It has never been my custom to follow cases, on which the solemn judgment of the law has been pronounced, beyond those immediate consequences of that judgment which the connection between a lawyer and his client has compelled me to superintend. But there was something in this case which both attracted and disquieted me, and one day in vacation I found myself at the grated prison-door, seeking admission to the cell of the condemned. The old woman received me quietly. She seemed to have forgotten me, or, at least, how active a part I had taken in the proceedings which had ended in dooming her to a shameful death. She was taciturn and moody; and, the longer I remained, the more satisfied I became that her mind was now unsettled, if it had not been before. I went several times after that, and gradually, by kind words and the gift of such simple comforts as aged matrons most desire, I won her confidence so far that, in her faltering, disconnected way, she told me all that sad history of woe and wrong and suffering which had brought an untimely grave to Michael Herican, and a felon's fate to her. It was one of those tales of falsity and sorrow which we cannot hear too often, and whose moral none of us can learn too well.
The little village of Easky, in the County Sligo, was, when this present century was young, one of those lonesome, scanty-peopled hamlets whose very loneliness and isolation render them more dear and homelike to their few inhabitants. The waters of the Northern Ocean foamed about the rocks where its fisher-boats were moored. The feet of its rambling children trod the rough paths and crumpled the grey masses of the wild Slieve-Gamph hills. Thus hemmed in between the mountains and the sea, it was almost separated from the world. The white sails that now and then flitted across the far horizon, and the slow, lazy car that twice a month brought over his majesty's mail-bags from Dromore, were all that Easky ever had to tell it that there were nations and kingdoms on the earth, or that its own precipices on the one side, and its weed-strewn rocks upon the other, did not embrace the whole of human joys and sorrows.
In this solitary village the forefathers of Patrick Carrol had dwelt for immemorial years. So far back as tradition went they had been fishermen, and the last remaining scion now followed the ancestral calling. He was a sort of hero among his fellow-villagers. True, he was as poor as the poorest of them all, and had no personal boast save of his vigorous arms and honest heart. But his father, contrary to the custom of his race, had refused to lay his bones within an ocean bed, and had died fighting in the bloody streets of Killala. All victims of '98 were canonized by those rude freemen, and the mantle of honor fell from the father upon the children, and gave to Patrick Carrol a deserved and well-maintained pre-eminence. And so, when Bridget Deery became his wife, the whole hamlet agreed that the village favorite had found her proper husband, and, when the little Mary saw the light, the christening holiday was kept by every neighbor, old or young.
Four years of perfect happiness flew by. Death or misfortune came to other families, but not to theirs. The little hoarded wealth, hid away in the dark corner, grew yearly greater. Health and affection dwelt unremittingly upon the hearthstone, and the hearts of the father and mother were as full of gratitude as the heart of the child was of merriment and glee. But the four years had an end, and carried with them, into the trackless past, the sunshine of their lives. One long, long summer day the wife sat among the rocks, watching for her husband's boat, and playing with the prattler at her side. The boat came not. The sun went down. The gathering clouds in the offing loomed up threateningly. The hoarse northwesters felt their way across the waters, and whistled in her ears, as she clasped the child to her bosom and hurried home out of the storm. As the gale strengthened with the darkness, she fell upon her knees, and all that wakeful night besought the Mother and the saints to keep her baby's father from the awful danger. In vain; for when the morning dawned, the waves washed up his oars and helm upon the beach, and an hour later his drowned corse was found beneath the broken crags of Anghris Head.
For the first few years after that fatal shock the widowed mother lived she knew not how. One by one the treasured silver pieces went, till destitution stared her in the face. The charity of her neighbors outdid their means, but even that could not keep her from actual suffering, and work for the lone woman there was absolutely none. What wonder was it, then, that, when the flowers had bloomed three times above the peaceful bed of Patrick Carrol, his widow, more for her child's sake than her own, consented to violate the sanctity of her broken heart, and become the wife of Bernard Davanagh?
Bernard was a bold, reckless, wilful man, and both the mother and the child soon felt the difference between the dead father and the living. As time passed on, and the boy Bernard was born, the passions of the man grew stronger, and cruel words, and still more cruel blows, became the daily portion of the helpless three. Oh! how often did the widow yearn to lie down with her children by her dead husband's side, in the drear churchyard, and be at peace for ever. But not without them. No, not even to be united with the lost, could she have left them, and so they clung together, closer and closer, as the years rolled on—knowing little of life except its dark page of sorrow.
There never yet was a life without some ray of joy, and, even in the midnight darkness which hung around the childhood of Mary Carrol, there were faint gleams of happiness. Next door but one to their poor cot lived James Herican. He too was a fisherman, and, in better days, had been Patrick Carrol's most intimate and faithful friend. He had remained such to the widow and the fatherless, and, but for him, the family of Bernard Davanagh also might sometimes have perished from want and cold. He was the father of one child, the boy Michael, older by two years than Mary, and doubly endeared to his heart by the mother's early death. The gossips of Easky had wondered, in their simple way, why James Herican and Bridget Carrol did not marry, but the memory of his dead wife and his dead friend forbade the one ever to entertain the thought, and the poor widow was as far from wishing it as he. They were happier as they were; he, by his kindness and true Christian charity, laying up heavenly treasures, which, as the second husband of a second wife, he never could accumulate; she, keeping ever fresh and pure the one love of her maiden's heart, the one hope of reunion in the skies. What, and how different, the end had been, if they had married, the eye of the Eternal can alone discern.
The friendship of these parents descended to the children. In all their sports, their rambles, their labors, (for in that toiling hamlet even tender childhood labored,) Michael Herican and Mary Carrol were together. When her half-brother, eight years younger than herself, grew into boyhood, Michael was his champion against the impositions of larger boys, and taught him all those arts of wood and water craft which village youth so ardently aspire to, and so aptly learn. It could not happen otherwise than that these constantly recurring kindnesses should beget firm and fast affection, and knit together these young hearts in bonds difficult, if not impossible, to sunder.