SOME GARDEN GHOSTS

There is no ghost in the garden of the Villino. Neither the meek spirit of Susan nor Tom’s saturnine spectre haunts the peaceful glade where they lie. Juvenal has planted a “Tree of Heaven” at the head of his ever-mourned darling and covered the grave with Forget-me-nots!

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My youth these reminiscences are contributed by Loki’s grandmother was spent in a large country place in Ireland, and to us children—we were six then—certain walks, certain dells in the woods, were assuredly haunted.

The property had long ago belonged to one Lady Tidd, who so adored it that she had herself buried on a hill overlooking it, her coffin upright in its tall square tomb. It was Lady Tidd who was popularly supposed to haunt the fair wooded lands that had come to us. This Dysart Hill, on the top of which the ruined chapel and the deserted graveyard lay, was a favourite walk of our childish days. When our short legs had mastered the difficulties of the slope—and a very stony slope it was, covered towards the summit with a fine mountain grass, than which no footing is more slippery—we never failed to wander round to that singular monument, through the massive granite door of which she who stood in the upright coffin was supposed to be gazing down upon the distant prospect of our own home. It was never without an awful sense of horror and mystery that I pictured those dead eyes, endowed with miraculous vision, piercing through wood and stone to stare out upon what she still loved. Some apprehension of the horror and tragedy of bodily death and of the dread power of the spirit seized hold of my small soul as I contemplated that grave of human folly and of poor human aspiration. There it was, perhaps, that an overpowering dislike of graveyards began in me.

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Lady Tidd was seen by a gardener of ours, between two Yew trees, in a dark corner outside the garden wall.

“She riz up out of the ground at me,” he told my mother. And he added, as a convincing detail, that his hat stood up on his equally rising hair. “Sure, wasn’t me hat lifted an inch off me head, ma’m?”

My mother, strong-souled creature as she was, laughed with a fine scepticism. Another kind of spirit had done the mischief, she declared. But we who heard could not so easily dismiss the agonizingly fascinating tale. We knew that spot outside the garden wall, in the shadow of the black Yew trees; and the fear and the darkness that always fell upon us when we passed it.

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Another dreaded place was a certain Primrose dell, beautifully starred with blossoms, beautifully green, beautifully shaded; the very place for happy children, it would seem, and for long hours of flower-picking gipsy teas and endless games. It was quite lost in the woods that banded the property, away from intrusions of nurse or governess—and yet, how haunted! Never shall I forget—I feel it now as I write—the profound misery that would seize upon me at the very entrance to the laughing glade.

I am not sure, however, that there was not a tangible reason for this depression, connected with the disappearance of a fondly-loved four-footed playfellow. A darling dog he was: one of the jocose, high-spirited kind; his open mouth and hanging tongue seemed to show him a partaker in human mirth, with a waggish humour all his own. No pun is intended! He had a rough tangled coat, black and white, a flag of a tail, flopping ears. He was the swiftest, gayest, most romping creature that has ever shared the play of children. We adored him. His name was Carlo. I don’t know of what breed he was, if of any.... Alas! he hunted the sheep! He disappeared! No one knew what had become of him. We children never ascertained anything, but there was a rumour—a dark, untraceable, yet most convincing rumour—that somebody had seen the small, rough corpse hanging from a tree-trunk, not far from the Primrose dell. Was it not that, perhaps, which haunted the dell for me?

We suspected the herd. A large, fat, round-faced, smiling man, this; with an unctuous, creeping voice that seemed to gurgle up like a slow oil-bubble from inner recesses of obesity. A man who at intervals would remark, seeing us grouped about our mother, “You’ve a lovely lot of ladies, ma’m, God bless them!”—as if we were little pigs or calves.

He had a sinister reputation with us already on account of his periodical dealings with sheep, which we, tender-hearted and impressionable children, scarcely as much as hinted to each other; and certainly never really associated with the roast mutton that appeared twice a week.

No, we did not like Green, the herd; and I, the smallest of the “lovely lot,” would cling to my mother’s skirts when his little twinkling eye turned in my direction.

