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Mrs. Riddell
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Title: The Earl's promise, Vol. II (of 3)
A novel
Author: Mrs. Riddell
Release Date: May 13, 2023 [eBook #70756]
Language: English
Produced by: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EARL'S PROMISE, VOL. II
(OF 3) ***
THE EARL’S PROMISE.
A Novel.
BY
MRS. RIDDELL,
AUTHOR OF
“GEORGE GEITH,” “TOO MUCH ALONE,” “HOME, SWEET HOME,” ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 8, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1873.
[_All rights of Translation and Reproduction are Reserved._]
PRINTED BY TAYLOR AND CO.,
LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
CHAP. PAGE.
I. MRS. BRADY UNDERSTANDS HER POSITION 1
II. COMING EVENTS 25
III. SEVEN YEARS AFTER 47
IV. THE LAST JOURNEY 77
V. THE PEOPLE’S FRIEND 114
VI. THE MUTTERING OF THE STORM 150
VII. FEET OF CLAY 178
VIII. BY THE SAD SEA WAVES 214
IX. WHAT THE WAVES WHISPERED 248
X. WHEN DOCTORS DIFFER 270
XI. NO CHANGE 294
THE EARL’S PROMISE.
CHAPTER I.
MRS. BRADY UNDERSTANDS HER POSITION.
Tacitly Kingslough had decided that Mrs. Brady was not to be visited.
Just as by one consent the public sometimes agrees to condemn an untried
man, so gentle and simple made up their minds not to enter the gates of
Maryville.
Those of Nettie’s own class, having regard to that which they considered
a _mésalliance_, quietly tabooed the fact of her marriage and her
existence; those of a lower grade, remembering what Miss O’Hara’s father
had been, and what the Rileys were, feeling if they called upon the
young wife she might not feel grateful for their attentions, agreed it
might be prudent for them to abstain from showing any.
Wherein they were wise. Scant civility would any one have met from
Nettie, who, presuming upon an altered position, had tried to force
unwelcome acquaintanceship on her. Mrs. Brady was not one to be
satisfied with dry bread when she had expected to feast on cake.
She could do without either. That was what the uplifting of her little
head and the defiant flash of her blue eyes silently informed society.
“She could live alone, she would live alone,” this the burden of her
talk to Mrs. Hartley, who, being above or below the considerations that
usually influenced the going and coming of Kingslough’s upper ten, could
afford to set precedence and public opinion at defiance, hired the best
covered car Kingslough boasted, and drove solemnly out to Maryville to
see the bride, and give her some old-fashioned advice as to the way in
which she was to order her future conduct, and make a good thing of the
years that had still to come, still to be lived somehow, happily or
miserably, creditably or the reverse.
“One day,” Mrs. Brady proceeded, “perhaps they” (they stood for the
retired officers of the army and navy, the clergy, the attorneys and
agents, the widows, old maids, poodles, and others who constituted the
aristocracy of Kingslough) “may wish to know me again, and then I will
have nothing to do with them.”
“When that day comes,” said Mrs. Hartley, with the coolness which
exasperated so many of her acquaintances, “you will of course have as
perfect a right to select the houses at which you choose to visit as the
Kingslough people have now.”
“Or as I have now,” amended Nettie.
“Pardon me, I think your selection is at present confined to those at
which you will not visit,” answered Mrs. Hartley. “It is of no use,
Nettie,” she went on, stroking the bright, fair hair kindly and
sorrowfully, “it is of no use trying to fight the world single-handed.
You are very young and you are very pretty, and you have a will of your
own and a temper of your own that few gave you credit for possessing;
but neither youth nor beauty, nor obstinacy, nor being at bottom a
little atom of a vixen will win this battle for you. If you take an old
woman’s advice, you will lay down your arms, and let people imagine you
are still the gentle, quiet Nettie they used to see going to school. You
cannot eat your cake and have it. You knew perfectly what Kingslough
thought, whether rightly or wrongly, of Mr. Brady, and still you chose
to marry Mr. Brady. Now you want Mr. Brady and Kingslough as well; at
least, you are bitter because Kingslough has not welcomed your return
with open arms. What you ought to say to yourself now is, ‘Never mind, I
have got my husband to care for and to love me, and so long as we are
happy together, no slights the world chooses to put upon us can affect
us much;’” and as Mrs. Hartley ended this very proper sentence, she
looked closely and curiously at Nettie, who, muttering something about
the heat of the room, rose and opened one of the windows.
It proved rather a long operation, but when she returned to her seat the
flush Mrs. Hartley had noticed rising even to her temples had not faded
quite away.
“Next time you come to see me,” Nettie began, ignoring the previous
subject of conversation, “I hope you will find the house looking more
comfortable. We have furniture coming from Kilcurragh, but it cannot be
here for a few days.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Hartley, “furniture does not necessarily mean
happiness, any more than—”
“Oh, I know that, of course!” Nettie interrupted, a little peevishly;
“still one would wish to have a few chairs, and perhaps a couple of
tables in a sitting-room, for all that.”
It was characteristic of Mrs. Brady that she elected to receive her
visitor in the drawing-room, which looked like a barren wilderness, and
contained very few more articles of furniture than when she first beheld
its gaunt and pretentious nakedness, rather than in the smaller
apartment where John Riley and his father had held their interview with
her husband.
Mrs. Hartley sat on the dilapidated sofa while Nettie tried to look
comfortable on a very hard and very high, straight-backed chair. Three
windows, reaching from the floor almost to the ceiling, looked out on
the weed-grown garden and the tangled wilderness beyond, so that the
visitor had plenty of light to view the old-fashioned chimney-piece, on
the white marble of which cupids disported themselves, holding wreaths
that seemed almost black with dirt—black and grimy as the wings of the
cupids.
Nevertheless a handsome chimney-piece—handsome and fantastic, like the
great chandelier that hung in the centre of the room, and seemed to Mrs.
Hartley’s critical eye to stand in as much need of a scrubbing as the
floor itself, from contact with which she had carefully preserved her
own dress, and would fain have advised Nettie to guard her muslin, had
that young lady seemed more amenable to common sense, and less sensitive
concerning the loss of social position induced by her marriage.
To Mrs. Hartley it did not signify in what rank Mrs. Brady was now
supposed to be, and she felt sorry to notice how much it appeared to
signify to Nettie. She had known girls make foolish matches before, and
she had seen them put up with the consequences, but never before had she
beheld a young wife battling like Nettie against the results entailed by
her own act.
Dimly she began to fancy that the girl had married less for love of Mr.
Brady than for weariness of her monotonous life, and that now, when the
new life promised to be as monotonous as the old, and there was, besides
no hope of escape from it, the hitherto unsuspected side of Nettie’s
character was beginning to crop up. But Mrs. Hartley, though partly
right, was yet greatly wrong, both in her premises and the results she
deduced from them.
Nettie had staked everything she owned—everything that seemed of value
to her—in order to gain her husband, and now she knew he was not worth
the price at which she purchased him. She had made a mistake which she
would never be able to remedy. No; not if she lived for a hundred years,
and it was not in her nature to forgive society for deserting and
leaving her to bear the consequences of her error as best she might, all
alone.
She had taken her own course, and that course had made her bankrupt. The
world might have helped to render the lot she had chosen happier, but
virtually the world had turned its back upon her and said, “You may
carry your burden as best you can. You may bear your trouble as well as
you are able.”
That was the secret of Nettie’s anger and Nettie’s petulance. Her heart
was bleeding, and not a hand was stretched forth to stanch it. Such
fearful isolation, such utter desertion were almost maddening to Nettie,
who had always thought a good deal of herself, and to whom it never
occurred for one moment that when she went off with Mr. Brady, she took
leave of her relatives and society at the same time.
She could have quarrelled with her own shadow. She would have liked to
strike some one, to scold as a very virago, and so get rid of even a
part of the anger and sorrow, and disappointment and humiliation that
were raging within her. She had gone as far as she dared with Mrs.
Hartley, but to no purpose. She had tried to exhibit her grievances, and
her sensible visitor plainly said she had none; implying rather, indeed,
that society and her relatives were aggrieved instead. It was all very
hard upon Nettie, and had Mrs. Hartley only suspected how thoroughly the
girl already realized the completeness of her mistake, she might have
dealt more gently with the blue-eyed beauty, whose pretty face had
brought such ruin on her life.
As it was, Mrs. Hartley felt a little provoked with her former
favourite.
Elderly people are apt to be a little severe upon young ones when the
ways and thoughts of the latter are beyond their comprehension; and Mrs.
Hartley was severe in her judgment of Nettie, more especially when their
conversation turned, as it soon did, upon Miss Moffat.
“You have heard from Grace, I suppose?” said Mrs. Hartley.
“I have. She told you she had written to me, of course?”
Mrs. Hartley wondered at the “of course,” but contented herself, with
answering “Yes.”
“Did she tell you also what she had sent me?”
“No; I do not think, whatever her faults may be, Grace is a girl to talk
to one friend about any gift she might intend to make to another.”
“She sent me this!” Nettie exclaimed, pulling out of her belt an
extremely beautiful and expensive watch, which. Mrs. Hartley recognized
as one formerly belonging to Miss Moffat. “She said in her letter she
would have bought me a new one—” for a moment the speaker’s voice
trembled, and she hesitated before finishing her sentence, “but in that
case she must wait until her father went to Dublin, and she did not want
to wait, and, besides that, she had worn this so constantly, it was like
sending me a piece of herself, as she could not come to see me. And
there was something besides the watch and chain.” Here Nettie,
apparently on the brink of a confidence, broke off abruptly.
“_I_ wanted to return her presents,” she went on, after a pause, and
Mrs. Hartley noticed how nervously and passionately the fingers of her
clasped hands laced and twisted round and about, in and out of one
another. “I would have sent them back, but Mr. Brady would not let me. I
would not have kept anything in the house sent by a person who thought
herself too good to come and see me; but I could not help myself. It is
not with any goodwill I wear this thing. I would rather Gracie had come
to see me than that anybody had given me ten thousand pounds; and if she
did not like to do that, she ought not to have made me presents, and I
told her so; Mr. Brady could not prevent my doing that, and I did it.”
“Then you ought to be ashamed of your ungrateful childishness!”
exclaimed Mrs. Hartley; “and I only wish Mr. Brady could have prevented
such an exhibition of temper. It is nothing but temper which is the
matter with you, Nettie; and if you do not take care, you will lose the
few friends who have remained true to you, and who will remain true to
you if you choose to let them, foolish and inconsiderate though your
conduct may have been.”
“Friends!” repeated Nettie scornfully, but tears filled her eyes as she
spoke, and Mrs. Hartley, seeing them, relented.
“You have friends, dear,” she said. “John Riley is your friend, so am I,
so is Grace. I am an old woman, and free to go where and to whom I
choose; but Grace is not free, she cannot come to see you, she cannot
set up her own opinion against that of all her advisers. She has no
mother; you know yourself how little of a protector Mr. Moffat is
capable of being, and till she marries it behoves her to be careful and
prudent. I think I may safely say, had Grace been Mrs. Riley, you would
have seen her here the day she heard of your arrival: as it is—”
“She ought to have taken no notice of me, I should have felt it less,”
finished Nettie. “Tell her though, Mrs. Hartley,” she went on, kneeling
before that lady, and resting her arms across her lap, while she turned
up her face, which looked at the moment pathetically beautiful, towards
her mentor, “tell her I am sorry for writing that nasty letter; tell her
I did not mean half nor a quarter what I said in it; but I was angry, I
was hurt; she ought not to have sent me money, it was like buying me
off. It was treating me like a beggar.”
“It is difficult to please every one,” remarked Mrs. Hartley; “I am
treated frequently like a thief, because I do not send money to those
who have no right to it. But proceed. How did Grace happen so far to
forget what was due to your feelings as to make this present?”
“Do not laugh at me—oh! don’t,” entreated Nettie; “I thought Grace was
fond of me, and it seemed so hard, so cold!”
“Grace is fond of you, and she is neither hard nor cold. What did she
say?”
“You can see her letter, if you care to read it,” Nettie answered; and
she went into the next room and fetched Miss Moffat’s epistle.
It was a simple, loving scrawl—Grace wrote an abominable hand—and told
how earnestly the writer hoped Nettie would be happy, and how she wished
she could go and see her, and how she sent a little token by which
Nettie would know she was not forgotten; and how, thinking there must be
many things Nettie might want to buy in the way of dress, she enclosed
her some money, which she hoped Nettie would take from her as if she was
her sister.
Nothing could have been more tenderly or delicately worded—there was not
a sentence, not a syllable in the letter which could have given offence
to any one who happened to be in a better frame of mind than was Mrs.
Brady’s case when she received it.
Never before, Mrs. Hartley felt, had she quite appreciated Grace Moffat.
Certainly there was a sweetness and softness about her mentally which
Nettie lacked.
“You did not stand in need of this money,” she said, folding up the
letter and returning it, “or else you never could have resented a
kindness so gracefully offered, or the feeling which prompted that
kindness. What was the amount of her enclosure?”
“Fifty pounds,” answered Nettie, slowly and reluctantly.
“Upon my word, Miss Grace, when you come into your own, you will do
things right royally!” remarked Mrs. Hartley. She was astonished at the
idea of Miss Moffat proffering such a sum, and yet while blaming the
girl’s reckless generosity, as she privately styled it, she was touched
by it sensibly. Middle-aged people, who, having learned the value of
money, look at a shilling twice before they spend sixpence, are not
always displeased at the spectacle of a lavish liberality on the part of
young folks. Nevertheless, she intended to remonstrate with Miss Moffat,
to point out the evil and folly of her pecuniary ways, and read her a
lecture, which she well knew beforehand would be answered with many an
“Ah, no!” and “Dear Mrs. Hartley,” and “Well, but,” and earnest excuse
and playful protest, uttered by that soft, sweet, stealing voice which
was—the Englishwoman confessed it with shame—almost reconciling her to
the Irish accent.
