The Southern Literary Messenger, Volume I., 1834-35

The Duel.

"McCarthy is no more!" said George, as I rushed out on learning his arrival from the scene of conflict. "Raymond reserved his fire; then deliberately taking aim, sent his ball through the heart of our gallant friend, who stood firm and undaunted to receive his fire."

"Good God!" I exclaimed, "was there no man present whose humanity prompted him to interpose for the prevention of so murderous a deed?"

"The attempt was made," said George, "but unavailingly. Raymond was the challenged party, and with a savage sternness of purpose insisted on his right, according to the rules which were agreed upon to govern the conflict."

"He is a hardened villain," cried I, "stained with the blood of four victims; and palsied be the hand that has robbed society of so pure and generous a spirit as McCarthy's."

Struck with horror at the occurrence, and overwhelmed with sorrow at the loss of so worthy a friend, needing consolation myself rather than capable of affording any, I hurried nevertheless to the house of the deceased, to share, if not to alleviate the sufferings of his bereaved mother and sister. Never, never shall I forget the scene which there awaited me. The lifeless body of McCarthy, weltering in his own blood, lay extended on a large folding table. The ball had entered the right side, and with fatal energy had passed through the body, leaving a corresponding wound on the left. The mother and sister, with disordered hair and the wild expression of maniacs, stood at either side of the corpse, applying their mouths to the wounds from which the blood was still oozing; nor could anything short of absolute violence withdraw them from the body. They wept not—they spoke not; but in all the wild impassioned energy of despair, kept their mouths still applied to the gaping wounds of the son and brother.

The deceased was a young gentleman, who inherited a handsome estate in the south of Ireland. He had but the year before become of age, and returned from Trinity College, where his vigorous understanding and zeal in the pursuit of literature had won for him the first honors of that venerable institution. Frank, generous and beneficent, he seemed intent on applying the energies of his active mind and the resources of an ample fortune, to the moral and physical improvement of his tenantry and dependants. A year of unexampled scarcity, gave him an early opportunity of developing those generous purposes of his pure and elevated mind. To the lower classes of his tenantry he remitted a part of their rents, and to the surrounding poor he distributed provisions, exacting from them in return, only increased attention to cleanliness and neatness in their persons and dwellings. He had besides a large tract of unreclaimed peat land, on which, at proper intervals, he erected comfortable stone dwellings, and let portions of this land to the industrious poor, requiring no rent from them except the application to the soil which they were to cultivate for their own benefit, of some bushels of lime, easily procured from the contiguous quarries. Thus, in a very short period, he effected a perceptible change in the condition of his tenantry, while he was in fact developing new resources for the indulgence of further beneficence. His tenantry already looked to him as a friend and protector; they submitted their difficulties to his arbitration, and applied to him for redress for their grievances, when oppressed or maltreated by any of the petty gentry of the vicinage. In addition to this generous devotion to their interests, McCarthy possessed advantages, which are no where more fully appreciated than among the imaginative and half chivalrous Irish peasantry. With a Moorish head, and face of the finest cast, often met with among the Milesian gentry of Ireland, he had a form developed in muscular and beautiful proportions, much above the common stature, resembling his ancestors in that particular, who from their large and muscular frames, obtained familiarly the appellation of McCarthy Mores. The cordial frankness of his manners too, assured the peasants who approached him, that his was no affected interest in their welfare and happiness. Thus endowed with every quality of mind, heart and person that could win esteem and confidence, was it to be wondered at that he should have become, almost at once, the idol of a warm-hearted and grateful people? Alas! they had too many opportunities of contrasting his kindness and generosity, with the indifference, if not harshness of neighboring landlords; or with the odious oppressions of mercenary agents to whom they confided their estates. To this latter class Raymond belonged; he was one of that wretched faction that so long kept Ireland in degradation. A Palatine by extraction—a member of the Orange Club—distinguished for his zeal in the unholy objects of that mischievous and once powerful association—without fortune and without education, save a limited knowledge of accounts, he possessed cunning and contrivance enough to win his way to the agency of a large estate, belonging to an absentee nobleman, who appeared once in three years among his tenantry, only to exasperate their feelings by walking at the head of an Orange procession. Raymond had a pecuniary claim against one of the humblest of McCarthy's tenantry, and in the hour of his greatest need, was enforcing it with the spirit of a Shylock. McCarthy remonstrated—offered to insure the payment, if he would extend the time until the ripening crop should enable the poor man to meet the demand. Raymond insultingly refused—charged McCarthy with rendering the tenantry of the surrounding country insubordinate to their landlords, and creating discontent among his neighbor's tenantry, by ill-timed indulgence to his own; and intimated in McCarthy a purpose inconsistent with loyalty to his sovereign. Unhappily, instead of inflicting on the miscreant the punishment which his strong arm could so easily have enforced, yielding to a barbarous usage which his better judgment must have condemned, McCarthy sent him a hostile message on the following morning. Proud of meeting such an antagonist—conscious of his unerring dexterity in the use of a weapon which on three former occasions had been fatally true in his hands—and anxious to remove a neighbor whose virtues and whose energy were a painful rebuke, and promised to be a troublesome check on his own views—Raymond gladly accepted the challenge, and dictated through his friend, as vindictive as himself, the terms of the combat. The result is known; and long shall the impressions made by that result, leave their traces in the breasts of the inhabitants of Kenmare. Amidst the general sorrow for what was regarded as a public bereavement, there was one heart on which it fell with a blight that withered every joy, and dried up at its very source the fountain of every hope. The mother and the daughter were privileged in their wailings; but there was one, who had received from him only the first evidences of newly kindled love, but who, silent and unobserved, had reposed on that evidence, slight though it was, all that she hoped for of earthly felicity. It was Ellen—to whom an expression of tenderness which her love made her interpret aright, and a hurried earnestness of manner in his last adieu, had whispered that the heart in which she had unconsciously garnered up her happiness, reciprocated a feeling which she strove to conceal even from herself. Daily intercourse with both, too plainly told me that the world contained but one being capable of interesting Ellen. I saw the wasting of a flame, which I feared would consume her; and believing her every way worthy of my noble-hearted friend, I sought to fix his attention on the charms of her person, and the elegance and purity of her mind, without wounding his delicacy by an intimation that I believed he had any hold on her affections. At first his mind was so occupied with schemes for ameliorating the condition of his tenantry, that they seemed to render him indifferent to all besides. The natural enjoyments of his age and station seemed to be shut out by these thoughts; and it was only when the approach of the fatal rencontre with Raymond caused him to look more closely into the recesses of his own breast, that McCarthy felt that Ellen was not to him an object of indifference. He sought her presence the evening before his fall. There was in his manner that which told the watchful eye of a lover that her love was returned. Yet he breathed no word of love—he sought no pledge of affection, lest the event of the morrow should pierce too deeply a heart which he now felt he would not wound for the world. Leaving to other friends the task of consoling, if possible, the distracted relatives of the deceased, I sought the home of Ellen. I found her alone; she started wildly on seeing me.

