants and their housekeepers and their grand old homes. I suppose our little American homes are like so many rabbit holes to them after their fine castles and their grand city mansions.”
“There are plenty of little rabbit holes over here, too,” answered Billie, recalling the abode of Miss Felicia Rivers and the rickety houses in the Old Town at Edinburgh.
But who could think of rabbit holes at eight o’clock that evening, when with fluttering hearts the Motor Maids peeped over the balcony and saw below the great table, shining with silver and damask, on one side of a long screen always set up for meals, and on the other side some half dozen new guests added to the party? There was Beatrice in a simple white muslin, talking and laughing with a ruddy-faced, delightful young man with a budding mustache; there was Lord Glenarm, looking every inch the nobleman he was, conversing easily with the mother of the ruddy-faced young person; and there was Maria Cortinas, beautiful enough to be any lord’s lady, surrounded by a circle of admiring people.
Was it all a dream, they asked themselves. Were they really four humble little West Haven High School girls on a tour of the British Isles? And was that Maria, the daughter of old Mrs. Ruggles, who kept the Sailor’s Inn near West Haven? But it was all real enough, indeed, and presently Billie found herself seated next to a jovial gentleman with side whiskers who asked her a hundred questions about their motor trip across the continent. It seemed that their fame had gone before them, and the four girls were the objects of much polite and well-bred curiosity.
It was midnight before the last carriage departed. Then, each with a bedroom candlestick, they filed along the ghostly corridor to bed.
“I am that tired that the ghosts of the good fathers, if they walk to-night, will have to make a lot of noise to wake me up,” thought Billie, stretching herself in the comfortable little bed. “What would the monks think if they could see their cells now,” her thoughts continued, “with curtains at the windows and rugs on the floors and every other cell turned into a luxurious dressing-room? They would say ’vanitas vanitatum,’ I suppose.”
Then she sank into a deep sleep.
As the night wore on and the darkness outside deepened, because the moon had set and the sky was overcast, Billie had a dream. She thought that one of the good fathers was leading her by the hand through the long corridors, across the garden and into the ruined chapel on the other side. Many monks were in the church, chanting in a deep chorus over and over again the same words: “Vanitas vanitatum.” The wind howled and the air was damp and chill. Suddenly one of the monks held up his hand for silence; they crouched on their knees and a bell boomed out in the stillness.
Billie was wide awake in an instant. She sat up in bed and listened. The ancient abbey was filled with ghostly sounds. The rain beat against the window and the wind howled mournfully. It seemed to be saying “Vanitas vanitatum.”
“That’s what I thought was the chanting of the monks,” she said to herself. “I suppose I had one of my usual nightmares.”
Back under the covers she crept, glad of the warmth and comfort after that gruesome dream.