“If you really do not require the money, Nettie, I should return the
whole or part of it,” said Mrs. Hartley, forgetful apparently of the
statement Mrs. Brady had made when the subject of Grace was first
broached.
“I cannot,” Nettie answered.
“What, spent it all already!”
“No,” she replied; “I have given it away,” and once again the tell-tale
colour flamed in Nettie’s cheeks.
No good purpose was to be served in continuing that conversation, so
Mrs. Hartley immediately guessed, and changed it.
“Grace has refused John Riley,” she began.
“So I hear.”
“How did you hear it?”
“John told me, and I am very sorry. I did not say I was sorry to Grace
because she might not believe me, but I am. She will never meet with any
person one half so fond of her for herself as John.”
“I agree with you there,” said Mrs. Hartley briskly; “but why do you
imagine Grace would not have believed you felt sorry, if you told her
you did?”
“Oh! because I used to be foolish about things,” answered Nettie,
looking straight down the dreary expanse of uncarpeted floor that
stretched between her and the other end of the room.
“About what things?” asked Mrs. Hartley.
“About lovers and husbands, and other nonsense of that sort,” Nettie
replied, as if she were five hundred years old. “I thought no girl
_could_ care for a man unless he was handsome; and John is not handsome,
you know. You remember the saying, Mrs. Hartley, that it is better to be
‘good than bonny.’ I did not believe anybody could be good who was not
bonny. I have learned better since then.”
Mrs. Hartley did not care to inquire “since when?” so she merely
remarked,—
“You were therefore, I suppose, always influencing Grace against him?”
“She did not need any influencing,” was the calm reply. “She did not
care for him—not—not in that way, and she did think he wanted her money
as much as herself; perhaps he did, he has not much of his own to spare;
and then she met Mr. Somerford, and he took her fancy with his playing
and singing, and talk about painting, and rubbish of that sort. No,”
added Nettie abruptly, reverting to the question of Miss Moffat’s
rejected lover, “we did not often speak about John. She always said she
never intended to marry any one; and of course I had to listen, and seem
to believe her.”
“You did not think she expressed her real intention, then?” suggested
Mrs. Hartley.
“I am not sure. I think Grace is likely enough to stay single all her
days; unless she marries Mr. Somerford, or some person like him; and I
hope she will not marry Mr. Somerford, I do, from my heart.”
“Why, Nettie?”
“Because I do not think he is good enough for her. He has nothing inside
his head excepting selfishness and the roots of his curly-black hair,”
criticized Mrs. Brady, whose ideas on the subject of physiology were
vague in the extreme.
Mrs. Hartley laughed. Disparagement of that handsome scion of a
worthless stock was very music to her ears.
“And besides,” proceeded Nettie, “I am certain Grace would never be
happy, stuck up amongst the peerage. I know she and the countess are now
never separate; but she must be a greatly altered girl if she cares very
much for being intimate with the nobility. However, there is no
knowing,” finished the speaker sententiously. “I suppose we are none of
us exactly what we seem,” and blue eyes and golden curls relapsed into
reverie.
“Where is your husband?” inquired Mrs. Hartley, after a moment’s pause.
She had hoped to see him, and she did not wish to end her visit without
doing so.
“Mr. Brady,” said Nettie (it was a noticeable feature in the young
wife’s conversation that since the day when General Riley and his son
came upon her, standing by the broken sun-dial, she had never spoken of
her husband as such, or addressed or referred to him by his Christian
name); “Oh! he has gone down the Lough as far as Port Clune, to look at
some cattle he is thinking of buying. It saves ten or twelve miles going
by water instead of round the headlands; but he cannot be back before
the evening. I am sorry it has so happened; he will be grieved to have
missed you.”
It struck Mrs. Hartley that although Mr. Brady might possibly be
grieved, Mrs. Brady was certainly not sorry; but she was rising to take
her leave, taking Nettie’s statement apparently for granted, when the
door opened, and the person of whom they had been speaking walked in.
At sight of a visitor he hesitated for a moment, then came across the
room and said how glad he was to see Mrs. Hartley, how proud to make her
acquaintance.
“I did not know any one was here,” he added (which must have been a mere
figure of speech, since he had seen Mrs. Hartley’s car, and learned from
the servant to whom it belonged), “or I should not have appeared before
you in such a plight.”
“Where have you been? what have you been doing?” inquired his wife.
“I have been in the water,” he replied, “bringing Lady Glendare back to
land. She got out of her depth, or caught by a current, or something of
that sort, and would most likely have been part of her way back to
England by this time, had we not happened to be passing.”
“You ought to change your clothes at once,” remarked Mrs. Hartley,
practical and unemotional as ever.
“There is no hurry,” answered Mr. Brady, laughing. “Mr. Moffat insisted
on my taking an internal antidote against cold; and, besides, salt water
never hurts anybody.”
“And the countess?” inquired Nettie.
“Oh! there is not much the matter with her beyond fright. She was
terrified. Miss Moffat, I suspect, has not come off so well. She was
sitting at the door of the bathing-box when Lady Glendare’s maid
screamed, and in one moment (by George, I never saw anything so quick or
so well done in my life) she was out along the rocks (how she kept her
footing I cannot imagine), and made one leap after her ladyship. I was
near the countess by that time, and Calpin had rowed in shore, so we
saved them both; but Miss Moffat is hurt, I know, though she will not
confess it. What a girl that is!” finished Mr. Brady reflectively; “what
a spirit she has! The first words she said to the countess, as Calpin
and I were carrying her ladyship up to Bayview, were, ‘Of course there
is no fear of the election now?’ I rather fancy the election was a
matter of secondary importance to Lady Glendare at that moment; but Miss
Moffat was right, nevertheless.”
Mrs. Hartley looked straight at Mr. Brady while he uttered the foregoing
sentence. He was a handsome man, no one could deny that; handsome after
his kind; and there was really nothing in the words he spoke calculated
to annoy any one. But there was a manner about him that offended the
lady’s taste. More especially she hated the tone in which he alluded to
Grace; and she felt angry with Grace for having made any remark capable
of repetition in the presence of such a person.
“I am certain that your husband ought not to be standing here in his wet
clothes,” she said, turning to Nettie. “If you name an evening when you
and Mr. Brady can come and take a cup of tea with me, I will not intrude
any longer upon you to-day.”
“I do not think,” Nettie was beginning, when Mr. Brady interrupted her,—
“Annette and I have not so many engagements, Mrs. Hartley, that we need
hesitate about accepting yours,” he said. “Any evening which suits you
will be agreeable to us.”
“Thursday, then?” suggested the lady.
“Thursday, with many thanks,” he replied.
“You know what that means, I suppose?” remarked Nettie, when he
returned, after helping Mrs. Hartley into her car. “She does not want us
to call when we might meet other visitors, but asks us to tea when she
will take good care to have nobody there.”
Nettie had not lived behind the scenes of high life in Kingslough for
nothing.
“Never mind,” returned her husband, “it is the thin edge of the wedge;”
and he went out to state to some of his astonished labourers that he
wanted the drive weeded, gravelled, and rolled, and that they were to
set about putting it in order immediately.
CHAPTER II.
COMING EVENTS.
Nothing but the desire of annoying Mrs. Somerford could have reconciled
Lady Glendare to the bi- or tri-weekly dip with which she sought, and
not unsuccessfully, to increase the earl’s popularity amongst the Whigs
of Kingslough and its dependencies.
Ninon de l’Enclos, we are assured, preserved her beauty by a plentiful
use of water; but then that was rain water, and not salt, used also in
privacy and under comfortable, not to say luxurious, circumstances; and,
besides, she was an exception to most rules,—certainly, if she pinned
her faith to water pure and simple as a conservator of good looks, an
exception to one.
As for Lady Glendare, she never made a secret of her antipathy to what
she styled the horrid and indecent practice of bathing in the sea.
Exclusive in all her ideas, a Tory in every turn of her mind except as
regarded the politics she professed, Lady Glendare looked upon soap and
water, more especially water, as methods of cleansing intended by
Providence for those poor and busy persons who had little time to spend
upon their toilettes, and less money to devote to the accessories of the
dressing-table. She might indeed, so great was her objection to all
ordinary modes of ablution, have been the original of that mother who,
when she left her daughters at school, begged they should on no pretence
be permitted to wash their faces.
“A silk handkerchief,” she suggested, “carefully passed over the skin,
being sufficient for the purpose, and rendering injury to the complexion
impossible.”
And, indeed, at a time when “making up” was rather an art than a
science, ere chemistry had exhausted its resources to provide a new
bloom, and invention had outstripped imagination in order to confer
beauties previously undreamed of, the indiscriminate use of so plebeian
a fluid as water could not fail to be attended with accidents, not to
say danger.
The rule was then, as now, to improve nature as much as possible, but
the process by which all this was accomplished seems to our modern ideas
clumsy and tedious.
It is almost a pity that some of the great-grandmothers of our present
sirens who likewise, and at great trouble and expense, tired their heads
and darkened their eyes and beautified their complexions, cannot come to
life again and behold all the pretty inventions by which much more
effective and deceptive results are now attained.
As the steam-engine is to horse-power so are the devices of women now to
those employed by their progenitors in the old days departed. The worst
of it is that beauty, by reason of its universality, will soon be at a
discount. Time was when, unless a lady were young and fair by the grace
of God, she had to be rich and idle before she could counterfeit His
gifts. Now loveliness can be had on the most reasonable terms; a
complexion is cheaper than a chignon, and large eyes with the iris
distended at high noon can be matched with real hair a dozen shades
lighter than it appeared a week previously, for the expenditure of a few
pence.
Things were not so when Lady Glendare came to Bayview, “for the benefit
of the salt water,” so ran the simple phrase in that primitive age.
People “took salt water” externally then as they might have taken a
solution of sulphuretted hydrogen internally. Some strong-minded old
persons and some light-minded young ones really liked the operation; but
taking society round, it shivered on the brink and went in for its
“three dips and out again,” actuated either by a strong feeling of duty
or a stronger dread of being laughed at. In a word, the sea was a
medicine, and regarded as such.
Lady Glendare considered it a medicine she personally did not require,
but she took it to benefit her lord and spite her sister-in-law. Many a
wry face she made over the dose to Grace; and Grace, when she beheld her
ladyship tripping down the ladder, pitied her, as she might a poor
wretch going up one on a different errand.
Not but that sea-bathing at Bayview was, as far as it could be made so,
an eminently comfortable affair. Grace was one of those fanatics who
dipped in season and out, for whom rough weather had no terrors, winter
rather charms than otherwise, and her box was therefore the perfection
of a dressing-room by the sea.
The usual mode of procedure at Kingslough, which indeed I have seen
adopted in more northern latitudes within the last few years, and
considered charmingly primitive and easy, if slightly uncomfortable by
reason of wind and sand, was to undress on the shore, flinging on a
green or blue baize gown to conceal the operation. Those who were so
fortunate as to own “back entrances,” disrobed themselves within four
walls and slipped quietly into the water, as, indeed, did others whose
houses faced the shore, and who, watching their opportunity, rushed
across the road enveloped in cloaks, which they flung off at the water’s
edge, and then went out to sea as calmly as though they had been fishes
bred and born.
Perhaps Lady Glendare was right, perhaps the whole system might be
accounted barbarous; but it is open to question whether the
bathing-machine régime, which jolts a poor shivering wretch over stones
and shingles, only to land her finally in six inches of water, imagined
sufficient to conceal her and her meagre serge dress from profane eyes,
is superior in any way.
However, there were no bathing-machines at Kingslough then (it is
possible Kingslough may have adopted them now), and failing such and
such like devices, the Countess of Glendare was fain to put up with the
accommodation afforded by Miss Moffat’s box.
For many reasons Miss Moffat took her pleasure in the deep at other
hours than those affected by the countess. Right glad would her ladyship
have been of her company in the water; but Grace judged, and judged
rightly, that on those mysteries of the toilette which were enacted with
closed doors and in solemn silence, the scrutiny of youthful eyes was
not desired.
Any change in the arrangement of her ladyship’s hair was hidden, as she
stepped out of the box, by that most hideous of all head-gear, an
oil-silk bathing-cap; and if, in the momentary glance which was all that
even by accident Grace caught of her guest’s face as, followed by her
maid, she went to perform her penance, it looked older and whiter than
had been the case an hour previously, still that proved nothing.
Her ladyship had been a beauty, and was beautiful even yet. If she chose
to put back the years and look younger than chanced to be actually the
case, that was entirely her affair, and Grace had sense enough to know
the countess felt no desire to reveal the secret means whereby such
wonderful results were obtained.
As regarded the maid, she consented to bathe, as she would have
consented to anything else which was duly considered in her wages.
After all, going into the sea could not by any stretch of the
imagination be considered a greater hardship than coming to Ireland.
Ireland was an extra, and so was bathing, or, to speak more correctly,
following Lady Glendare into the water and assisting her to bathe. Mrs.
Somerford wondered how her sister-in-law could think of making such an
exhibition of herself; but the exhibition was rapidly restoring the
earl’s popularity. Her ladyship’s condescension—so the fact of her going
into the sea at all was styled—had given a greater fillip to Kingslough
than could have been supposed likely. The Ardmornes had tried being
popular, but Lady Glendare beat them at their own game, and the
finishing stroke of being within an ace of drowning settled, as Grace
prophesied it would, the fate of the Tory candidate.
Certainly, could Kingslough have chosen, it would not have selected Mr.
Brady for her ladyship’s rescuer.