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For a long time he was associated in my mind with the horror of a conversation which passed between him and my mother. How well I remember that day! We were walking through one of the upper fields towards a village called Hop Hall, which also belonged to the estate. It was a lovely meadow with a curious little wood in the middle of it, ringed like a moat by a streamlet in which the cattle drank. This wood was full of wild Crab-apples; the blossom of it hung over the water and was mirrored therein. The field caught the sweep of wind that blew from the top of the hill with the breath of the Pine-trees. It was a carpet of Cowslips in the right season.

Well, as we walked, my mother and four little girls and one little boy, the herd stumping along with a stick—he had a lame leg—his ragged dog behind him, there came the following interchange of remarks, which set a seal of terror on my young mind. My mother mentioned her intention of visiting Hop Hall, and then inquired how a certain old woman might be who dwelt there. She had been long bedridden.

“Troth, and she’s the same as ever!”

“My goodness,” exclaimed my mother, “why, she must be nearly a hundred!”

“She must be that, me lady.—Begorra, she’ll have to be shot!”

My mother laughed, and so did the herd. The anguish of the small listener passes description; and there ensued a veritable haunting. The herd she could understand, she knew him to be a criminal of the deepest dye. But her mother!...

It was months before a benevolent governess discovered the hidden sore, and explained and consoled. It was only a joke! It left a rankling tenderness. I could see no humour in it.

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It is no wonder that Irish children should be fanciful, surrounded as they are, or were in my day, with the quaint, superstitious beliefs of servants and peasantry. Our chief nursery comfort and most beloved companion was the old housekeeper, who had begun her life in the service of our mother’s grandmother. That takes one back! Whenever we had a free moment we trotted into her sitting-room for pleasant conversation and, maybe, a biscuit, a bit of chocolate or candy. She had the key of the stores.

“I declare if I was made of sugar, you’d have me eaten!” she would say; a cannibalistic possibility I made it a point of earnestly disclaiming.

The linen room was where she sat, in a quaint, painted, high-backed armchair by the window. She gazed straight out across a yard to a shrubbery dominated by three large Fir trees over which the evening star would peep, a tremulous yellow. She called those Fir trees her Three Kings, and never failed to lift her hands in wonder and gratitude over the beauty of the star. Poetry goes deep into the hearts of the Irish.

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I can see that room now. The whole of one side was filled with cupboards—presses, we called them—where, behind buff wire gratings and beautifully fluted bright pink calico, the linen was stored. A few nursery groceries, biscuit and dessert oddments were kept in a cupboard just at the entrance; and there was always a faint fragrance of raisins and spice in the atmosphere. I can see the dear occupant of the room too; the picture of beautiful old age, with banded silver hair beneath the snow-white cap which was tied with muslin strings under her chin. I can see her apple-blossom cheeks and her blue eyes, clear and innocent as a child’s, yet so wise! She had a white starched kerchief folded across her black bodice, and her black skirt was gathered with a great many pleats round the comfortable rotundity of her figure. We used to find her sitting by the casement in the twilight, gazing out. If the mood took me, I would sit on her knee and stare out too. Every few minutes or so she would sigh, not with sadness, but gently, as the woods sigh, with scarcely perceptible movement on a still night. But though I knew it to be no sigh of distress, it nevertheless troubled me. I would ask anxiously:

“Why do you sigh, Mobie?”

Her answer was always the same:

“Old age, Alanna!”

Her name was Mrs. O’Brien, which was interpreted Mobie by our baby lips.

In same fashion the first nurse, whom I only vaguely remember, erect, small, severe, and kind, had degenerated from Mrs. Hughes into Shuzzie; and the queer, tiny head housemaid, baptized Bridget, was Dadgie. A unique personage this, minute as she was active, with bobbing bunches of grey curls on each side of her grey net cap with purple ribbons which were tied under her chin. Upon the rare occasions when some damage occurred to the china or glass under her hands, she would trot into my mother with the announcement:

“Oh, ma’am, I’ve made a ‘foo pas!’”

No one knew where she had picked up this inappropriate bit of French.

Dear, quaint, pathetic, busy little creature, buzzing about the house with a flapping duster! I have a vision of her too, as I write: her huge poke bonnet overshadowing the small, important face; her bobbing curls as she fluttered in to confession in the oratory on those monthly occasions when the old parish priest—another figure out of long past times, he too, with his white head, his black stockings and buckle shoes, his full-skirted coat—came out from the little country town to “hear” the household.

