Charles Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer (Charles Robert Maturin) - the complete collection, comprehensive, unabridged and illustrated - (Literary Thoughts Edition)

There was the slink-veal, flanked with tripe; and, finally, there were lobsters and fried turbot enough to justify what the author of the tale asserts, “suo periculo,” that when his great grandfather, the Dean of Killala, hired servants at the deanery, they stipulated that they should not be required to eat turbot or lobster more than twice a-week. There were also bottles of Wicklow ale, long and surreptitiously borrowed from his “honor’s” cellar, and which now made their first appearance on the kitchen hearth, and manifested their impatience of further constraint, by hissing, spitting, and bouncing in the face of the fire that provoked its animosity. But the whiskey (genuine illegitimate potsheen, smelling strongly of weed and smoke, and breathing defiance to excisemen) appeared, the “veritable Amphitryon” of the feast; every one praised, and drank as deeply as he praised.

John, as he looked round the circle, and thought of his dying uncle, was forcibly reminded of the scene at Don Quixote’s departure, where, in spite of the grief caused by the dissolution of the worthy knight, we are informed that “nevertheless the niece eat her victuals, the housekeeper drank to the repose of his soul, and even Sancho cherished his little carcase.” After returning, “as he might,” the courtesies of the party, John asked how his uncle was. “As bad as he can be;”—“Much better, and many thanks to your honor,” was uttered in such rapid and discordant unison by the party, that John turned from one to the other, not knowing which or what to believe. “They say his honor has had a fright,” said a fellow, upwards of six feet high, approaching by way of whispering, and then bellowing the sound six inches above John’s head. “But then his honor has had a cool since,” said a man who was quietly swallowing the spirits that John had refused. At these words the Sybil who sat in the chimney corner slowly drew her pipe from her mouth, and turned towards the party: The oracular movements of a Pythoness on her tripod never excited more awe, or impressed for the moment a deeper silence. “It’s not here,” said she, pressing her withered finger on her wrinkled forehead, “nor here,—nor here;” and she extended her hand to the foreheads of those who were near her, who all bowed as if they were receiving a benediction, but had immediate recourse to the spirits afterwards, as if to ensure its effects.—“It’s all here—it’s all about the heart;” and as she spoke she spread and pressed her fingers on her hollow bosom with a force of action that thrilled her hearers.—“It’s all here,” she added, repeating the action, (probably excited by the effect she had produced), and then sunk on her seat, resumed her pipe, and spoke no more. At this moment of involuntary awe on the part of John, and of terrified silence on that of the rest, an unusual sound was heard in the house, and the whole company started as if a musket had been discharged among them:—it was the unwonted sound of old Melmoth’s bell. His domestics were so few, and so constantly near him, that the sound of his bell startled them as much as if he had been ringing the knell for his own interment. “He used always to rap down for me,” said the old housekeeper, hurrying out of the kitchen; “he said pulling the bells wore out the ropes.”

The sound of the bell produced its full effect. The housekeeper rushed into the room, followed by a number of women, (the Irish præficæ), all ready to prescribe for the dying or weep for the dead,—all clapping their hard hands, or wiping their dry eyes. These hags all surrounded the bed; and to witness their loud, wild, and desperate grief, their cries of “Oh! he’s going, his honor’s going, his honor’s going,” one would have imagined their lives were bound up in his, like those of the wives in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, who were to be interred alive with their deceased husbands.

Four of them wrung their hands and howled round the bed, while one, with all the adroitness of a Mrs Quickly, felt his honor’s feet, and “upward and upward,” and “all was cold as any stone.”