It grudged such a piece of good fortune to a man of his standing and
antecedents; but still, had he not chanced to be at hand when the
countess got out of her depth, and her maid lost whatever presence of
mind she ever possessed, and stood shrieking helplessly, while Grace ran
the risk of being carried out to sea likewise in her mad endeavour to
render assistance,—had Mr. Brady, I say, not been near enough to render
efficient help then, Kingslough would have lost both Miss Moffat and the
stranger within her gates. And Kingslough was not ungrateful; more
especially as the earl, moved no doubt by hints from his agent, and very
plain speaking on the part of Mr. Robert Somerford, confined his thanks,
so far as anybody knew, to an early visit.
Nettie and her husband were not taken into high favour at Rosemont. They
were, it is true, like everybody else, asked to the election ball, but
Mr. and Mrs. Brady had sense enough to stay away.
The world did not know that a grateful husband had asked in which
direction Mr. Brady’s wishes lay, so that he might advance them, and
that Lady Glendare had told Nettie she could answer for herself and her
children that they would never, never forget the obligation under which
Mr. Brady had laid them.
There were a great many things Mr. Brady wanted which it was in Lord
Glendare’s power to give; but although he knew enough of society to be
aware a nobleman’s memory for benefits conferred is about as short as
that of other people, he contented himself, for the time being, with
having “got his foot in.”
It might be or it might not be that hereafter the earl would have the
opportunity of serving him disinterestedly, but he was well aware that
once he was in a position to avail himself of his opportunities, he
could make it serve Lord Glendare’s purpose to advance his views.
The world was before him—and it was an advantage that his world now
included an acquaintance with the owner of Rosemont, and something which
amounted almost to the right of speaking or writing to him without the
intervention of any one, whether agent or lawyer.
Mr. Brady hated lawyers, which was all the more natural since lawyers,
even his own, hated him.
Looking around, this man saw that nearly every rising fortune, and
almost every fortune that was secure in Kingslough, owed its foundation
to some stone rent from the ruins of the Glendare prosperity. Any one
whose property was unencumbered—any one who was getting on in the world,
any one whose father and grandfather having been nobodies was
consequently educating his children to become somebodies, owed the whole
of their advancement to the need or the improvidence of the Glendares.
Any man clever enough to obtain their ear, and patient enough to wait
his opportunity, any one unscrupulous as to making terms, and wise
enough to have those terms made binding, could get an advantage over the
Somerfords, could clear his own way to wealth, while lending a hand to
help them along the road to ruin.
Not that they needed any help; they found the road easy to travel, if
occasionally not over pleasant.
To use a phrase which has become common of late in connexion with
business failures, “They were bound to go;” and to pursue the same
simile, all that wise men thought of in relation to them was how to get
as much money, or money value, as possible out of them before the crash
came.
Unsophisticated people, who had always been hearing of the
embarrassments of each successive earl, thought there must be a
wonderful vitality about the Somerfords’ affairs, and concluded rashly,
that what had been apparently from the beginning must go on to the end;
but these were persons who forgot, on the one hand, the first enormous
extent of the property, and, on the other, the fact that a man rolling
down hill gains a frantic speed as he nears the bottom.
“I do not know why I should grudge Glendare this triumph,” said Lord
Ardmorne, looking askance at grapes which he would fain have made
believe to think sour; “he will never see his nominee sent to Parliament
again.”
And the marquis was right. When the next election took place Mr. Robert
Somerford, who contested the seat himself, was beaten, not
ignominiously, perhaps, but sufficiently.
From which remark of his fellow-peer, it will be understood that the
earl had the happiness of seeing a Whig returned for the family seat.
The fight was fierce, the contest close, the expense great, but the
Glendare interest won.
How far my lady contributed to this result can only be surmised; how far
sympathy carried the voters is also problematical. One thing only is
certain, that when the general public learned how Lady Glendare, herself
still ailing, started at a few hours’ notice to see her youngest born,
reported dangerously ill, and heard Lord Glendare making his lament
about Arthur, whom he loved best of all his children, and called, to
those who evinced sorrow (and few there were that failed to do so), the
“flower of the flock;” and when further news came that on the very eve
of the election the earl was summoned away, told to travel with all
speed “if he wished to see his boy alive,” the hearts of the people
forgot Th’ Airl’s faults, and remembered only Th’ Airl’s grief.
Men who had “promised,” men who had half consented, men who were
undecided, forgot their promises, their semi-agreement, their doubts,
and voted to please the earl.
And the result did please him. Though his son lay dead when the news
came, he felt gratified, and, for the moment it might be, so far as such
a sensation could exist in a Glendare, grateful.
After all, they were not a bad race, a degenerate peasantry, those
Irishmen, who despite Lord Ardmorne’s money remained true to the
Somerfords and the traditions of their fathers.
They were a staunch tenantry and an honest, who forgot not former
benefits—so he mentally styled the renewals of leases, the granting of
liberty to pay rent—those sturdy independent men who spoke to him as
though he had been one of themselves, and yet who honoured him and his
house, who toiled early and late to make up the amount required on
“gale” days, expressive phrase! and who asked for nothing better than to
live and die hard-working paupers on the ground their “forbears” had,
personally paupers likewise, cultivated for the benefit of a reckless,
faithless, ingrate, doomed race.
Doomed! yes, and justly. They had cumbered the ground for a sufficient
period, and the inexorable fiat, “Cut them down!” had gone forth.
Their reign was coming to an end—the reign of the good-natured,
handsome, wicked Glendares. They had sprung from the loins of some
dare-devil English trooper, and they had not belied their ancestry. It
was time for them to depart and give place to another house willing to
return to the soil a portion at all events of what it took out of the
soil.
But the Glendares, one and all, men and women, were as those in the days
of Noë.
They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, and
still the waters were creeping up about them, round and about, and when
they were engulfed no soul pitied them.
It was coming, it was coming; wise were they who could read the signs of
the sky, and foretell the impending tempest, wise in their generation,
as are usually the children of this world.
Amongst the wise men were Mr. Dillwyn and Nettie’s husband. Of the
doings of the former there will be something to state hereafter. He took
steps at which all the world wondered, but which at the same time all
men could see and comment upon.
Mr. Brady, on the contrary, worked like a mole underground, throwing up
here a mound and there another, that might have conveyed a hint to
observant eyes.
But the eyes were wanting. Society at Kingslough was not clever at
addition. Scandal, being presumably feminine, is generally deficient in
its ability to solve abstruse arithmetical problems.
Kingslough, therefore, with whom Mr. Brady did not intermeddle, put Mr.
Brady on one side and left him at leisure to work out his plans.
What those plans were, even Nettie, with all her quick perception and
intuitive knowledge of other folks’ designs, failed fully to understand.
She comprehended that her husband, like the rest of his countrymen, had
a passion for the possession of land, a passion not second even to his
love of money; but her imagination never grasped the fact that already
he had formed a scheme to get the Woodbrook mortgage into his own hands,
and the thing he most fervently hoped for was that he might be able to
achieve his purpose before the General died.
The idea had entered his mind, more in the form of a vague wish than a
practicable scheme, on that day when John Riley and his father refused
his proffered hand; but he had since brooded over the plan, moulded it
into shape, and resolved to carry it into effect.
He knew he could ruin the Rileys. It became in his mind a mere question
of time, for now that Miss Moffat had refused to cast in her lot with
the family, not even a hope remained of ultimate extrication. The more
rapidly the world went on—and the world had begun in those days to show
signs of quicker movement—the more certainly were the Rileys doomed to
destruction; but he felt that his revenge would lose half its sweetness
if he failed to carry out his design in the General’s lifetime.
Already his fancy portrayed the old man leaving the house and lands he
had struggled so gallantly and so unavailingly to retain. Already he
pictured the daughters governesses, the father and mother living poorly
in some cheap house in Kingslough, the son’s exertions being taxed to
provide for the necessities of his family.
Such reverses had been over and over again, such a reverse should be
enacted once more.
“Had the Rileys,” he said to himself, but said falsely, though perhaps
unconscious of his self-deceit, “had the Rileys recognized Nettie and
received me, I would have forgiven them their insolence, and helped them
to build up their fortunes once again.”
So he said, so possibly he thought; but the experience of all time
tending to prove that a known enemy is better than a false friend, the
Rileys, in the impulse of their indignation at Nettie’s choice, acted
probably as well for themselves as they would have done had they gone
into a series of worldly calculations and ordered their conduct
accordingly.
Mr. Brady might be a rising man in a pecuniary sense, people soon began
to say he was, but the Rileys were of one rank and sort and he of
another, and there can be no greater folly than for one in a higher
station to suppose that a person who is trying to creep up to the same
station will serve him faithfully either for love or interest.
So after John’s departure there was a dead break between Woodbrook and
Maryville, and if Nettie had found her life in Kingslough monotonous,
she probably found it—except so far as her husband’s tempers diversified
the routine—more monotonous still in her new home.
But how she fared in that new home, whether well or the reverse, no one
could tell. Few ever saw her, to none did she give her confidence.
Even the Castle Farm beheld her no more. In the early days of her
marriage she wandered over there two or three times, in the vague hope,
perhaps, of meeting Grace; but Mr. Brady, hearing of these visits,
expressed his disapproval, and Nettie silently obeyed his wishes in that
as in all other matters.
Perhaps, indeed, after a few sentences she and her husband exchanged one
day, she felt little inclination to listen to Mrs. Scott’s hopeful talk
about the future, her cheerful gossip concerning their plans and
expectations.
“I wonder,” said Mr. Brady to his wife, “why Scott is drawing all those
stones? It looks as if he meant to build.”
“So he does,” Nettie answered; “he is going to build a new byre and
stable and loft over.”
“He must be mad,” remarked Mr. Brady, “to lay out money at the tail-end
of his lease.”
“The earl has promised him a new one, did not you know that?”
“I heard something about it,” said her husband, “but it is all nonsense.
The earl has no power to give him a new lease.”
“Why?” Nettie inquired.
“I wonder if one could talk for three minutes to any woman without her
asking ‘Why?’” said Mr. Brady impatient. “It would take me a day to
explain the why and the wherefore to you. He can’t, and there’s an end
of it.”
Having returned which courteous answer, Mr. Brady walked out of the room
with his hands deep in his pockets.
Now the lands of the Castle Farm “marched,” to use a local expression,
with those of Maryville.
CHAPTER III.
SEVEN YEARS AFTER.
High noon once again at Kingslough; high noon, with a leaden sky, a
drizzling rain falling, the streets ankle deep in mud, the side paths
sloppy and dirty.
Altogether a miserable noon—the sea out a long way, as was its wont to
go at Kingslough when low tide-time came; an expanse of grey,
sad-looking shore; the water still and sullen; the hills the only bit of
colour in the landscape, for the foliage of the fir-trees in the distant
woods looked almost black by contrast with the leafless branches amongst
which they reared their heads.
No sunlight dancing on the waves; no shifting shadows succeeded by
bright patches of brightness coming and going upon the uplands; no
mellow haze softening the distance; no purple bloom softening the scene
into a dream of fairyland. At the foot of its hills, Kingslough lay
crouching and shivering its houses together; houses in which every blind
in the lower windows was drawn close, or the shutters closed, in token
of—respect, the people would have said.
Let the word go for what it was worth. It could not now matter to Lord
Glendare—in evidence of whose death the weather itself seemed to have
put on mourning—whether the men he had ground down into the earth loved
or hated, respected or despised, his memory.
He was gone—by the road winding inland, along the Glendare
Parade—closely-shut houses on one side, and the dark, bare shore, with
the leaden-coloured sea reflecting a leaden sky, on the other—up the
steep hillside they were about to bear the mortal remains of the earl to
their last earthly home.
Nearly seven years had passed since his previous visit to Ireland, and
during that time progress set a weak, uncertain foot, even in
Kingslough.
Men had arisen who, from first whispering doubts of the Glendare
infallibility, gradually grew bolder, and at length openly proclaimed
the new doctrine, that property has its duties, and that the human
being, be he of gentle birth or of simple, to whom many talents have
been given, must account some day for the use made of those talents, if
not at any human tribunal, before the throne of God.
To those who had been accustomed to regard themselves as relieved from
all responsibility by the act of God Himself; who believed in the divine
right of landlords to do what they liked with their own; who had never
regarded the people save as so much raw material, out of which rent and
renewal fines were to be extracted—easily and kindly if possible—with
difficulty and harshness should necessity arise; to those, in a word,
who, like the Glendares, had been living on the edge of a social
precipice, the increasing murmurs of discontent fell on their ears as a
sound of impossible, yet uncomfortable, prophecy.
They had been Glendares since the time of that careless, selfish English
trooper; they had been great people; they had lived on the fat of the
land; they had ruffled it with the best; the fairest women had smiled
upon them; men of rank equal to their own, of better birth, of stricter
principles, had condoned the faults and sins of their false, bad race,
for the sake of the charms of person and the grace of manner which
distinguished all of the name; and could it be—could it that an end was
to come to the pleasant vices paid for by the sweat of toiling peasants,
the prematurely old faces of anxious wives, the feeble though willing
work of little children, who were turned out of their cradles into the
fields to help to make up the rent?
Had noon come and gone, and were the evening shadows already darkening
the fair landscape? Was the day in which their fellows greeted them with
smiles, and paid them honour, drawing to an end, and a night, dark and
starless, closing in around a House which had ruled despotically for so
long and so ill.
As is usual, the signs of the times were first made apparent in
increased difficulties of obtaining money or credit. So to speak, the
murmurs of dissatisfaction grew into words, which could be distinguished
by the ears of the earl, if by no other members of the family.
Never had a Glendare been so deeply involved in debt as he; never had a
Glendare been so short of that which should enable him to clear his
debts, even temporarily. One generation had gone on pushing its burdens
on the next. Long leases, sometimes for nine hundred and ninety-nine
years, had been granted by successive proprietors at disastrously small
rents, for the sake of a “lump sum down,” which sum vanished like “snow
off a dyke.” Lands had been sold, rights conceded. Almost everything
available with which the Glendares could part had been leased or sold or
mortgaged.