"Is it true?" she exclaimed; "is he dead? Say, is McCarthy dead?"

"It is too true, Ellen," said I; "our friend—our generous, noble-hearted friend, has fallen by the hands of a privileged assassin."

"Friend!" said Ellen impetuously, "he was to me—" and checking herself in the expression which to me was not necessary to convey what she meant, she sunk back, relaxed and colorless, into her chair; her bosom heaved as if contending with a tide of emotions—she sobbed hysterically, and at last found temporary relief in a flood of tears.

Poor Ellen, alas! the relief was but temporary. The wild tide of passionate sorrow, it is true, subsided soon; but it had left deep furrows in the broken heart of Ellen, which time could not efface. Her spirits sunk daily; her beautifully rounded figure became lank and attenuated; her eye lost its lustre, and she shrunk instinctively from the gaze of all, as if anxious to hide the secret of that grief which was consuming her. Her physicians recommended change of air and scene; they were tried—but no scene had a charm, no air had a balm for poor Ellen.

Twelve months rolled by, and a gloomy pageant was seen passing through the streets of Kenmare; that pageant was conducting to the family vault, the lifeless remains of Ellen Mahony.

The fatal ball which drank the life's blood of the generous McCarthy, broke also the heart of Ellen. Nor were they the only victims immolated on the altar of a false honor. The mother of McCarthy sunk prematurely into the grave; and his lovely sister continued to manifest for many years, by occasional fits of melancholy madness, the severe shock which her heart and understanding had received from the premature fall of an idolized brother.

