William Carleton

“ There stood Skinadre, like the very Genius of Famine, surrounded by distress, raggedness, feeble hunger, and tottering disease, in all the various aspects of pitiable suffering, hopeless desolation, and that agony of the heart which impresses wildness upon the pale cheek, makes the eye at once dull and eager, parches the mouth and gives to the voice of misery tones that are hoarse and hollow. There he stood, striving to blend consolation with deceit, and in the name of religion and charity subjecting the helpless wretches to fraud and extortion. ”

“ The mother, we said on glancing at her, paused—but the chord of love and sorrow had been touched, and poor Mave, unable any longer to restrain her feelings, burst out into tears, and wept aloud on heading the name and sufferings of her lover. Her father looked at her, and his brow got sad; but there was no longer the darkness of resentment or indignation there; so true is it that suffering chastens the heart into its noblest affections, and purges it of the gloomier and grosser passions. ”

“ Still such they knew to be the natural affection and tenderness of his heart, his benevolence and generosity, in spite of his occasional bursts of passion, that they could not reconcile to themselves the notion that he had ever murdered a fellow creature. Every one knows how slow the heart of wife or child is to entertain such a terrible suspicion against a husband or a parent, and that the discovery of their guilt comes upon the spirit with a weight of distress and agony that is great in proportion to the confidence felt in them. ”

“ Dalton pressed her hand, and looking tenderly upon her face, replied:
“Dear Sarah, forgive me; your dhrame is both thrue and false. It is true that I like you—that I pity you; but you forbid me to say that—well it is true, I say, that I like you; but I can't say more. The only girl I love in the sense you mane, is Mave Sullivan. I could not tell you an untruth, Sarah; nor don't desave yourself. I like you, but I love her.” ”

“ It is impossible, however, to describe the various aspects and claims of misery which presented themselves at Skinadre's house. The poor people flitted to and fro silently and dejectedly, wasted, feeble, and sickly—sometimes in small groups of twos and threes, and sometimes a solitary individual might be seen hastening with earnest but languid speed, as if the life of some dear child or beloved parent, of a husband or wife, or perhaps, the lives of a whole farcify, depended upon his or her arrival with food. ”

“ The general destitution, the famine, sickness and death, which had poured such misery and desolation over the land, left, as might be expected, their terrible traces behind them. Indeed the sufferings which a year of famine and disease—and they usually either accompany or succeed each other—inflicts upon the multitudes of poor, are such as no human pen could at all describe, so as to portray a picture sufficiently faithful to the dreary and death-like spirit which should breath in it. ”

“ The Prophet, indeed, was naturally a plotter. It is not likely, however, that he would ever have thought of projecting the robbery of the Grange, had he not found himself, as he imagined, foiled in his designs upon Mave Sullivan, by the instinctive honor and love of truth which shone so brilliantly in the neglected character of his extraordinary daughter. Having first entrapped her into a promise of secrecy—a promise which he knew death itself would scarcely induce her to violate, he disclosed to her the whole plan in the most plausible and mitigated language. ”

“ Saviour of earth, Mave dear, is it mad you are? You, achora machree, that's! dearer to us all than the apple of our eye, or the very pulse of our hearts—to let you into a plague-house—to let you near the deadly faver that's upon them—where you'd be sure to catch it; an' then—oh, blessed Father. Mave what's come over you, to think of sich a thing?—ay, or to think that we'd let you expose yourself? But it's all the goodness and kindness of your affectionate heart ”

“ Alas! little do our English neighbors know or dream of the horrors which attend a year of severe famine in this unhappy country. The crowds which kept perpetual and incessant siege to the houses of wealthy and even of struggling small farmers, were such! as scarcely any pen could describe. Neither can we render anything like adequate justice to the benevolence and charity—nay, we ought to say, the generosity and magnanimity of this and the middle classes in general, In no country on earth could such noble instances of self-denial and sublime humanity be witnessed. ”

“ When I grew into youth, Sarah, an' thought every one full of honesty an' truth, an' the world all kindness, an' nothin' about me but goodness, an' generosity, an' affection, I was, of coorse, a villain. When I loved the risin' sun—when I looked upon the stars of heaven with a wonderin' and happy heart—when the dawn of mornin' and the last light of the summer evening filled me with joy, and made me love every one and everything about me—the trees, the runnin' rivers, the green fields, and all that God—ha, what am I sayin'?—I was a villain. ”