Fortunes were being made out of streams, moors, building-sites, houses,
and farms the Glendares had parted with, under the pressure of
importunate creditors, for an old song.
No young sprig of nobility ever made worse bargains with professed
money-lenders than successive earls with men who were wise enough to
take advantage of the Somerford necessities. Agent after agent had
fattened on the spoil; some of them, catching the infection of their
betters, spent their money recklessly, and came again, or their families
after them, to indigence. Some went to England and did well there;
others, again, bought properties in distant parts of Ireland, and set up
in the land-owning business for themselves; all, at any rate—however
they spent their money—had a pull out of the Glendare purse, as the
state of the Glendare purse could testify.
The mismanagement, the profuse expenditure, the eating the calf before
birth, the depredations of outsiders, had continued for a long time, but
it was impossible the game could be carried on for ever.
The end was coming; the murmurs of a once voiceless people, rising at
length into a hoarse low cry of discontent, reached even to London, and,
together with the remonstrances of lawyers and agents and the demands
and entreaties of duns, told the earl that, unless he and his reformed
their ways, reduced their outgoings and came down a little from their
high estate, they would have to sink altogether and drop a title and a
rank they had no longer wealth to maintain.
“It is hard upon me in my old age,” said the earl to himself with that
self-pity which would be ludicrous were it not almost pathetic, which
those who have never showed pity to others always extend to
themselves—“old, broken, weighed down by trouble, with one foot in the
grave”—but here the soliloquy ended. The ideas it expressed seemed too
true to form pleasant food even for self-pity. The years “few and evil”
were drawing to a close, and the prospect of having both feet laid in
the grave was as little agreeable to his lordship as it proves to most
of those who have loved this world, its sins, its pomps, and its
pleasures passing well.
“It all began when Arthur went,” he said one day to Lady Glendare; and
certainly, since the death of his favourite son, trouble and the earl
had not walked on different sides of life’s highway. Petty annoyances,
grave anxieties, family trials, succeeded each other as though all were
part of a giant army gathered to annihilate an enemy.
Save Henry—the heir—he was childless, and one of his sons had before his
departure, dragged even the Glendare name through such disreputable
places that the world could scarcely put on a show of decent sympathy
with his parents when his career was cut short.
Henry the earl did not love—or loved, to speak more correctly, after the
fashion in which men usually love those who are born to wear their shoes
after them—and Henry had not much affection to spare for his father.
Nevertheless, he had been ready enough to join him in granting leases,
and cutting off part of the entail, until he discovered that far more
than the lion’s portion of the spoil was finding its way into the earl’s
pocket.
Some one enlightened that overwise young man on this point; my lady
declared the some one was Robert Somerford, whom she now hated with that
impotent hatred only a weak vain woman can entertain towards a man who,
through the deaths of her children, stands a few feet nearer rank and
wealth; and the result was, that the next time the earl asked his son to
join him in some fresh work of destruction, his son flatly refused to do
anything of the kind.
“There has been enough of this suicidal policy in the family already,”
said the young man with an air of withering superiority, “and I for one
will be no party to its continuance.”
“But, Henry, you are as much in want of money as I am, and I only ask
you to do for and with me what I did for my father,” urged the earl.
“What you may have chosen to do for your father is beside the question,”
was the reply. “I have quite made up my mind as to the course I intend
to take. It is true I am in want of money, but, on the whole, I find the
Jews cheaper than your lordship”—
Whereupon his lordship ordered him to leave the house, and there being
reasons why London was at that time not so agreeable a residence as it
might have have been to the future earl, he went to visit his relatives
at Rosemont—
Who now consisted, by marriage and otherwise, of Mr. Robert Somerford,
Mrs. Somerford translated into Mrs. Dillwyn, and her husband, Mr.
Dillwyn.
The news of the proposed matrimonial alliance had electrified Kingslough
six years previously. That Mr. Dillwyn should propose! that Mrs.
Somerford should consent!—so the sentences of wonderment ran, while
gossips lifted their hands—whilst ladies eligible as to spinsterhood,
though not equally so as to age, wondered what the agent could be
thinking about to marry a woman older than himself, and she a
widow—whilst men shook their heads and said, “Dillwyn was not born
yesterday.”
“What will the earl do under the circumstances?” people
inquired—meaning, Would the earl dismiss his agent, or receive him into
the bosom of the Glendare family? would he give the bride-elect notice
to leave Rosemont, or would he ask her and the bridegroom to spend part
of the honeymoon in London?
Popular opinion inclined to the belief that Mr. Dillwyn would have to
leave his situation and deliver up his papers, and had Lady Glendare’s
wishes been followed, a line hard and fast had then been drawn between
the earl and the occupants of Rosemont; but her wishes were not
followed, and not only was Mrs. Somerford allowed to remain at Rosemont,
but Mr. Dillwyn was permitted to take up his abode there with her.
He offered to pay a rent for the mansion and grounds, and, to his secret
satisfaction, Lord Glendare accepted his offer. When Henry Lord Trevor
came of age, almost one of his first acts was, with his father, to grant
a long lease of Rosemont to the agent.
“But remember, Dillwyn, Rosemont is still to be our home when we come to
Ireland,” said the earl; and Mr. Dillwyn agreed, nothing loth.
He had counted the cost of his plan before carrying it into practice,
and the cost included maintaining his noble relatives on the few
occasions they might choose to honour Ireland with their company.
As for Mr. Robert Somerford, he did not like Mr. Dillwyn, but he did not
dislike the match. It gave him a much more comfortable home than had
hitherto fallen to his lot, money in his purse, power to travel, and, to
a certain extent, maintain his proper position in the world.
There were pecuniary ease and comparative affluence amongst the trio who
lived there.
Mr. Dillwyn was well to do, and carefully trying to be better, but he
acted towards his stepson with a liberality which at last elicited some
astonished, if not grateful, remark from the younger man.
“It is not right you should be mewed up in a remote country house
through the best years of your life,” answered Mr. Dillwyn; “you ought
to see the world, and become fitted for a position beyond that of a mere
dependant. It is on the cards you may one day be Earl of Glendare
yourself.”
With an amazement too swift and genuine to be assumed, Mr. Somerford,
looking eagerly in the agent’s face, asked him what he meant.
“Precisely what I say,” answered Mr. Dillwyn. “Count your chances, and
see what stands between you and the title.”
There was a pause; then Mr. Somerford, having presumably counted the
chances and found them in his favour, said,—
“You calculated on this when you married my mother.”
“I did, Mr. Somerford,” was the reply, as calmly uttered as though there
had been no sting contained in the sentence, no scorn in the tone. “A
man must marry for something—love, money, interest. Your mother married
me because she was sick of existing on her wretched pittance of a
jointure, because she believed I might assist you. I married her because
I had reasons to believe you might one day be able to serve me; because
I knew the match must strengthen my position with the earl. There was no
question of love in the matter, no pretence of anything beyond respect;”
and Mr. Dillwyn stopped, thinking evidently his stepson ought to be
perfectly satisfied with the explanation vouchsafed.
But Mr. Somerford’s vanity had received a blow which a much longer and
more plausible explanation might have failed to soothe.
He had thought, honestly and sincerely, that the honour of an alliance
with a member of his family was more than an equivalent for Mr.
Dillwyn’s good looks, comparative youth, unquestionable ability, and
wealth acquired—no one exactly understood how; and now to be told that,
instead of an open, the man had been playing an underhand, game—with
himself as probable ace of trumps hidden up his sleeve all the time—was
more than he could endure.
“So that was your motive?” he began quietly, drawing in his breath at
the end of his sentence, as the wind lulls for a moment before the storm
breaks forth in its fury.
With all their amiability the Somerfords had tempers, and knew on
occasions how to exhibit them; and the years spent in association with
the family had not been passed by Mr. Dillwyn altogether in vain.
Well, at any rate, he understood what the lowering of Mr. Robert’s voice
and the compression of his lips portended, and so hastened to avert the
threatened hurricane.
“I have shown you my hand,” he began. “Do not let us quarrel about the
honours I hold till we are quite sure they will win. Do not speak that
which is in your mind unless you are satisfied it will be to your
interest to quarrel with me. I tell you it is your interest to keep me
as your friend. If the Glendare estates, or any part of them, are to be
saved, which is problematical, I am the only person who can tell you how
to save them. If without the estates you are ever to keep your head
above water, I am the only person able to show you the way.”
“I ought to be the last person to question your ability to compass
anything on which you set your mind,” said Mr. Somerford, “but I do not
feel at all disposed to allow you to exercise your talents in the
management of my affairs.”
“When you have affairs to manage, it will be time enough to discuss that
question,” retorted the agent. “Meanwhile, if I did make a throw for
fortune and position, remember what I staked upon it. I burdened
myself—I use the word advisedly, Robert—with a young man utterly
destitute, with a lady worthy of all esteem, but no longer even in the
prime of middle life, while between you and the possibility of the title
stood how many? The Glendares, I believe, always expect people to give
them something for nothing; to waste their health, strength, money, in
the unselfish desire to give them pleasure; but if you have taken up any
false ideas of that kind with regard to me, disabuse your mind of it as
fast as you can. It is of no use scowling. I will work with you or
against you; only say whether we are to be friends or foes, and I will
order my course accordingly.”
“You are wondrous plain, sir, all of a sudden,” said Mr. Somerford with
a sneer.
“I am wondrous true, considering the nature of the man to whom I am
speaking,” replied Mr. Dillwyn.
“There is no necessity for you to favour me with an analysis of my
character,” returned the younger man; “I think we understand each other
without going into particulars. It seems we must row together, or swim
separate. Is not that the English of the confidence you have forced upon
me? Yes; well, that being the case, and having no taste for salt water,
I agree to let bygones be bygones, and take my chance with you.”
“Meaning that we are to be friends?”
“If you attach any importance to the expression, yes.”
“Will you give me your hand upon it?”
“Having given my word, I should have imagined the other form
unnecessary; but as you wish——” and he held out his hand, which Mr.
Dillwyn clasped hard for a moment.
Then he loosed it, saying, “That is a bargain.”
“Agreed,” answered Mr. Somerford carelessly; and he went off, humming an
opera air.
“I would not give much for my hopes if you were once king,” muttered the
agent, as he watched his retreating figure. “Drivelling idiots
all—cruel, selfish, vain, inconsequent fools—earl, heir, nephew. What
could his mother have been thinking of when she brought such a
short-sighted simpleton into a world already overweighted with
simpletons? Well, forewarned forearmed, and when it comes to a stand-up
fight between us we shall see which man has best made ready for battle.
He has gone to Bayview I suppose. Ah, Grace! you had better have taken
me. Even if he comes to be earl, you will find a coronet cannot
compensate for the want of both head and heart.”
Whereby hung a tale—one never enlarged upon by Grace Moffat. After she
refused her first lover, she never took man, woman, or child into her
full confidence about those who came after.
It was to this united household Henry Lord Trevor, after the
unpleasantness with his father, came. Sympathy in abundance he received
from all the inmates of Rosemont, to say nothing of that which he valued
far more than sympathy—a considerable pecuniary advance from Mr.
Dillwyn, who, playing in those days for high stakes, could not afford to
be over-cautious in his game.
On the whole, the heir-apparent did not dislike Ireland; the almost
fulsome affection displayed by the tenantry, who, growing weary of the
old _régime_, trusted that the “young lord, bless him!” would reduce
their rents, and find money for improvements, was not unpleasant to one
of a family to whom popularity was as the sunshine and the breeze to
mankind in general.
He would not have been a Glendare had he not promised liberally, and
thus he charmed the people and they pleased him. A better shot than his
cousin—a more indefatigable sportsman—he traversed the moors and walked
over the hills in search of game. All in vain, knowing what he knew, Mr.
Dillwyn tried to keep him within bounds (the life of this young man had
suddenly become precious in his eyes); he would not be staid; and so,
with the seeds of a fatal disease lying in his frame, he exposed himself
to rain and storm, and trudged miles through mists that were as the very
breath of death to a constitution such as his.
By Mr. Dillwyn’s advice the breach with Lord Glendare was closed. At his
dictation the heir wrote a letter of apology for the expressions of
which he had made use. After stating how deeply he regretted having
permitted temper to overcome his filial respect, he proceeded to say
that, whilst his views concerning the general impolicy of granting long
leases at nominal rents for the sake of raising amounts utterly
nonequivalent to the benefits conferred, remained unaltered, still, if
any plan were thought of by which his father’s difficulties could be
permanently lessened, he would do all in his power to assist in carrying
it into effect. “For myself,” he went on, “I have already experienced so
much of the ill effects of running into debt, that I feel as though I
could make any sacrifice to set our affairs straight. I should not
object even to take up my residence permanently in Ireland—(he had been
a week in the country, and game was plentiful)—if it were thought
desirable for me to do so. Dillwyn believes a considerable amount might
be raised by granting leases for a certain term to those of the tenants
who hold their land on lives. There has been such a mortality amongst
the members of our family lately, that a feeling of uneasiness is
abroad, and it seems probable that even those persons to whom fresh
leases of this description have been granted since I came of age would
willingly pay a further sum to have their tenancy placed upon a more
secure footing. I may mention one case in illustration of this. Since I
arrived here, Mr. Brady, to whom you may recollect we granted a lease of
the Castle Farm, Scott’s tenancy of which expires at the death of Lady
Jane Somerford, has called to say he is prepared to pay any amount
Dillwyn may consider fair, if we will change the lease from three lives
to ninety-nine years. Evidently he does not think our space of existence
likely to extend to the same term as that of her ladyship.”
The last sentence was not, it is unnecessary to say, prompted by Mr.
