For forty long years, as the neighbours declared,
His abode had ne'er once been cleaned or repaired.[360]
But in personal appearance he was neat enough, and might be daily seen, in the stiff high cravat of the Regency, emerging from its precincts. Dr. Atkinson and Charles Kernan say that, though Magan was a familiar object to them all the year round, they never saw him accompanied by mortal in his walks. He never married, would sit in solitude, or stalk from room to room like Marlay's ghost. Perhaps the voice of conscience muttered, 'You are said to have sought the confidence of men in order to betray it; show the world by your frigid attitude that such is not likely to be true.' He was reported to have wealth: how he acquired it seemed a mystery.
In 1842, Dr. Madden, when engaged on his 'Lives of the United Irishmen,' had interviews, as he tells us, with Mrs. Macready, who, as Miss Moore, had been with Lord Edward the day before his arrest;[361] but her son informed me that as Magan was then alive and residing near at hand, she did not mention his name to Dr. Madden. Magan, however, cannot fail to have heard of the inquiries being instituted around him by Madden, and his nervous temperament was not calmed by that knowledge. He died in 1843, during a period of great popular excitement and when fears prevailed that the events of '98 were about to be renewed.
'Magan's remains lie in our vaults' writes a local priest.[362]
'By his will he requires a perpetual yearly mass to be celebrated by all priests of this church for the repose of his soul, so that I have been praying for him once each year since I became attached to this parish, without knowing anything of his antecedents.'
Dr. Dirham had been residing within a few doors of Magan's house, and on the death of that gentleman it occurred to him to move to the more ample accommodation it afforded. His account, though wholly unimportant, is curious in its way. For years Miss Magan kept constantly promising to vacate in his favour, stating that some small cottage in some rural spot would be much more suitable to her lonely life; but an irresistible fascination bound her to the dingy rooms in which she had vegetated since the dark days of '98. Francis Magan, by a will of ten lines, had left all his property to Elizabeth, his sister, and directed that his funeral might be private. The rooms were now all shut up, and Miss Magan herself ate, drank, and slept upon the landing. For twenty years the drawing-room had not been opened, owing to the fact that a younger sister had died there; and the other apartments of the house were locked up for reasons equally odd. A strange indisposition to permit the humblest visitor to enter the place, was shown in various ways. A quarter of a century seemed to have elapsed since the dust-pit had been emptied, and boards were erected round it which enabled the Magans to add daily débris, until at last they became dust themselves. When Dr. Dirham came into possession of the place[363] he found the garden covered from end to end with some feet deep of cinders, through which rank nettles struggled like the stings of the self-consciousness that made life with Magan the reverse of roseate. In a retired nook stood a bottle drainer, the wooden bars of which had fallen in from decay, smashing in its descent the emblems of conviviality it once enshrined, and through the aid of which profitable secrets may erst have been gained. The sewers and gratings had become choked; and the deep area at the rear of the house was filled with eight feet of stagnant water. A subterranean cell, adjoining this fosse, and by courtesy styled the 'coal-vault,' opened on another dark chamber; and a feeling of awe crept over the Doctor when, impelled by curiosity to gauge its depth, he cast a stone into the pit, and listened until its descent terminated in the sound of splashing water below. The hinges of the hall door were so stiff during Miss Magan's tenancy, that Dr. Fleming, who as a cousin once ventured to visit the moneyed recluse, had to call at a neighbouring chemist's for sweet oil ere he felt safe in crying 'Open Sesame.' Seated on the cold landing, in the midst of chests of mysterious treasure, this 'unprotected female,' trembling in every nerve lest friends should wrest it from her grasp, gloomily passed the closing years of a hidden life. Once, on a false alarm of fire, her anguish was pitiable, and, to the surprise of everybody, she relinquished the custody of some chests to a neighbour,[364] Mr. Cotton, who, however, detained them only a few hours. At another neighbour's, Miss Flanagan's, who kept an old established bakery, Miss Magan always got her bank-notes changed; but, fearful of being waylaid between the covered car she occupied, and the door at which it stopped, Miss Flanagan was always obliged to get into the vehicle and place in the hands of its shrinking occupant the metallic equivalent for the crisp new note. Some arrears of rent had accumulated at the time of Miss Magan's death, and a term of years in the lease remained unexpired; but her property was so left that the landlord's claim could not be satisfied. The house was in such a ruined state that the landlord, Colonel King, was glad to accept half the former rent. Although an extremely old house, only one tenant, Archbishop Carpenter,[365] occupied it before Magan. In its back parlour had been ordained Dean Lube and many other old priests well known in Dublin during the struggle for Catholic Emancipation; and so searchingly severe was the operation of penal law, that students for ordination had to be smuggled into the Archbishop's house by the stable in Island Street, afterwards turned to ignoble purposes. An altar stood in a recess of this parlour, which the Magans changed into a cupboard.
William Allingham would seem to have had the house in his eye when, some years later, he wrote:—
Outside, the old plaster, all spatter and stain,
Looked spotty in sunshine and streaky in rain;
The window-sills sprouted with mildewy grass,
And the panes from being broken were known to be glass.
Within there were carpets and cushions of dust;
The wood was half rot, and the metal half rust;
Old curtains—half cobwebs—hung grimly aloof:
'Twas a spider's Elysium from cellar to roof.