“ The Prophet, on beholding the man, stood more in surprise than astonishment, and seemed evidently filled more with mortification rather than wonder. He looked around the court with great calmness, and then fastening his eyes upon Sullivan, studied, or I appeared to study, his features for a considerable time. A shadow so dark or we should rather say, so fearfully black settled upon his countenance, that it gave him an almost supernatural aspect; it looked in fact, as if the gloom of his fate had fallen upon him in the midst of his plans and iniquities. ”

“ We know that the most savage animals as well as the most timid will, when impelled by its ravenous clamors, alike forget every other appetite but that which is necessary for the sustainment of life. Urged by it alone, they will sometimes approach and assail the habitations of man, and, in the fury of the moment, expose themselves to his power, and dare his resentment; just as a famine mob will do, when urged by the same instinct, in a year of scarcity. ”

“ And in truth there is no doubt whatsoever, that the intensity of their sufferings, and the natural panic which was occasioned by the united ravages of disease and famine, had weakened the powers of their understanding, and impressed upon their bearing and features an expression which seemed partly the wild excitement of temporary frenzy, and partly the dull, hopeless apathy of fatuity—a state to which it is well known that misery, sickness, and hunger, all together, had brought down the strong intellect and reason of the wretched and famishing multitudes. ”

“ We can only say, that the famine crowds of that awful year should have been seen in order to have been understood and felt. The whole country was in a state of dull but frantic tumult, and the wild crowds as they came and went in the perpetration of their melancholy outrages, were worn down by such starling evidences of general poverty and suffering, as were enough to fill the heart with fear as well as pity, even to look upon. ”

“ And the widow—emblem of desolation and dependence—how shall she meet and battle with the calamities of this fearful season? She out of whose heart these very calamities draw forth the remembrances of him she has lost, with such vividness that his past virtues are added to her present sufferings; and his manly love as a husband—his tenderness as a parent—his protecting hand and ever kind heart, crush her solitary spirit by their memory, and drag it down to the utmost depths of affliction. ”

“ Her extreme youthfulness was touching in the highest degree, and to the simplicity of her beauty was added that unbroken stillness which gives to the lifeless face of youth the only charm that death has to bestow, while it fills the heart I to its utmost depths with the awful conviction that that is the slumber which no human care nor anxious passion shall ever break, The babe, thin and pallid, from the affliction of its young and unfortunate mother, could hardly be looked, upon, in consequence of its position, without tears. ”

“ When old Dalton first noticed the strange man getting upon the table, the appearance of Sullivan, associated, as it had been, by the language of his counsel, with some vague notion of his resurrection from the grave, filled his mind with such a morbid and uncertain feeling of everything about him that he began to imagine himself in a dream, and that his reason must soon awaken to the terrible reality of his situation. ”

“ The evening, which was now far advanced, had impressed on it a character of such dark and hopeless desolation as weighed down the heart with a feeling of cold and chilling gloom that was communicated by the dreary aspect of every thing around. The sky was obscured by a heavy canopy of low, dull clouds that had about them none of the grandeur of storm, but lay overhead charged with those wintry deluges which we feel to be so unnatural and alarming in autumn, whose bounty and beauty they equally disfigure and destroy. ”

“ On the contrary, she clung to her fiercely, shouting out—
“I won't give you up yet—I love you too well for that—no, no, it's fond of you I'm gettin'. I'll hug you, mother, dear; ay will I, and kiss you too, an' lave my mark behind me!” and, as she spoke, her step-mother felt her face coming in savage proximity to her own.
“If you don't keep away, Sarah,” said the other, “I'll stab you. What do you mane, you bloody devil? It is going to tear my flesh with your teeth you are? Hould off! or, as heaven's above us, I'll stab you with the knife.” ”

“ I see now, dear Con, the raison for the sorrow that's in your face; the heart-break an' the care that's there; I see, indeed, how low in spirits an' how hopeless you are; an' I see that although your eye is clear still it's heavy; heavy with hard affliction; but then, what is love, Con dear, if it's to fly away when these things come on us? Is it now, then, that you'd expect me to desert you?—to keep cool with you, or to lave you when you have no other heart to go to for any comfort but mine? Oh, no! Con dear. You own Mave Sullivan is none of these. ”