Old Melmoth withdrew his feet from the grasp of the hag,—counted with his keen eye (keen amid the approaching dimness of death) the number assembled round his bed,—raised himself on his sharp elbow, and pushing away the housekeeper, (who attempted to settle his nightcap, that had been shoved on one side in the struggle, and gave his haggard, dying face, a kind of grotesque fierceness), bellowed out in tones that made the company start,—“What the devil brought ye all here?” The question scattered the whole party for a moment; but rallying instantly, they communed among themselves in whispers, and frequently using the sign of the cross, muttered “The devil,—Christ save us, the devil in his mouth the first word he spoke.” “Aye,” roared the invalid, “and the devil in my eye the first sight I see.” “Where,—where?” cried the terrified housekeeper, clinging close to the invalid in her terror, and half-hiding herself in the blanket, which she snatched without mercy from his struggling and exposed limbs. “There, there,” he repeated, (during the battle of the blanket), pointing to the huddled and terrified women, who stood aghast at hearing themselves arointed as the very demons they came to banish. “Oh! Lord keep your honor’s head,” said the housekeeper in a more soothing tone, when her fright was over; “and sure your honor knows them all, is’n’t her name,—and her name,—and her name,”—and she pointed respectively to each of them, adding their names, which we shall spare the English reader the torture of reciting, (as a proof of our lenity, adding the last only, Cotchleen O‘Mulligan), “Ye lie, ye b——h,” growled old Melmoth; “their name is Legion, for they are many,—turn them all out of the room,—turn them all out of doors,—if they howl at my death, they shall howl in earnest,—not for my death, for they would see me dead and damned too with dry eyes, but for want of the whiskey that they would have stolen if they could have got at it,” (and here old Melmoth grasped a key which lay under his pillow, and shook it in vain triumph at the old housekeeper, who had long possessed the means of getting at the spirits unknown to his “honor”), “and for want of the victuals you have pampered them with.” “Pampered, oh Ch—st!” ejaculated the housekeeper. “Aye, and what are there so many candles for, all fours, and the same below I warrant. Ah! you—you—worthless, wasteful old devil.” “Indeed, your honor, they are all sixes.” “Sixes,—and what the devil are you burning sixes for, d’ye think it’s the wake already? Ha?” “Oh! not yet, your honor, not yet,” chorussed the beldams; “but in God’s good time, your honor knows,” in a tone that spoke ill suppressed impatience for the event. “Oh! that your honor would think of making your soul.” “That’s the first sensible word you have said,” said the dying man, “fetch me the prayer-book,—you’ll find it there under that old boot-jack,—blow off the cobwebs;—it has not been opened this many a year.” It was handed to him by the old governante, on whom he turned a reproaching eye. “What made you burn sixes in the kitchen, you extravagant jade? How many years have you lived in this house?” “I don’t know, your honor.” “Did you ever see any extravagance or waste in it?” “Oh never, never, your honor.” “Was any thing but a farthing candle ever burned in the kitchen?” “Never, never, your honor.” “Were not you kept as tight as hand and head and heart could keep you, were you not? answer me that.” “Oh yes, sure, your honor; every sowl about us knows that,—every one does your honor justice, that you kept the closest house and closest hand in the country,—your honor was always a good warrant for it.” “And how dare you unlock my hold before death has unlocked it,” said the dying miser, shaking his meagre hand at her. “I smelt meat in the house,—I heard voices in the house,—I heard the key turn in the door over and over. Oh that I was up,” he added, rolling in impatient agony in his bed, “Oh that I was up, to see the waste and ruin that is going on. But it would kill me,” he continued, sinking back on the bolster, for he never allowed himself a pillow; “it would kill me,—the very thought of it is killing me now.” The women, discomfited and defeated, after sundry winks and whispers, were huddling out of the room, till recalled by the sharp eager tones of old Melmoth.—“Where are ye trooping to now? back to the kitchen to gormandize and guzzle? Won’t one of ye stay and listen while there’s a prayer read for me? Ye may want it one day for yourselves, ye hags.” Awed by this expostulation and menace, the train silently returned, and placed themselves round the bed, while the housekeeper, though a Catholic, asked if his honor would not have a clergyman to give him the rights, (rites) of his church. The eyes of the dying man sparkled with vexation at the proposal. “What for,—just to have him expect a scarf and hat-band at the funeral. Read the prayers yourself, you old ———; that will save something.” The housekeeper made the attempt, but soon declined it, alleging, as her reason, that her eyes had been watery ever since his honor took ill. “That’s because you had always a drop in them,” said the invalid, with a spiteful sneer, which the contraction of approaching death stiffened into a hideous grin.—“Here,—is not there one of you that’s gnashing and howling there, that can get up a prayer to keep me from it?” So adjured, one of the women offered her services; and of her it might truly be said, as of the “most desartless man of the watch” in Dogberry’s time, that “her reading and writing came by nature;” for she never had been at school, and had never before seen or opened a Protestant prayer book in her life; nevertheless, on she went, and with more emphasis than good discretion, read nearly through the service for the “churching of women;” which in our prayer-books following that of the burial of the dead, she perhaps imagined was someway connected with the state of the invalid.