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My mother used to call the three old women servants her three duchesses. Alas! two of these dignitaries passed away very early in my recollection. Fortunately, Mobie, the best beloved, was left to us till later years. It is to her that my thoughts most readily return.

She was a store-house of anecdotes and legends. Never would she speak, nor allow anyone to speak before her, of the fairies otherwise than as “the good people”; and then it was with bated breath. It was established as a fact among us that in her girlhood she had had communication with them. Certainly, we believed, she had seen them one evening dancing in a ring; but never could she be got to tell us in detail anything about these experiences. The very mystery of her silence confirmed our theory.

What a delightful volume one could have made out of the tales that fell from her lips upon our small listening ears by the nursery fire; or in the linen room with its uncurtained window and its vision of the Three Kings and the Star.

From many memories one floats back to me. It made a great impression:

“... And when Tim Brenahan was on his way home that evening, wasn’t it round by the wall he went, and didn’t he see two great cats sitting on the top of it with their tails hanging over? And didn’t one cat say to the other, as plain as can be, and didn’t he hear it, just as you do be hearing me:

“Says one, ‘And what’s the news this evening?’ And says the other, ‘No news at all,’ says he. ‘Only that the widdie Moloney’s old tabby’s gone at last,’ says he, ‘and it’s the great funeral will be to-night,’ says he.

“And when Tim Brenahan came home to his wife, says she to him, ‘And what’s the news this evening, Tim, asthore?’

“And says he to her, ‘Faith, no news at all,’ says he, ‘save as I was coming home by the long wall beyont, there was two great fellers of cats sitting on the top of it. And says one to the other, “The widdie Moloney’s tabb’s goney at last,” says he, “and it’s the grand burying on her there’ll be to-night.”’

“And no sooner were the words out of his mouth when his own tom-cat ups with him and shakes himself where he was sittin’ starin’ at the turf, and says he ‘Then it’s time for me to be off,’ says he, ‘or I’ll be late for the funeral.’ And out of the door with him, with his tail all of a bristle....”

I was rather awed by that story, which, to my infant mind, bore the stamp of unmistakable veracity; but nothing that proceeded from the linen room ever really distressed me. Its ruling spirit was too benign and too perfectly in harmony with us.

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The terror of those days to me was the fragile-looking, soft-voiced, mincing widow who became our nurse after the death of the fine old martinet by whom we had been ruled before. It was not surprising that our mother should have imagined she was passing us over to a much gentler authority; but as a matter of fact—indolent, ignorant, peevish—the new nursery autocrat was given to enforcing her orders by threats of a ghastly and impossible description.

“I’ll cut your tongue out,” was a favourite menace, which, if defied, would be supplemented by—“Wait, now, till I run and get my scissors.”

Stronger of body, more enlightened in mind, my co-nurseryites treated these remarks with the scorn they deserved. But I cannot describe the agony with which they pressed upon me. It is peculiar to all children that these terrors are never communicated to others. Not even to my brothers and sisters would I breathe one word of my apprehensions. But the misery took shape in horrible dreams and sleepless nights. And when matters became too intolerable, I would creep out of my little bed, and patter across the bare boards into the adjoining room where the housekeeper slept. On no single occasion did she show the smallest severity or even annoyance at being disturbed.

“Mobie,” I would pipe, “I’m afraid!... May I get into your bed?”

“Come in, Alanna,” was the invariable response.

Oh! the comfort of snuggling against her!

Whether she promptly fell asleep again, or whether she watched and talked loving nonsense one felt equally safe, equally blessedly happy. If she slept, it was lightly enough, like all old people; and each time she turned or moved in the bed, the small bed-fellow would hear her murmur:

“The Lord have mercy on me!”

It was not a deliberate prayer, scarcely even a conscious thought, but the natural movement of the soul.

Little wonder that, being what she was, she who had lain down every night, as it were, in the very arms of Providence, should pass to her last sleep as simply and fearlessly.

“Are you frightened, mother?” cried her daughter, bending over her at the very end. She opened her eyes and smiled.

“Frightened? How could I be frightened? Am I not going to my best friend?”