By the Barrow River, and Other Stories

by Edmund Leamy

I had smoked and read for two or three hours, and then got up, stretched my legs and walked about my sitting room. And for the first time, I think, I paid serious attention to the pictures on the walls. With one exception, they were all photographs. This exception was the allegorical representation of Hope—a beautiful female figure. The others were photos of family groups, churches, etc., and they suggested in an unmistakeable way a “job lot” at an auction.

This suggestion set me speculating on the fortunes of their former owner. And what encouraged me in this was the character of the largest photograph. It was a wedding group, evidently taken just after the arrival from church. The persons forming it stood on the steps of a rather fine house, over the porch of which the word ‘Welcome’ was formed in rosebuds. There were in the group about twenty persons in all. The bride, with a bouquet in her hand, was standing beside the bridegroom, on the top step, and both came out very well in the photo, and as the central figures, of course they naturally excited more interest than the others. The bride was tall, shapely and decidedly good-looking, while the bridegroom, on the other hand, was stumpy, thick-necked, and of an ill-favoured countenance, and apparently much older than the bride. Was it a match of love or convenience? How did it fare with the two standing here side by side, whose future life till death would them part were linked together for good or ill, for happiness or misery?

An idle question, the reader may say, but then it was in an idle hour I put it to myself. As I turned from this photo to the others, it occurred to me that all of them were somehow connected. There were photos of two country churches, one with a tower and steeple recently erected at the time the picture was taken if one might judge from the clearly defined lines of masonry, and the low size of the firs and yews planted round it. The other had a square tower and was almost concealed by ivy, and a glimpse was given of the churchyard and of some of the tombstones, including a fine Celtic cross. In one or other of these I decided the marriage had taken place. In the new church doubtless, for the photo was mounted on a grey toned card, as was that of the wedding group. Moreover, both were from the same photographic studio of Grafton-street, Dublin. The photo of the old church was by a different artist, and was mounted differently. The remaining photos were of the Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde, the tomb of Napoleon, and the Louvre—souvenirs, no doubt, of the honeymoon spent in Paris, and there was one of a pretty cottage, which was, I surmised, the first home of the newly married couple. In this way I explained satisfactorily to myself all the pictures, save that of the old church, with the glimpse of the graveyard. Then it seemed to me that I had arrived at the end of the story, and so I gave it up and returned to my lounge, my book and my pipe.

That evening a friend from town dropped in after dinner and spent a few hours with me. I went down to the station to see him off by the last train, which went about eleven o’clock. Returning alone in a starless night, and with the damp breath of the sea fog clinging to my face, and the long, low moan of the ocean falling upon my ears, a ‘creepy’ feeling came over me. I was like one rescued from a harassing but unseen enemy when I got back into the shelter of my lodgings, and had closed and bolted the door.

I went almost straight to my bedroom, and I found myself leaving the gas lighting, an unusual circumstance with me. After a while I fell asleep, and began, as I thought, to dream. It seemed to me as though I was sitting alone in the sittingroom downstairs, and that I was looking curiously at the pictures, tracing from them again the little history already given. Then my eyes rested steadily on the picture of the old church, and then I thought that the picture itself had vanished, and that I was actually standing at the gate of the churchyard. Over the church and the little cemetery the morning was breaking, and the grass and leaves appeared to be quite wet as if the heavy rain had only just ceased. Then, when about to move away from the gate, I saw a white, and at first, shadowy figure standing by the Celtic cross in the graveyard. In a few seconds it seemed to become a defined and substantial form. It was that of a lady of about thirty years of age. She wore about her head drapery similar to that on the head of the allegorical picture of Hope, which, as I have said, was among the pictures in the sitting-room, but the face was different—it was that of the bride! Then I saw the figure leave the cross and pass out by another gate than that at which I was standing and go along the road. I felt myself drawn after it, and it seemed to me that both it and I flew rather than walked, so swiftly did we pass over the road.

We must have gone some miles when the figure stopped in front of a rose-clad cottage, identical with the cottage in the photo.

The figure entered the cottage, and I thought I should see it no more. But in a second the exterior of the cottage disappeared, and I saw instead a bedroom, in which a woman was lying. It was the face and figure which I had followed. The face was pale, and she appeared ill and suffering. By the bed was a man, whose back was at first towards me, but soon he moved and I saw that he was the image of the bridegroom. The woman raised herself uneasily on the pillow. Her eyes were wide and glistening, and she made a gesture towards a table at the head of the bed, on which were two or three medicine bottles. The man, in reply to her gesture, poured out something from one of the bottles into a cup and put it to her lips. She appeared to drink it all, and then, lying back quietly on the pillow, seemed to fall into a deep sleep.

I awoke, and knew I had been dreaming—to my great surprise, found myself in my dressing-gown in the sitting-room, to which I must have made my way during my sleep.