“I dunno what way was in thim,” he replied, cautiously, “but b’lieve me ’twas thim that could sew!”
At this point a long and seemingly tortured squeal from the Puppet told that the rabbit had at long last broken covert. I cannot now remember if he or the rabbit had the pre-eminence—I think the rabbit—but the immediate result was that for us the story of those Leprechaun brethren remained unfinished, which is, perhaps, more stimulating, and leaves the imagination something to play with.
CHAPTER XV
FAITH AND FAIRIES
In our parts of Ireland we do not for a moment pretend to be too civilised for superstition. When Cromwell offered the alternative of “Hell or Connaught,” with, no doubt, the comfortable feeling that it was a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, more creatures than he knew of accepted the latter refuge. And when, in the County Cork, the ancient saying was proved that “Beyond the Leap”—which is a village about twelve miles inland from the Western Ocean—was indeed “beyond the Law,” and that the King’s writ, if it ran at all, ran for its life in the wrong direction, sanctuary was found there, also, for more than the hard-pressed people of the land.
The “Fairies and Bridhogues and Witches” of the old song fled west and south; in Galway, in Kerry and in Cork, they are still with us. Have I not seen and handled a little shoe that was found in a desolate pass of the Bantry mountains? It was picked up seventy or eighty years ago by a countryman, who was crossing a pass at dawn to fetch the doctor to his child. It is about two and a half inches long, and is of leather, in all respects like a countryman’s brogue, a little worn, as if the wearer had had it in use for some time. The countryman gave it to the doctor, and the doctor’s niece showed it to me, and if anyone can offer a more reasonable suggestion than that a Leprechaun made it for a fairy customer, who, like Cinderella, dropped it at a dance in the mountains, I should be glad to hear it.
At Delphi, in Connemara, to two brothers, a Bishop and a Dean of the Irish Church, many years before its disestablishment, when Bishops were Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and by no means people to be trifled with, to these, and to their sister, there came visibly down the beautiful Erriff river a boatload of fairies. They disembarked at a little strand—one of those smooth and golden river strands that were obviously created in order to be danced on by fairies—and there the fairies danced, under the eyes of “Tom of Tuam” (thus I have heard that Bishop irreverently spoken of by my cousin Nannie Martin), and of his brother, the Dean, and of their sister; but to what music I know not. They were possibly related to the Ross fairies, as it was noted (by the Bishop’s sister, I believe) that they “wore red caps, and were very small and graceful.”
Not half a mile from Drishane Gate there is a little wood that has not the best of reputations. At its western end there is an opening, out of the road that traverses it, that has been immemorially called the Fairies’ Gap. I have in vain striven to obtain the facts as to the Fairies’ Gap. Such information as was obtainable had no special connection with Those People, yet was vague and disquieting. That there was Something within in the wood, and it might come out at you when you’d be going through it late of an evening, but if “you could have a Friendly Ghost to be with you, there could no harm happen you.” The thought of the friendly ghost is strangely soothing and reassuring; perhaps oftener than one knows one has a kind and viewless companion to avert danger.
Only eighteen months ago I was told of an old man who was coming from the West into Castle Townshend village to get his separation allowance. “A decent old man he was too, and he a tailor, with a son in the army in France. He was passing through the wood, and it duskish, and what would he see but the road full of ladies, ten thousand of them, he thought. They passed him out, going very quietly, like nuns they were, and there was one o’ them, and when she passed him out, he said she looked at him so pitiful, ‘Faith,’ says the old tailor, ‘if I had a fi’ pun note to my name I’d give it in Masses for her soul!’”
I was told by a woman, a neighbour of mine, of a young wife who lived among these hills, and was caught away by the fairies and hidden under Liss Ard Lake. “A little girl there was, of the Driscolls, that was sent to Skibbereen on a message, and when she was coming home, at the bridge, east of the lake, one met her, and took her in under the lake entirely. And she seen a deal there, and great riches; and who would she meet only the young woman that was whipped away. ‘Let you not eat e’er a thing,’ says she to the little girl, ‘the way Theirselves ’ll not be able to keep you.’ She told the little girl then that she should tell her husband that on a night in the week she would go riding with the fairies, and to let him wait at the cross-roads above on Bluidth. Herself would be on the last horse of them, and he a white horse, and when the husband ’d see her, he should catch a hold of her, and pull her from the horse, and keep her. The little girl went home, and she told the husband. The husband said surely he would go and meet her the way she told him; but the father of the woman told him he would be better leave her with them now they had her, as he would have no more luck with her, and in the latter end the husband was said by him, and he left the woman with them.”
I know the cross-roads above on Bluidth; often, coming back from hunting, “and it duskish,” with the friendly hounds round my horse, and my home waiting for me, I have thought of the lost woman that was riding the white horse at the end of the fairy troop, and of the tragic eyes that watched in vain for the coward husband.