Dillwyn. He was not given to sentimentality; nevertheless a grave pity
darkened his eyes as the young man laughingly read it aloud.
“Old ladies have a wonderful knack of living,” he went on. “Now there is
that Miss Riley; she must have been a hundred, twenty years ago.”
“I do not know her age,” Mr. Dillwyn answered; “but Lady Jane Somerford
was ninety-six last June. She has had her share of the Glendare
revenues, no matter who else may have gone short.”
“I wonder who invented life-leases,” remarked the other thoughtfully.
“Some one who liked speculating himself, and understood the love for
speculation, which is an integral part of human nature.”
“But our tenants’ human nature appears eminently non-speculative,” was
the reply.
“As the world grows older, its inhabitants get wiser,” said Mr. Dillwyn.
He could have told his auditor that there would be little of a
speculative character in taking a lease on his life, at all events! but
the agent’s rule had always been to try to make things pleasant, and he
was not going to deviate from it now.
“He may live; who knows?” reflected Mr. Dillwyn; “in a warm climate he
might last for years; but, whether he live or die, if only the earl
agree to my scheme Mr. Robert will find he had better not have tried to
play a double game with me.”
From which remark it will be seen that the agent’s Christianity did not
extend so far as the forgiveness of injuries inflicted or contemplated.
As for the earl, he was only too happy to accept the olive-branch held
out by his son; and as the course suggested by Mr. Dillwyn offered a
chance of raising some money, he came over to Ireland in person to carry
it with greater expedition into effect.
Glad enough was he to leave London and its duns behind him for a season,
and, crouching over the library fire at Rosemont, a bent and broken man,
he assured Mr. Dillwyn, even with tears, that if any arrangement could
be made which might enable him to end his days in peace, he would live
anywhere—he would do anything—he would induce her ladyship to do
anything for the sake of obtaining peace.
“It has been all wrong from beginning to end,” he declared, with a
frankness characteristic of those who, having eaten up the whole of
their cake at once, lament the absence of any hoard from which another
may be obtained. “It has been all a mistake. I ought to have retrenched
years ago; I ought to have come here, or lived abroad. Take warning by
me, Henry, and remember that an extravagant youth means a miserable old
age. Life seemed very happy once—ah! that was a long, long time ago. If
I could but have the past to spend over again, with my present
experience——”
“You would make just as bad a business of your second existence as you
have done of your first,” thought Mr. Dillwyn, while he publicly
observed “that regrets were worse than useless; that what they had now
to consider was, how to surmount present difficulties.”
“By the way,” he went on, “speaking of difficulties, there seems to be
one with Scott of the Castle Farm. He says your lordship promised him a
renewal of his lease, and that he has spent a mint of money on the place
in consequence.”
“The Castle Farm! where is it? what is it?” exclaimed the earl
pettishly. “I wish, Dillwyn, you would not pester me about matters that
lie exclusively in your province. I promise the man a lease? why should
I? And, even if I had, he must have been an idiot to lay out money until
he got it.”
“But he says he gave your lordship money for granting it.”
“Now, what nonsense all this is!” cried the earl angrily. “I don’t know
where the Castle Farm is. I should not know the man Scott if I met him
to-morrow. Why should he bring money to me instead of paying it to you?
What have I ever had to do with the tenants, except at election times?”
“That is the point,” persisted Mr. Dillwyn. “He declares he paid you the
money when you were over at the time of the last election, and that,
therefore, Mr. Brady’s lease is invalid.”
“He must be a fool,” observed the earl in a tone of sincere conviction.
“So I told him,” was Mr. Dillwyn’s reply.
“He has no lease, has he?” asked the earl.
“None excepting that which expires with the life of Lady Jane
Somerford.”
“Then what does the fellow mean?”
“That I really cannot say,” answered the agent.
“Of course, it is all a trumped-up story,” said Lord Somerford.
“Very possibly,” agreed Mr. Dillwyn, and the subject dropped.
Next day, when Amos Scott called at the agent’s office, that gentleman
said to him,—
“Now, look here, Scott—you chose to deal with the earl direct before,
and you must settle this matter with him now. I wash my hands of it. I
don’t understand the transaction, and I don’t want to understand it. The
earl will be up to his ears in business for a few days, but go to
Rosemont, say the early part of next week, and ask to see Lord Trevor. I
will beg him to get you speech of his father.”
“Yer honour’s a hard man, but I thought you would have seen justice done
to me,” said Amos bitterly.
“I cannot do you justice. I tell you I know no more of the matter than
the babe unborn. I will undertake that the earl shall see you; anything
more is beyond my power. However it may be, you have not much cause of
complaint; Lady Jane has lived twenty-six years longer than the time she
ought, and you have had the benefit of her toughness.”
“No thanks either to you or my lord,” answered Amos Scott with a grim
smile.
“Thanks to Providence, who, it is said takes an especial care of fools,”
retorted Mr. Dillwyn. “Come up on Tuesday morning about ten o’clock. I
will speak to Lord Trevor to-night; that is all I can do for you.”
Man proposes, but he cannot dispose. Amos Scott never “had speech” of
Louis Lord Glendare, who, before Tuesday came, was lying at Rosemont ill
unto death, dying as fast as he knew how.
Physicians came from Dublin; my lady was summoned in all speed from
London: but the first said there was “no hope,” and the presence of the
latter failed to save.
For nearly a fortnight my lord lay unconscious of debt, writs, duns,
bailiffs—lay forgetful of his wasted life—of the good he had neglected
to do—of the evil he had not failed to perform.
For a moment—only for a moment—at the very last, the light flickered up
again.
His son noticed the change, and leaned eagerly forward.
“Arthur,” murmured the dying man, thinking of the dead; and that was
all—he was Earl of Glendare no more. His son had succeeded to the title.
Following fast on the heels of the physicians came a Dublin undertaker.
No expense was to be spared about the funeral; such were the new earl’s
orders.
For eight whole days, which seemed to the ordinary Irish mind a period
almost disreputable, the late earl lay sleeping his last sleep in the
home of his ancestors—sleeping so quietly that he might well have
dispensed with the watchers, who never left his side by day or by night.
At length the ninth day arrived, that on which he was to be borne to
Ballyknock Abbey, when, after the lapse of years, the reader is asked
once again to enter Kingslough at high noon.
The town is in mourning; the inhabitants, with a hush of expectation on
them, are waiting to behold the spectacle of the “Th’ Airl” being
carried to his rest.
CHAPTER IV.
THE LAST JOURNEY.
Not even at election-time had the streets of Kingslough and the roads
leading into it been so thronged as on the day of Lord Glendare’s
funeral.
From ten, fifteen, and twenty miles people came to see the sight. From
far and near they flocked into the town. Men, old and young; comely
women, with babies in their arms; elderly women, so wrinkled and aged
that the memory of their childhood must have seemed as a dream to them;
girls straight and handsome, with brilliant complexions and, as a rule,
light luxuriant hair came crowding in from the east, and north, and
west. Some in jaunting-cars, some in farm-carts, some on the national
low-backed car—in which the want of springs was frequently
counterbalanced by a feather-bed covered with a patchwork counterpane
being laid on the body of the conveyance—most, however, on foot.
Not every day does a nobleman go to his rest, not every day was it given
to Kingslough to behold the proud spectacle of a hearse drawn by six
horses passing through its streets.
Simple enough were the funerals the little town witnessed as a rule.
Quietly and unostentatiously the dead were laid in their graves. Little
pomp and many followers, such was the primitive fashion at Kingslough.
Amongst the poor, neighbour carried neighbour to that resting-place he
was helpless to reach for himself. Amongst the rich, if the distance to
the churchyard were great, a hearse was procured from Kilcurragh; but
there the black business began and ended. Friends and relations followed
in their own conveyances; in broughams, chariots, barouches, phaetons,
dog-carts, gigs, cars, with an invariable rear of foot-passengers.
At that period of the world’s history a man was not allowed to shirk out
of the world unnoticed, as if he had done something to be ashamed of. So
to speak, his friends accompanied him to the very portals of earth,
before they could prevail on themselves to say farewell. The worst fate
which could befall a human being was, when he went to the grave, to do
so without a “following;” but it did not matter how unpretentious that
following chanced to be. A certain number of persons had shown respect
for the dead, that was enough. There had been no apathy, no coldness, no
standing aloof. His friends had stuck to him to the last. In driving
sleet or blinding snow no one worthy the name of friend shrank from the
performance of the final duty. They followed if the roads were a foot
deep in mud, they stood beside the grave with the rain beating down on
their uncovered heads, with the long, rank, wet grass reaching above
their ankles.
No single mourning-coach preceded by a hearse feathered as heavily as it
might, would have contented that sympathetic population. Without a
hearse at all it was possible for a coffin to be carried to the grave;
without a coach it was possible to follow the coffin; but it was a thing
not to be thought of that any one should be permitted to walk out of
this life as through a back-door, unmourned, unattended.
And when this idea of companionship obtained concerning even the poorest
of the community, how should sufficient honour be done to the dead earl?
How? the question was easy enough to answer. It resolved itself into a
matter of multiplication. Where a commoner had fifties the peer must
have his thousands. In the days to come, when the high-stepping horses,
and the sombre velvets, and the waving plumes and all the undertaker’s
bravery should be forgotten, feeble old crones should still be able to
tell their grandchildren of the “grand burying,” when the road from
Rosemont to Kingslough was lined by spectators who, so soon as the
carriages and the horsemen, and the tenantry had passed, became
“followers” also; when the ladies, dressed all of them in black, sat at
the windows where the blinds were drawn half down, to view the sight;
when the tenants chosen for that purpose, all furnished by the new earl
with white linen hatbands, and white gloves, “kept the curb,” so that
the roadway might be clear and unimpeded for the procession; when all
the shops were closed, and the town was “like a Sunday;” when the clergy
of all denominations—and there were many different sects in
Kingslough—had white scarves, ornamented by bows of the best black
ribbon, and black kid gloves sent to them; when, for one appearance
only, the lion lay down with the lamb, and Father Kelly and Mr.
MacRoberts,—who disagreed as heartily as it is possible for two
Christians in name to do, and this is saying enough—walked demurely side
by side; when happy was he or she whose friends lived on the line of
route; when the halt, and the deaf, and the blind reaped a rich harvest,
and, their pockets full of halfpence, chanted the praises of the
departed, of the last Glendare who shall ever sleep with his ancestors
in the old abbey situated so picturesquely on the height overlooking the
sea.
It was slow work traversing the weary miles that stretched between
Rosemont and Ballyknock Abbey, and the Kingslough gentry had ample time
for luncheon before crowding to the windows to look at the show.
All the men, as a matter of course, were either following the _cortége_
in carriages or holding in their horses to a walking pace in the rear of
the carriages, but the ladies ate their modest meal at their leisure,
and discussed many questions concerning the Glendares over it.
From the windows of Miss Riley’s house a good view was to be obtained of
the procession, and from attic to parlour her rooms were crammed by
guests possessed of sufficient forethought to take their mid-day repast
with them. As for Miss Riley—half blind, half deaf, whole
childish—seated close by the window-frame, she kept up an incessant wail
for Nettie. She had asked Nettie—why did she not come? it would amuse
Lillie to see the show; why, if Nettie did not care for it herself,
should she deprive her little girl of the pleasure? she had been a
little girl once herself, and a good girl too—before she was naughty and
ran away with Mr. Brady.
Poor old lady! who would not rather die in the summer’s prime than live
on into the dull December days, to babble idle stories to heedless
listeners? Who cared about the tale of Nettie’s marriage now? who cared
for Nettie herself, or Mr. Brady, or Miss Riley? The house was central,
and commanded a good view of the procession. Her older guests hearkened
to her civilly, if secretly impatient of her doting utterances. The
younger talked, and whispered, and laughed, charmingly oblivious of the
fact that, if they lived long-enough, age must come to them also—age
possibly even less attractive than that presented by Miss Riley. But
there was no Nettie; at no window in Kingslough did that most lovely
face keep watch for the long, and slow, and mournful funeral array.
Contrary to all precedent, Mrs. Brady grew fairer as she grew older.
Possibly had all gone well with her—had she married happily, and led the
easy, contented life it were devoutly to be wished all women could
lead—she might have grown plump, and so lost her beauty.
But as it was, the delicate carmine of her cheeks had not deepened, the
cheeks had grown no rounder, the hair had darkened but little, the
figure was lithe and slight as ever. She was the Nettie of old save for
this, that across her blue eyes there lay a dreamy shadow which added to
their tenderness, and that her mouth, once almost childish in the
pliability of its muscles, had acquired an expression which one who knew
nothing of her story might have failed to understand aright.
She had suffered cruelly, she had made a mistake, and some of the years
during which she must expiate her error were gone and past—a few, only a
few—but she was still so young that grief seemed to touch her with a
remorseful pencil, and increased her loveliness instead of destroying
the one great gift God had bestowed upon her.
Nevertheless, few now looked upon her winsome face. On the rare
occasions when she was compelled to enter Kingslough, she walked through
it with veil drawn close, with hurried steps, with eyes that looked
neither to right nor to left, that recognized and wished to recognize no
one who had known her in the old days departed.
Not so, however, Mr. Brady; about Kingslough he swaggered frequently,
and time, which works wonders, had brought him nods and “how-d’ye-do’s”
and “good mornings” from men too idle, or too busy, or too careless to
interest themselves concerning the antecedents of an apparently
prosperous man.
While Miss Riley moaned over Nettie’s absence, he was solemnly amongst
the other mourners reining in a mare that for blackness and uplifting of
all her feet in protest of the pace he forced her to adopt, might have
done credit to any undertaker in the United Kingdom.
As it was, the earl’s funeral brought him a good price for ‘Brunette.’
