MAURYA NA GLEANNA.
Or Revenged at Last.
During the year of the ’98 Centennial celebrations, it chanced that I was staying on a short visit with a friend in the county of ——, whose residence was not far from one of the battlefields of the rebellion. Our talk turned one day upon ’98, and I asked him if he knew if any stories of the period were still current in the neighbourhood. He said he was not himself familiar with any. He was not belonging to the county, and had been residing in it only a few years. But he promised to find out if any of the servants or workpeople could give me any information. That evening he informed me there was an old man helping in the garden, now almost past his work, who was at one time a schoolmaster, and had originally come from the county of Antrim, and who had some stories of the rising in the North. The next day I made the old man’s acquaintance, and from him took down the story of Maurya na Gleanna:—
“I wasn’t more nor nine or ten years old when I first saw Maurya na Gleanna, and although I’m over seventy years now I can see her face just as if she was standing there foreninst me. She would have been very tall if it were not for a stoop in her shoulders. Her face was rather long, her cheeks shrunken and almost yellow. Her hair (and there was plenty of it) was tied up in a wisp at the back of her head, and was gray almost to whiteness, while her eyebrows were as dark as the night. Her lips were full and might have once been red, but the colour had left them and they looked dry and blanched. Her eyes were as black as a coal with a red heart that would blaze up for a moment and then become dull.
“She had come into the glen many years before. She had wandered into it of a wild March morning—a Patrick’s morning, too, it was—when the snow lay deep in the glen, and you could hardly see a bit of green for miles around.
“The snow was in a drift against Jack M’Guinness’s door when she knocked at it just after the break of day. There was hardly one astir in the house at the time, but when the knock was repeated the servant-man got up and went to the door and opened it; before he could question the woman he saw standing outside, she had stepped across the threshold.
“Her hair was then, so they afterwards told me, as white as when I first saw her, but there was some colour in her cheeks, nor had it left her lips. A kerchief covered her head, and a shawl thrown over her shoulders was fastened above her breast by a skewer that had been beaten into the semblance of a pike, and which served to keep in its place a bunch of shamrocks. Her head-dress and shoulders were thickly coated with snow, which clung to her dress that stopped short at her ankles. Her feet were bare.
“The man said afterwards that the blaze of her eyes nearly blinded him, and took the word out of his mouth.
“She laid her left hand upon his shoulder, and touching the shamrock with one of the fingers of her right hand, she whispered in a tone suggestive of mystery: