I now knew whereabouts he was, and that my Cork friends were the quarry at which we aimed. I did as I was ordered, and we immediately pulled on shore, where, leaving two strong fellows in charge of the boat, with instructions to fire their pistols and shove off a couple of boat-lengths, should any suspicious circumstance indicating an attack take place, we separated, like a pulk of Cossacks coming to the charge, but without the hourah, with orders to meet before Pat Doolan’s door, as speedily as our legs could carry us. We had landed about a cable’s length to the right of the high precipitous bank—up which we stole in straggling parties—on which that abominable congregation of the most filthy huts ever pig grunted in is situated, called the Holy Ground. Pat Doolan’s domicile was in a little dirty lane, about the middle of the village. Presently ten strapping fellows, including the lieutenant, were before the door, each man with his stretcher in his hand. It was a very tempestuous, although moonlight night, occasionally clear, with the moonbeams at one moment sparkling brightly in the small ripples on the filthy puddles before the door, and on the gem like water-drops that hung from the eaves of the thatched roof, and lighting up the dark statue like figures of the men, and casting their long shadows strongly against the mud wall of the house; at another, a black cloud as it flew across her disk, cast every thing into deep shade, while the only noise we heard was the hoarse dashing of the distant surf, rising and falling on the fitful gusts of the breeze. We tried the door. It was fast.
“Surround the house, men,” said the lieutenant, in a whisper. He rapped loudly. “Pat Doolan, my man, open the door, will ye?” No answer. “If you don’t, we shall make free to break it open, Patrick, dear.”
All this while the light of a fire, or of candles, streamed through the joints of the door. The threat at length appeared to have the desired effect. A poor decrepid old man undid the bolt and let us in. “Ohon a reel Ohon a reel What make you all this boder for—come you to help us to wake poor ould Kate there, and bring you the whisky wid you?”
“Old man, where is Pat Doolan?” said the lieutenant.
“Gone to borrow whisky, to wake ould Kate, there—the howling will begin whenever Mother Doncannon and Mistress Conolly come over from Middleton, and I look for dem every minute.”
There was no vestige of any living thing in the miserable hovel, except the old fellow. On two low trestles, in the middle of the floor, lay a coffin with the lid on, on the top of which was stretched the dead body of an old emaciated woman in her grave-clothes, the quality of which was much finer than one could have expected to have seen in the midst of the surrounding squalidness. The face of the corpse was uncovered, the hands were crossed on the breast, and there was a plate of salt on the stomach.
An iron cresset, charged with coarse rancid oil, hung from the roof, the dull smoky red light flickering on the dead corpse, as the breeze streamed in through the door and numberless chinks in the walls, making the cold, rigid, sharp features appear to move, and glimmer, and gibber as it were, from the changing shades. Close to the head, there was a small door opening into an apartment of some kind, but the coffin was placed so near it, that one could not pass between the body and the door.
“My good man,” said Treenail, to the solitary mourner, “I must beg leave to remove the body a bit, and have the goodness to open that door.”
“Door, yere honour! It’s no door o’mine—and it’s not opening that same, that old Phil Carrol shall busy himself wid.”
“Carline,” said Mr Treenail, quick and sharp, “remove the body.” It was done.