Common decency forbade a deal during the tedious journey to Kingslough,
but human nature suggested a series of remarks which led a certain
Captain Labucerbe to call next morning at Maryville and offer a given
sum for ‘Brunette,’ which, after a becoming hesitation and reluctance,
Mr. Brady accepted.
If, however, Nettie were nowhere to be seen, her old companion Miss
Moffat sat conspicuous amongst the ladies who crowded the windows of
Major Perris’ house. Time had amply fulfilled Mrs. Perris’ predictions
concerning her beauty. At four-and-twenty she was the most lovely woman
in all that part of the country. The world of Kingslough had settled
that she was certain to marry Robert Somerford, as it had settled years
before she must marry John Riley; but a girl possessed of her beauty and
her money had no lack of suitors, and if she were destined to wed the
late earl’s nephew she seemed also destined to refuse before doing so as
many would-be husbands as usually offer themselves to the favourable
consideration of an heiress.
Had it not indeed been for the fact of Mr. Somerford’s constant visits
at Bayview, Kingslough might have decided that Grace bade fair to become
an old maid; but as matters stood she was looked upon as almost engaged,
and treated by her friends accordingly.
Her denials of the statement were treated precisely then, as her denials
of a similar statement had been treated formerly. Kingslough was
convinced in its own mind that whenever Mr. Somerford got “an
appointment” the marriage would take place; and Kingslough also felt
satisfied she would have become a wife long previously but for her
father’s objection to her wedding a man who had no money and no
position. That Mr. Moffat had never been asked either to consent or
refuse was too absurd an idea to entertain.
Of course she was going to marry Robert Somerford—so said Kingslough,
and whatever Kingslough said, it implicitly believed to be true.
Slowly the hours crept by. On the road conversation grew brisker; at the
windows of the Kingslough houses it flagged grievously; in the streets
people were getting very weary, and not a few very drunk.
The shutters of the public-houses were closed, it is true, but the doors
stood hospitably open, and amongst the crowd of friends and neighbours
who thronged the streets there were not wanting plenty of persons
willing to treat and wishful to be treated.
Nevertheless, even with the charm whisky is capable of exercising, the
masses were beginning to get very tired. Everything about the late earl
and the new earl, and my lady, and Mr. Robert and Mr. and Mrs. Dillwyn
that could be said had been said. Speculation itself could advance
nothing further concerning the Glendare future, and the oldest
inhabitant could remember nothing about the Glendare past which he had
not already communicated.
As for the ladies—the best regulated mind could scarcely have considered
the entertainment provided that day particularly exhilarating. Hostesses
had committed the great mistake of inviting their guests to come for
luncheon, and consequently, when luncheon was over, and no sign of the
funeral still appeared, a feeling of boredom crept over even the
liveliest of the company.
The occupation of mentally criticizing each her neighbour’s apparel was
denied on this occasion. Every one appeared in black, and as of course
people could not be expected to purchase a new dress for the occasion, a
general effect of second or third best attire prevailed, which at once
defied and disarmed comment.
No Mrs. Hartley was there now in Kingslough to excite or amuse the
occupants of any drawing-room by her plain speech and sharp retorts.
Long previously she had returned to a country where, to quote her own
observation, “The poorest children are taught to pronounce the letters
in the alphabet properly.”
“How do they pronounce H?” Grace wrote back at once to inquire.
In congenial society she rustled her silks—in a civilized land she
recalled the years spent “amongst a warmhearted, barefooted, and
prejudiced race,” with something of the same feeling as Dr. Livingstone,
say, might evince if he ever returned to converse familiarly concerning
the inhabitants of Central Africa. In her descriptions of Irish ways, of
Irish notions, of Irish management, of Irish eccentricity, the lady was
merciless. The manners and customs of the Isle of Saints were described
to attentive listeners with a _verve_ and bitterness for which it seemed
difficult to account, except on the ground of intense dislike to the
country and the people; and in truth there had been a “difference”
between her and those of the Irish over whom she exercised some
authority, a difference of so grievous a description, that she sold all
the land she owned to Lord Ardmorne, and, shaking the dust of Ireland
off her feet, vowed a vow never to enter the country again.
Had she remained in Kingslough, it is possible the lives of Mrs. Brady
and Grace might have been different. As matters stood, both her former
favourites went on their separate ways without forming a close
friendship with any woman, without considering it necessary to establish
confidential relations with any adviser. There was no one now to talk
reproachfully to Grace about the honest heart she had stabbed by her
rejection of his love; no one to show Nettie how to make the best thing
of an existence she had marred for herself so young.
The peace of mind of Kingslough, no longer disturbed by the rich dress
and bold utterances of that strong-minded Englishwoman, who had been so
fond of golden-haired Nettie and dark-haired Grace, of the girl with
blue eyes and the girl with grey, had attained a state of tranquillity
verging on dulness. But for the sayings and doings of the democratic
party, there would literally have been no stock subject of conversation
amongst the _élite_ of Kingslough. As it happened, however, just at the
time of Lord Glendare’s death, the malcontents and those who, wishing to
acquire notoriety, self-elected themselves champions of the people’s
rights, had been making an unusual disturbance. Meetings were held and
speeches delivered; the beauties of Ireland described, and the soil,
“blessed by heaven and cursed by man,” invested with a number of
qualities subsequent experience has scarcely evolved from it. Tom Moore
was freely quoted, as well as some of the extremely beautiful poetry
produced during the time of the Rebellion. History was ransacked to
furnish instances of English cruelty and Irish chivalry. After listening
to the orations poured forth with all the fervour, and unreason, and
discursiveness for which democratic orators have always been noted, an
uninformed auditor could only draw one conclusion, namely, that there
had never been a great statesman, poet, patriot, soldier, sailor, or
writer born out of Ireland.
With throbs of national pride the people listened and believed, as name
after name was recited from what the speakers were pleased to style the
“glory-roll of time.” With rejoicing they gathered beside ingle nooks,
and around the turf fire of some wayside public-house, to hear the
schoolmaster or any other “scholard” read out leaders in which the Whig
paper of the county spoke of the “oppressed tenants,” of the “grinding
tyranny” of the landlords, of the right of the men who in the “sweat of
their brows tilled the soil to reap the fruit of their labours.”
It would have been touching—had it not been almost heart-breaking—to
behold the simple faith with which these utterances were received. Now
that men had “arisen to speak for them,” the population felt satisfied
the future would be bright as the past had been gloomy.
That they were in danger of falling between two stools never occurred to
them; that old friends might withdraw helping hands, that new friends
might be unable really to benefit was too common sense a view of the
matter to present itself; that orators were all unconsciously driving
nails into the coffins of one generation in order to benefit generations
then unborn, was a truth too self-evident to be acknowledged by anybody.
They believed that in gaining fresh advantages, they should lose none of
the old; that in being independent of the rich, they stood no danger of
losing the help and friendly feeling of the class above them.
It was not much they really wanted, something less than justice would
have satisfied every honest, sensible man in the community; but a great
deal more than justice would not have contented the new brooms, who
believed society only wanted to be swept by them to be made clean, who
held the doctrine that the only way to remodel old ways was to destroy
them, to encourage affection between all classes in the community was to
exterminate class altogether, and to exemplify practically the truth of
the Irish theory that “one man is as good as another—and better.”
In no community could social changes such as these indicated, have
passed altogether unnoticed; and in a neighbourhood like Kingslough,
where the upper ten bore an absurdly small proportion to the lower
thousand, much conversation was induced by the evil doings of the new
prophets who had arisen to lead the people to destruction.
Even amongst ladies the topic proved one of considerable interest, and
much of the talk in many houses on the day of Lord Glendare’s funeral
centred in the grievances, real or fancied, of the lower orders.
As for Miss Moffat, her sympathies were with the people, but she had no
toleration for the demagogues who were deluding them.
An earnest, quiet, patient friend of the poor, she did not care to
listen to foolish talk, either about their wrongs or the way to right
them.
With all the strength of her nature she loved the hard-working, devoted,
uncomplaining men and women amongst whom she had grown from a child to a
woman, but well she knew it was because of their unconsciousness of
fortitude, of endurance, of humble heroism, that she had grown so fond
of them, and she almost hated the orators who were trying to change the
very natures of those they addressed.
At the same time she had seen too much of the bitterness of the poverty
against which her humble friends waged incessant war; she understood too
well the struggle occupiers of land had to get enough out of the soil to
pay their rent and keep soul and body together, to endure with patience
senseless remarks concerning the discontent and ingratitude of poor
deluded creatures who flocked all too eagerly to hear the tale of their
wrongs and their trials recounted with dangerous eloquence, with
declamation and exaggeration.
Her heart was sore for the people. Had she sprung from them, had she
been of their blood and their bone, her soul could not have gone out to
them in their sorrow and their suffering more freely than proved the
case. She “spoke up for them,” and did no good either to them or herself
by her advocacy.
“When you are older you will know better,” said one antiquated lady,
shaking her ancient head with an air of solemn wisdom.
“The whole matter,” broke in a lively little matron, “puts me in mind of
that story which tells how a client, who suddenly burst into tears
whilst his counsel was speaking, being asked why he cried, answered ‘I
never knew how much I had lost until now;’ and in like manner the
peasantry never knew they were oppressed and injured till Mr. Hanlon,
and men such as he, told them so.”
“Do you mean us to infer from your anecdote that the client had lost
nothing?” asked Grace with judicial calmness.
“How can I tell? you have the story as I heard it.”
“Because,” proceeded Miss Moffat, “if you wish to make me believe that
the tenants even in this neighbourhood have no just cause of complaint—”
“For pity’s sake,” interrupted Mrs. Perris, “do not let us open up that
question, Grace! We are none of us landowners. If there is anything
wrong, we are utterly powerless to put it right. For my own part, I
agree with my husband that nothing could place the present race of
tenants in a better position. They ought all to be labourers. They have
not money enough to work the land easily or profitably. If they are
miserably poor it is not because their rent is too high, but because
they have no capital to put into their farms excepting their own and
their children’s labour.”
“Yes; and they would shoot anybody with money, who took a farm and
offered to give them employment, or else burn his house down about his
ears, or set fire to his ricks,” finished a maiden lady, whose brother,
having tried the experiment of going afield for his tenants, had been
compelled to abandon the attempt. “Take my word for it, Miss Moffat,
when you become one of the Glendares, you will see there is another side
to the land question than that espoused by Mr. Hanlon and his set.”
“When I become one of the Glendares, it is extremely likely I shall
adopt the opinions of the family on all subjects,” said Grace a little
bitterly.
“It is supposed,” remarked the lively matron who had previously spoken,
“that if Mr. Somerford were in a position to declare his sentiments, he
would side with the people.”
“The younger members of great houses are generally in opposition,” said
Colonel Perris’ father, who, by reason of an attack of gout had been
compelled to forego the pleasure of accompanying Lord Glendare’s remains
to the family vault; “just as men who want to rise are Radicals, and men
who have risen are Tories. Am I not right, Miss Moffat?”
“Possibly,” she replied. “Your experience of life has been much wider
and longer than mine.”
“Ah, Miss Grace!” exclaimed the old man, “how cruel it is of you to
remind me how far behind I have left my youth.”
“I do not think youth such a particularly happy season that one ought to
regret its departure,” was the answer.
“Wait till you are old before you decide that question,” he retorted.
“And others, you would imply,” she added.
“And others,” he repeated. “Believe me, those who think there can be
nothing easier than to put the world right, often find the operation
more difficult in practice than in theory. Take for instance Mr. Robert
Somerford—”
“Perhaps, Mr. Perris, you will defer pointing a moral by the help of Mr.
Somerford till he is present to hear for himself. I beg to state I am
not the keeper of his conscience.” And with a heightened colour Miss
Moffat walked to the window, whilst the ladies exchanged significant
looks, and Mr. Perris chuckled audibly.
“If they do not come soon, it will be quite dark before they get to the
abbey,” said Mrs. Mynton, referring to the funeral party, and, true to
her instincts, striving to make matters comfortable for Grace. “Hush! is
not that the bell?”
It was the bell of St. Martin’s Church tolling slowly, solemnly.
“They have got to the Black River, then,” observed Mr. Perris, that
being the point where the parish of Kingslough was supposed to commence.
“As they pass through the town the whole peal is to be clammed—muffled,”
said his daughter-in-law.
“I thought it was considered unsafe to ring all the bells,” remarked
Grace, not sorry, perhaps, to have an opportunity of speaking on an
indifferent subject.
“The risk is to be run to-day, at all events,” was the reply. “If the
tower comes down, and the ringers are killed, it will be a graceful
opportunity for the new earl to win golden opinions by rebuilding the
first, and providing for the families of the second.”
“I wonder if he will remain at Rosemont?” marvelled Mrs. Mynton.
“I should think he would reside with his mother,” observed a widow, who
had kept her only son tied to her apron-strings till he was long past
forty.
“I should think he would do no such thing,” said Mrs. Perris decidedly.
“He ought to travel, and get enlarged ideas, and rid himself of the
absurd notion that the earth was created solely and exclusively for the
benefit of the Glendares.”
“Who is Radical now?” suggested Grace.
“I am not,” was the reply; “but I would have young men be young men, and
learn what is passing in the world, and acquire fresh ideas. How should
any one be benefited by living with Lady Glendare—a silly, affected
woman?”
“Who must be in grievous trouble,” interposed Miss Moffat softly.
“True, my dear, and I beg her and your pardon for speaking so
ill-naturedly. She must be in trouble. The earl’s death will make a
great difference to her.”
“She intends to go to her sister, Lady Martinell, for the present,”
Grace explained; “and Lord Trevor—the new earl—talks of staying at
Rosemont.”
“At Rosemont! what attraction can he find there?” exclaimed the company
in chorus.
“Mr. Dillwyn thinks it would be advantageous to the property for him to
remain on the spot for a time at least.”
