"Only disburden your mind with one word--tell what has thus
alarmed you--what danger you apprehend."
"I have seen her," answered Eveline--"I have seen the tenant of
yonder chamber--the vision fatal to my race!--Urge me no more--to-
morrow you shall know all." [Footnote: The idea of the Bahr-Geist
was taken from a passage in the Memoirs of Lady Fanshaw, which
have since been given to the public, and received with deserved
approbation.
The original runs as follows. Lady Fanshaw, shifting among her
friends in Ireland, like other sound loyalists of the period,
tells her story thus:--
"From thence we went to the Lady Honor O'Brien's, a lady that went
for a maid, but few believed it. She was the youngest daughter of
the Earl of Thomond. There we staid three nights--the first of
which I was surprised at being laid in a chamber, where, when
about one o'clock, I heard a voice that awakened me. I drew the
curtain, and in the casement of the window I saw, by the light of
the moon, a woman leaning through the casement into the room, in
white, with red hair and pale and ghastly complexion. She spoke
loud, and in a tone I had never heard, thrice. "A horse;" and
then, with a sigh more like the wind than breath, she vanished,
and to me her body looked more like a thick cloud than substance.
I was so much frightened, that my hair stood on end, and my night-
clothes fell off. I pulled and pinched your father, who never
awoke during the disorder I was in, but at last was much surprised
to see me in this fright, and more so when I related the story and
showed him the window opened. Neither of us slept any more that
night; but he entertained me by telling me how much more these
apparitions were common in this country than in England; and we
concluded the cause to be the great superstition of the Irish, and
the want of that knowing faith which should defend them from the
power of the devil, which he exercises among them very much. About
five o'clock the lady of the house came to see us, saying, she had
not been in bed all night, because a cousin O'Brien of hers, whose
ancestors had owned that house, had desired her to stay with him
in his chamber, and that he died at two o'clock; and she said, I
wish you to have had no disturbance, for 'tis the custom of the
place, that when any of the family are dying, the shape of a woman
appears every night in the window until they be dead. This woman
was many ages ago got with child by the owner of this place, who
murdered her in his garden, and flung her into the river under the
window; but truly I thought not of it when I lodged you here, it
being the best room in the house! We made little reply to her
speech, but disposed ourselves to be gone suddenly."]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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