The pursuit of professional knowledge called me far away from the scene of these occurrences. The fate of McCarthy and Ellen presented itself less frequently to my mind, occluded by new scenes and avocations. In 1818, six years after the fatal catastrophe, I returned to visit, for the last time, my relatives in Kenmare. Mary, the lovely sister of my murdered friend, bereft of every nearer relative, was residing with her uncle, a distinguished officer of the Irish Brigade, who with a constitution broken down by the fatigues of an eventful life, had retired to a small estate near the lakes of Killarney. I owed it to the memory of my deceased friend, to visit the last surviving object of his affection. The day was full of freshness and beauty, and the country through which I must travel to reach the seat of Colonel McCarthy, is not surpassed by any in the world, in the wild grandeur of its scenery. The road from Kenmare winds along a chain of lakes, now narrowing into deep channels, hurrying precipitously their angry and foaming waters into reservoirs below—now expanding into broad and silvery inland seas, studded with verdant islands, blooming with Arbutus and Lauristina. From the unruffled surface of these lakes, you behold reflected, as from an expanded mirror, the images of the over-hanging mountains, wooded to their tops, and varying in the hues of the dense foliage that covers them with every varying stratum of soil, from their bases to their summits. The high and threatening Turk Mountain yields its reluctant base to the winding road. The beautiful Peninsula of Mucrus is seen in full view. Its venerable Abbey, still exhibiting traces of its former grandeur, containing within its sombre walls the slumbering remains of many a gallant knight and gentle maiden, of the humble and the great, in indiscriminate oblivion. The proud mansion of the Herberts, still in fine keeping—the long vistas opening in every direction on some cultivated villa or rich demesne; the town of Killarney, with its spires and undulating lines of white buildings; the mansions of the Kenmares, the Cronins, and O'Connells,—all seen in distant perspective, afford a coup d'oeil unsurpassed in beauty and natural munificence by any in the world. As I revisited these scenes which my boyhood loved to trace, there stole upon my heart a melancholy joy; it was indeed "pleasant but mournful to the soul." The friends with whom I had enjoyed these scenes were gone, or hurried far apart by the varying engagements of busy life. To one of those friends this journey was devoted, and his virtues and his fate rose before me in vivid colors. The tear rose unbidden to my eye, and dimmed for awhile the bright scene before me. Thus attuned to melancholy, I approached about ten o'clock the residence of Colonel McCarthy. The modest but tasteful dwelling was situated on a small eminence in the centre of a basin, formed by a hill in the rear, and two projecting wings, open and expanding to the south and southeast, having in full view before it the ancient castles of Dunloe and Desmond—the beautiful lower lake and its crowning ornament, the island of Innisfallen—Ross, the majestic castle of the O'Donoghues—and to the right the bold Mountain of Tornies, with its foaming cataract, appearing to the distant eye like the giant guardian of the place, with his silvery beard flowing on his venerable breast. The grounds were tastefully laid out, and the regularity and order that was observable in all the decorations of the place, gave evidence of a superintending mind trained to discipline; while the surrounding scenery bespoke it an appropriate refuge for the warrior worn with toil and years.

As I approached, I beheld a female form sitting on a little eminence to the right of the house, which was decorated with a cluster of white pines. I could not mistake the light and graceful form of the beautiful Mary. It was she, much as I had beheld her six years before. Her large blue eye had the same wildness of expression which was observable in it after the death of her brother; her figure was if anything more beautiful, set off by a dress which she had selected in the wild imaginings of her sorrow, to fit her in a special manner for communion with the spirits of her mother and brother; her hair was loose, but carefully combed, flowing gracefully on her shoulders; her bust was incased in a plain white spencer, most studiously fitted to her person; and she wore hanging in loose folds around her, a pure and virgin white drapery, that was rivalled by the pellucid whiteness of her uncovered neck, hand and arm. This dress, as I afterwards learned, she always wore when the mind gave way before periodical melancholy; and its approach was too truly announced by the cautious vigilance with which she was observed to hide from her friends the preparations for her strange attire. As I approached, I saw too plainly that Mary had no thought for any object before her.

"Mary," said I, "do you not know me? do you not know E——, the friend of your brother?"

"Oh yes," said she, keeping her eye steadily fixed as on some object towards the lake. "Yes, yes," said she in a hurried manner. Then placing her soft hand gently in my arm, she said, "Go, good spirit, go; I want my mother and Sandy. See, they are coming; Mary will yet have a mother and brother."

I spoke, I reasoned, I entreated her to come with me into the presence of her uncle.

She replied with a hysterical laugh, and said, "He too is gone with them."

I turned towards the house, and all there seemed silent and full of sorrow. The Colonel's servant, with eyes swollen from weeping, replied to my inquiries about his master, that he had that morning expired, having for some days suffered intensely from the effects of his old wounds.

"And who," said I, "remains to give consolation to the poor and forlorn Mary?"

"Ah," said John, "Miss Mary is always light when any sorrow comes on the family. The Dunloe family are coming here to take Miss Mary home with them."

"God grant," said I, "she may be soothed by their kindness. Has she no attendant, John?"

"Yes sir, but my poor master said it was best not to trouble her when she is in her strange way."

I wound my way back slowly and mournfully from this house of sorrow. I have since passed from scene to scene; I have witnessed the agonies of many a breaking heart, and have been myself the subject of much sorrow and anguish; but never did I witness blight and desolation equal to that brought on the house of McCarthy by the murderous hand of Raymond.

E.

Henry County.

For the Southern Literary Messenger.