“Mr. Dillwyn, oh! Mr. Dillwyn, ah! Mr. Dillwyn has great influence. Mr.
Dillwyn knows all the ins and outs of the Glendare estates.”
These and other expressions like them were uttered in different tones by
the assembled ladies. In their hearts, perhaps, they had hoped the death
of the earl would prove the signal for Mr. Dillwyn’s dismissal. Amongst
them there were several who could not have married the agent themselves,
but there were few who ever intended to forgive his marrying Mrs.
Somerford.
By the window stood Grace Moffat, listening to the storm in a teapot she
had brewed so unwittingly. She was sorry now she had come into
Kingslough. The whole of the talk about herself and Robert Somerford,
the Glendares and their tenantry, seemed to her ill chosen on such an
occasion.
She had longed, with a longing the nature of which she could not have
explained to herself or any one else, to see the funeral procession—the
hearse, the coaches, the carriages, the long, long train of mourners.
The whole thing had taken possession of her imagination; she had brooded
over the earl’s death; she recalled the stories of the Somerfords’
former greatness; the years when, as legends ran amongst the poor, their
doors stood wide to all comers; when the gentry feasted in the hall, and
there was plenty and to spare in the kitchen; when no beggar left the
gate unrelieved; when, let money be spent in England or abroad, or
wherever it might be, with a careless prodigality, there was no stint at
home; and she contrasted those years with the later and more evil times
upon which the Glendares had fallen.
That was the beginning, this was the end. From Robert Somerford she had
heard histories of the shifts to which his uncle was compelled to
resort, the anxieties he endured, the small gratification he was ever
able to take out of his estates, his title, his wife, his children.
To Grace, who formerly thought the life of an earl must be one of
unqualified happiness, these revelations proved a disillusion almost
impossible to endure. To be placed so high, and yet have to stoop so
low; to have the power, apparently, of achieving so much, and yet to be
unable to do anything useful; to hold the happiness of so many in his
hand, and still to fail in bettering the condition of those most
dependent upon him; to be burdened with debt, not altogether of his own
contracting but to a great extent, an ever-increasing legacy handed down
from ancestor to ancestor through generations to him, and yet lacking
moral courage to retrench and live in honour and comfort, if not
luxury,—the whole thing seemed to her so pitiful, that she could neither
get the life nor the death of the late earl out of her mind.
What would the new earl, invested so young with such a terrible
responsibility, make of his life? On him devolved the debts, the duties,
the cares, the upholding of an ancient name. How would he, still almost
a boy, support the burden thrust upon him—the legacy of debt, the duty
of honour, the commission to put wrong right? How would he act?
And if not he, how would Robert Somerford—supposing—only supposing?
She put the idea swiftly aside. Robert was still only a cadet of a noble
house. So far as she was concerned, she had no desire ever to see him
otherwise, only—
Round at that moment went the bells, taken from the old abbey, open;
round again, muffled; round again open; round muffled, and still once
again, then clammed, muffled.
With tongue silenced, with face a little pale, each woman hurried to the
window; the procession was at hand—they were about to see the last in
this world of Louis Earl of Glendare.
On came the cavalcade—first the undertaker’s men, a strange sight in the
little town, then the hearse conveying all that was mortal of the late
earl, then the first coach, containing the new earl, the Hon. Cecil
Somerford, the late earl’s uncle, a shrivelled, weird old man, my lady’s
brother, and Mr. Robert Somerford.
That vehicle held the probable succession in this order,—first, the
earl, then Mr. Cecil, then Mr. Robert. It were idle to suppose the two
latter were not calculating chances, even on the way to the grave.
It was quite possible Mr. Cecil might be a peer before he died. On the
other hand, given some chances in his favour, it was equally possible
Mr. Somerford might step into the coveted position.
How they loved each other, those two mourners! how they hated each other
were indeed the better phrase; with the low, vulgar hatred wherewith
Mrs. Briggs’ laundress regards her relation Mrs. Griggs’ nurse when she
imagines Mrs. Wiggs, aunt to both, has left to the latter a snug sum in
the savings’ bank and her personal effects as well.
Looking around, and seeing how money and rank are coveted, which amongst
us is there that should wish to live?
Reverse the notion, and which is there that should wish to die, and
leave such prizes, as most people regard them, behind?
Slowly the procession passed along, the sad, grey waves lapping in upon
the shore, wailing out a requiem for the dead.
Dark and sullen looked the sea under the leaden sky—like a vast desert
the waters stretched away to the horizon, where clouds and waves seemed
to touch each other.
It was a sight to make one shiver, that mournful pageant—that sorrowful
sea, and all the time the bells rang out open, muffled, clammed.
Next behind the coach containing the new earl followed one in which were
seated other relatives of the deceased nobleman, then came my lady’s
brother, then Lord Ardmorne’s carriage, occupied by himself and two of
his sister’s sons; to that succeeded a long line of carriages belonging
to the gentry for twenty miles round, then more humble vehicles, covered
and jaunting-cars, phaetons and dog-carts, all conveying
self-constituted mourners to Ballyknock Abbey, while beside the
carriages and cars rode gentlemen and officers who had come from far and
near to pay the last token of respect to the late earl.
As the procession moved on, the tenants closed in behind the
conveyances.
Many of them had walked all the way from Rosemont; but those selected to
keep the line, so soon as the carriages had passed by, fell into
position as part of the funeral train.
Altogether an impressive pageant, not by reason of any great pomp or
grandeur in the arrangement, but rather by the mere force and
accumulation of numbers.
Along the Parade, past Glendare Terrace, then making a slight sweep
inland, it began to ascend the steep hill it was needful to climb before
the abbey could be reached.
It was late in the afternoon, and the evening shadows were already to
the east darkening down over the sea, when the hearse stopped at the
rusty gate of the burying-ground, through which no conveyance could
pass.
With many pauses, with many relays of bearers, the heavy coffin was
borne into the abbey, where, in the roofless chancel, with the heavy
branches of the ivy falling across crumbling walls, the clergyman read
the first part of the funeral service over the remains of him who had so
lately been Earl of Glendare.
Borne through the stillness came the cry of the sea-birds hurrying
homeward to their rocky haunts. The tide, which had turned some hours
previously, was rapidly covering the shingle, and the waves broke with a
monotonous plash on the beach below Ballyknock head; whilst seaward, a
little between the town, nestling under its hills, and the extreme east,
over which night seemed to be settling down, a line of white foam marked
the spot where sunken rocks lay concealed.
A dreary landscape to contemplate, a dreary time and place for such a
ceremony.
Black yawned the vault where so many a Glendare slept dreamlessly, and
when the coffin had been lowered and the handful of earth was flung upon
it, the sound echoed back upon the ears of the bystanders with a hollow
reverberation which had in it something awful to the imagination.
It was all over, and the multitude dispersed, tenants, friends,
relatives, they had done everything they could for the dead, and the
time had come to leave him till eternity. Already the great funeral was
a thing of the past, the late earl a memory. From the east darkness
crept up swiftly, night was coming on apace; the sheep that, frightened
by such a concourse of people, had stood huddled together on the
hillside, now came timidly back and made their way over the low broken
wall into the old graveyard; the men whose business it was to close the
vault stood waiting with their lanterns and tools to begin their work;
but still Mr. Dillwyn could not prevail on the earl to leave the coffin.
Through the whole of the time occupied in traversing the long road that
stretched between Rosemont and Ballyknock he never spoke a word, he
never evinced a sign of emotion. During the burial service it was
noticed by several persons that he seemed as collected as though the
dead had been neither kith nor kin to him; and the calmness with which
he informed Mr. Dillwyn that he wished to go down into the vault alone,
for a moment deceived even that astute gentleman as to his real
feelings.
Five, ten minutes passed, then Mr. Dillwyn followed into the
charnel-house, where, by the light of two candles that were flickering
in the draught, he saw the new earl kneeling on the ground, his arms
stretched across the coffin and his head laid upon them, crying like a
child.
He took no notice either of entreaty or remonstrance. It was all in vain
that the agent tried first to soothe and then to rouse him. He might
have been deaf for any heed he paid to comfort or expostulation, and
when at length he was almost dragged into the open air, he continued
sobbing as though his heart were breaking.
Then the damp night wind, laden with sea mist, brought on a violent fit
of coughing, which lasted till they had descended the hill and entered
their carriage.
“We had better have the windows up,” said Mr. Dillwyn, the moment they
were in motion, anxiously suiting his actions to his words.
For he saw, and so did Robert Somerford, that the handkerchief the young
man held to his mouth was stained with blood!
CHAPTER V.
THE PEOPLE’S FRIEND.
The Mr. Hanlon casually referred to in the previous chapter, had been
the first to set the ball of democracy rolling through Kingslough.
I do not mean that he originated the feeling of discontent; that he
invented a new form of political religion which he invited the people to
join; or that he introduced strange and heretical doctrines concerning
the rights and privileges of the powers that then were to the
consideration of those who were many degrees lower in the social scale.
But he gave the popular sentiment shape; he spoke the ideas that had
never hitherto found voice; he turned the dissatisfaction which had long
and silently prevailed, into a wail of complaint, and then he set his
poetry to music; he wedded the moans of the down-trodden to his own
fervid eloquence, and the men who had never before got a gentleman to
talk their thoughts for them, hung upon his sentences, and believed that
the good time which each succeeding generation seeks but never finds—the
good time, so long in coming—was at hand at last.
A gentleman they called him. Well, perhaps so. And yet, possibly, the
hardiest of his admirers might have hesitated to give him a niche beside
one of the “old stock.” He dressed better, spoke better, was better
educated, was better looking than any other male resident in Kingslough;
he came of a sufficiently respectable family, and he was not destitute
of money, nor mean about spending it. But there was something lacking;
something which, in a different country and a larger sphere, he might
either have lived down or corrected, that prevented his making any mark
socially amongst his equals, or having the right hand of fellowship held
out by his superiors.
And under this neglect the man writhed. The son of an army surgeon who,
after seeing all sorts of places and associating with all kinds and
varieties of men, was well enough content at last to settle down on his
patrimonial estate of a few hundred acres of bog and call himself the
“squire,” Theophilus Hanlon had, from the paternal mansion, looked out
upon the world with an ever-increasing conviction that the world would
be exceedingly glad to welcome his appearance.
He was not singular in this idea: other young men have held the same
opinion, and been disabused of it. The singular thing about Theophilus
Hanlon was that no lapse of time and no sequence of events seemed able
to teach him the world had not waited—was not waiting for him with
breathless anxiety.
He had lived much with women—a bad beginning for one of his
self-conscious, conceited temperament. He was clever, and his mother and
sisters and aunt and grandmother lifted up their hands in astonishment
at the extent of his knowledge.
The years spent by Mr. Hanlon, senior, out of Ireland were not however
entirely bare of fruit. He was wise enough to see that the home
atmosphere did not altogether agree with his son’s mental health, and
that there was not the slightest chance of Theophilus finding his level
unless he went far afield from Hanlon’s-town to do it.
The result of this was, that although it sorely crippled his income to
educate his son in England, he sent him to a good school in one of the
midland counties; and when the lad was considered sufficiently old and
well informed for the purpose, despatched him to Edinburgh, where, after
duly attending lectures, and going through a very respectable course of
private study, he passed his examination, and returned to Ireland and
his parents “licensed to kill.”
But, as at Hanlon’s-town, it was an utter impossibility for him to hope
for patients, as there was nothing in the whole of the neighbourhood on
which to operate, except snipe, teal, and wild-duck, it became necessary
for the young man to select farther afield the scene of his future
triumphs.
Wherever he went he had always been a favourite with women; his curly
brown hair, his hazel eyes, his clear complexion, his upright figure,
his assured walk, his confident manner, his profound belief in his own
abilities, had won him the admiration of that sex which is so apt to
assume as correct the estimate men entertain of their own virtues, until
those men chance to become their husbands; and already Theophilus
considered he had nothing to do except to step across life’s threshold
and walk straight away to success.
So far experience had taught him very little; this Mr. Hanlon, senior,
confessed to himself with a sigh. He might as well have kept his money
as spent it in keeping his boy at school.
“I can’t make out what you want at all,” said Mrs. Hanlon, to whom he
confided his anxieties. “You might search Ireland through and not find
such another as Phil. Why he is as upright as a dart, and as handsome as
a picture, and as dutiful as a girl, and then what is there he can’t do?
what is there he doesn’t know?”
“He doesn’t know anything about himself,” replied Mr. Hanlon; “and I am
not sure that book learning can quite supply that defect. However I have
done all I could——”
“And that you have,” finished the warmhearted, though not overwise
matron, “that you have.” And sold Harkaway, and parted with your diamond
buckles and gold snuff-box, that the boy might not want a start in life.
“But he won’t forget it to you, he won’t,” continued Mrs. Hanlon, the
tears starting into eyes bright and hazel like her son’s, and warming in
her Irish idiom as a high-couraged horse warms to his work; “when he’s
driving through Dublin to the Castle in his carriage and pair, and
another pair to the back of that in his stables besides, he won’t forget
the father who gave up hunting for his sake, and sold the emerald pin
out of the breast of his shirt that his son might want for nothing among
the strangers. It will come home to you, Larry, your goodness and
thought for that boy.”
“Well, I hope so,” said Mr. Hanlon, who evidently entertained a lower
opinion of the soil in which he had sown for future reaping than his
wife. “Anyhow, I have done all I could. My judgment may have been at
fault, but according to my light I have done all I could.”
Had the opinion of Mr. Theophilus Hanlon been taken, he would have
confirmed the hopeful augury of his maternal parent. Judging by results,
nothing could be wiser than the course his father had adopted. Was not
his accent better than English? Had not one of his lady friends assured
him his speech had all the refinement of the Court of St. James’s, while
retaining the mellow softness of the seductive Dublin brogue? He had
added another charm, while retaining the old. Was not his appearance as
attractive as that of the most fashionably-dressed Sackville Street
lounger? Were not his mental acquirements far beyond those of most other
men? Had he not learned and remembered, had he not studied and to good
purpose? Were not his manners fit for a palace? to quote Mrs. Hanlon’s
own words, and to borrow again from the freely expressed statements of
that admiring parent, “Even to his handwriting, there was a character
and a dash about all he did.”
He could shoot, he could ride, he could dance; what should stand between
him and wealth, and fame, and happiness?
Out in that great world of which Mrs. Hanlon knew so little, but where
she had a sure faith heiresses were plentiful and confiding, her boy
would, she opined, “Pick up something worth the lifting.”
Theophilus had no idea of picking up anything in a hurry. If he were
inclined to throw himself away, there was a little girl in
Worcestershire he might have for the asking. A girl who had made eyes at
him when he was only a schoolboy, and who was mistress of a very snug
fortune. Theophilus knew he could have her, for she wrote to him
frequently with a certain tenderness of tone, and on the occasion of his
last visit to her uncle’s house she had gone as close to proposing for
the conceited young Irishman as a girl well could; but he was still at
the entrance of that wood whence he had liberty to select his sapling.
He would not choose hastily, he would see what grew to right and left of
the enchanted pathway and cut accordingly.
Till then behold him a bachelor, careless, unfettered, free to go
wherever chance called or fate beckoned.
Fate beckoned him to Kingslough. The precise chain of circumstances it
would be tedious to follow; but an old friend of Mr. Hanlon’s happening
to hear he wanted to find a good opening for his son, a surgeon, wrote
to say Kingslough presented what he sought.
Only one medical man in the place, town improving and extending yearly;
becoming a fashionable seaside resort; present doctor breaking up,
slightly deaf and sight failing only necessary to take apartments, and
practice certain to follow. Beautiful scenery; good society.
So averred Mr. Hanlon’s informant, who, being a man of good connexion,
an officer, and connected with one or two old families in the north of
Ireland, had probably found a visit to that part of the country very
pleasant indeed.
Strangers often do find sojourning in a neighbourhood more delightful
than the inhabitants themselves; perhaps for the same reason that the
good qualities of most people reveal themselves more fully to
acquaintances than to those of their own household.
Englishmen who have visited the Isle of Saints are always eloquent
concerning the hospitality shown to them. On the same subject, however,
the Irish themselves are occasionally discreetly silent.
After he had been a couple of years in Kingslough, Mr. Hanlon had many
opinions to express relative to this matter, none of them complimentary
to the inhabitants.
Upon the other hand the inhabitants generally were not complimentary
when they spoke of Mr. Hanlon.
Pecuniarily he could not complain of his success. For a young man and a
stranger, he had a large and not unprofitable practice. His living cost
him little, his habits were not expensive. He had made friends with the
beggars, he could afford to go his rounds on horseback, and to wear far
finer broadcloth than Dr. Girvan had ever donned, but the Kingslough
Upper Ten closed their doors upon him.
They would neither let him physick nor associate with them. To invert
the words of a celebrated wit—they returned his medicine and dispensed
with his visits.
Why, who could tell?—they conceived a prejudice against the man. If he
had crouched to them, perhaps in time he might have crept his way into
their parlours and drawing-rooms—had he been humble, and comported
himself with commendable bashfulness, they might possibly have
eventually patted him on the back and bid him take heart of grace, and
not be confounded and overwhelmed by their condescension.
As it was, he held his head too erect, he spoke with too unabashed a
front, he treated even the highest with too great an assumption of
equality to please people who held their own heads very high, and when
they spoke expected to be listened to with deference, and felt
themselves to be better than anybody in the land, unless indeed it might
be the Duke of Leinster and a few others of the same rank.
In a word Kingslough tabooed Mr. Hanlon, and Mr. Hanlon had his revenge.
In our own times we have seen the effect of a judicious bone thrown to a
very dissatisfied and yelping leader of discontented masses. In those
times Kingslough felt the effect of not having asked Mr. Hanlon to
dinner. Had they stopped his mouth with food eaten in good company, the
democrats must have waited a little longer for the arrival of an
exponent of their wrongs.
As matters stood, since Mr. Hanlon could not have the gentry, he ranged
himself with the people. Smarting under slights real and imaginary, he
grew rabid against “those ignorant persons who called themselves the
aristocracy.” “Nature’s gentlemen—those who delved and dug, those who
followed the plough and worked hardly for that they earned honestly,
were the only form of nobility he could recognize.”
“He was neither Whig nor Tory; he was for the people, who were coming to
their rights at last.” “He loved the Irish, but he could not call
mushroom lords or newly created marquises Irish. By what right did they
hold their lands? Should honest men be kept serfs and slaves because a
couple of centuries previously a profligate thief had bestowed stolen
land upon one of the members of his fraternity?” This and much more said
Mr. Hanlon in private and in public. Whenever in the “wild parts of
Ireland,” as the Kingslough people called the midland and southern parts
of their own country—a compliment reciprocated by calling the province
in which Kingslough was situated the “black North,”—one of those
accidents occurred which are not unusual even now, Mr. Hanlon pointed
the moral and adorned the tale.
Not even the “largest circulation in the world” could have idealized a
fact better than he.
Were a landlord shot—and shot plenty of landlords were—he drew pictures
of evicted tenants, of deserted hearths, of cottages whence the
roof-tree had been ruthlessly torn, of nursing mothers driven forth to
feel their sucking children dying at the breast; of men wasted with
fever falling by the wayside and “seeking that justice in heaven they
had been denied on earth.”
That was Mr. Hanlon’s style of oratory, and the facts on which he
founded it were sometimes too true; but then he forgot, like all special
pleaders, the other side—the unpaid rent, the untilled land, the
exhausted acres; the hut it was a disgrace for a man possessed of his
full complement of legs, arms, and senses to call a house and a home;
the half-starved cow; the greyhound-like pig; the energetic fowls that
laid only because they sought their food with twenty times the industry
and courage displayed by their owners. This side of the question of
which the “wild parts of Ireland” presented examples in plenty, was
forgotten by Mr. Hanlon when he waxed eloquent, and I question much
whether when he so wrought upon the feelings of his auditors, one
amongst them bestowed a second thought on the man stricken down in his
prime, of the wife left a widow, of the children orphans.
These things which would in England have driven an orderly population
mad, which would have caused a cry of “blood for blood” to ring from
Berwick to Penzance, failed to stir the hearts of the northern Irish.
They had their ideas about landlords; and if those ideas failed to find
such unmistakable expression in the North as in other parts of the
island, it was not because their feelings were less keen or their
judgment less critical.
Their passions were not vindictive and treacherous, like those of the
truer, more impulsive, scarcely civilized Celt, but they were men more
dangerous to arouse, harder to subdue than any other in Ireland.
Where in the annals of that unhappy country shall we find a parallel to
the holding of Derry, the heroism, the self-denial, the obdurate
determination to win or die?
And it was to the descendants of men such as those who kept the walls of
the maiden city that this man held forth his parable; it was amongst
such enduring fuel that he thrust his torch, trying to kindle the
smouldering discontent into flame.
How he and men like him succeeded there can be no need to tell. Their
success is now a matter of history. Never perhaps was so much, for evil
as some consider, for good as others declare, accomplished in a given
time in any country as in Ireland. Fifty years ago, ay, far less than
fifty, the tenant farmers were of as little account in the estimation of
their landlords as Gurth the Swineherd in the eyes of his master, and
now Jack is as good as Sir Harry in his own eyes, and all the old
landmarks are removed, and a new _régime_ has commenced—inevitable
perhaps, irrevocable certainly, but which, nevertheless, no thoughtful
man can contemplate with pleasure, since progress should be gradual
rather than instantaneous, the growth of years rather than the result of
a political eruption.
Thoughtful people in the days of which I write were much exercised in
their judgments as to what was right and what was wrong. Thoughtful
people have now to accept the change, be it right or wrong; but in those
days the beginning of the end, was only—and no one could prognosticate
how the event should prove.
Now, notwithstanding the fact that women are fervent politicians, it may
very well be questioned whether they take a new measure home to nurse,
as was the case before they had learned, or were permitted, to express
their opinions so fluently, as is the case at present.
Grace Moffat was no politician, though she belonged to a party, and yet
the matters concerning which Mr. Hanlon discoursed so glibly were to her
subjects of daily and hourly consideration.
No one had felt, or could feel more keenly than she, the rotten state of
that fair Denmark in which her lot was cast; she had lived too much
amongst the people not to have learned to love and feel for them; but
she had also heard from her father so many remarks concerning the
improvidence and false views of political economy prevailing in Ireland,
that whilst her sentiments inclined her to one side, her judgment
disposed her to favour the other.
Thus she was in the unenviable position known as between two stools.
When she listened to the opinions that obtained in Tory circles, she
felt herself a Whig; when she heard the Radical outpourings, she felt
herself a Tory. Society had never injured her personally, and therefore
she was not disposed like Mr. Hanlon to sweep away all the distinctions
of society.
In a word, when the new prophet propounded one of his favourite
theories,—
“Worth makes the man—
The want of it the fellow;”
she felt inclined to disagree with a proposition which, carried out by
Mr. Hanlon, declared Amos Scott to be a finer gentleman than Robert
Somerford.
Theoretically Mr. Hanlon might be right, practically she resented his
doctrines. Taking a large view of the subject, Mr. Hanlon might be one
of the best and most disinterested patriots that ever lived; but taking
a personal and private view, Miss Moffat felt she had rarely met a man
who excited in her so sharp an antipathy. Though not free of the magic
circle in Kingslough, Mr. Hanlon had met Miss Moffat—of whom in the new
form of language he saw fit to invent for himself when society refused
to recognize his merits, he spoke as “a good woman,” and Miss Moffat’s
acquaintance with him was more than mere bowing or a formal
How-do-you-do.
She met him on his rounds when she paid her visits to the farmers’
wives; he attended the poor often without asking for fee and reward, and
Miss Moffat had seen that he did not suffer for his generosity; and
thus, though he had never eaten bread or salt at Bayview, he was not
altogether antagonistic to Miss Moffat.
When the humbling of the aristocrats took place, he did not desire to
see Grace lick the dust. If he had the management of public opinion at
that juncture, Miss Moffat should be permitted an independent income,
though, of course, the bulk of her money must be distributed for the
public good.
Although she was of age, Grace had not yet been able to carry out her
more juvenile project of spending her wealth in benefiting her country.
There are practical difficulties in the way of benefiting a country
impossible to guess, till a person comes face to face with the problem.
One of Miss Moffat’s impediments was the spirit of the times. She was
not prepared to enrol herself under the colours of Mr. Hanlon or any one
like him. If ever she married Robert Somerford, she might then be able
to help the people without compromising herself. Meanwhile she felt no
desire to become a representative woman. It was enough for her to help
the poor and needy, to comfort the sorrowful, to provide necessaries for
the sick, to soothe the dying, without entering into the vexed questions
which were disturbing the land.
In the depths of her heart she loved the land and its inhabitants, but
she distrusted those who were about to put all wrongs right by setting
every one by the ears.
Since the earl’s death matters on the Glendare estates had not been
progressing favourably. The new earl was abroad, and the state of his
health prevented any satisfactory settlement of disputed claims.
The demagogues had it all their own way. No one could contradict their
statements. Having always maintained that he personally knew nothing of
any private transactions which might or might not have taken place
between the late earl and some of his tenants, Mr. Dillywn could not now
take up arms on behalf of his late employer, and tell Mr. Hanlon and the
remainder of that clique they were propagating falsehoods by the score.
All the sins, actual and imputed, of the Glendares since their first
advent in Ireland, were resuscitated for the purpose of rounding
sentences more eloquently, of enabling Mr. Hanlon and his friends to
deliver themselves of more passionate bursts of oratory.
The better classes were becoming anxious. Let the dead man and his dead
ancestors have been what they would, it was felt that decency ought to
forbid such attacks on those whose voices were silenced for ever.
Lord Ardmorne had won golden opinions from gentlemen of all creeds and
shades of politics, by protesting at a public meeting against the
intemperance of Mr. Hanlon’s observations—the utter irrelevance of his
remarks.
“No one,” said his lordship, “can accuse me of being a partisan of that
family which the last speaker misses no opportunity of vilifying. In
theory and practice I have been opposed to the Earls of Glendare all my
life. Their ways were not my ways; their thoughts, and ideas, and
opinions differed from mine; but having admitted so much, I go on to
declare that nothing shall induce me to continue to preside over a
meeting where such licence of language prevails—where the dead are
dragged out of their graves to be gibed at and reviled—where the sorrow
and the suffering of the living fail to restrain the buffoonery of a too
facile tongue—where misfortune is spoken of with a taunt, and griefs are
considered fit matters for jest! If such remarks are persisted in, I
shall at once vacate the chair.”
After that public rebuke, it might have been imagined Mr. Hanlon would
transfer his attack from the Glendares to the Marquis. On the contrary,
however, he was wise enough to swallow the compulsory pill with a good
grace.
He apologized in a manner not destitute of tact for his indiscretion,
and was happy enough to be able at the same time to wing a side-shaft at
his censor, by saying in a tone of contrite humility, “He was aware he
had been guilty of bad taste of speaking ill of one nobleman in the
presence of another,”—a remark which, as it cut two ways, was received
with applause—genuine and derisive. “If it were a necessity for some to
be rolling in wealth, while others had not a crust to eat, he could wish
all rich men were such as their noble chairman, or better—supposing that
possible.”
Altogether Mr. Hanlon held his own whilst seeming to yield, but he
respected Lord Ardmorne for his straightforwardness and plain speaking.
“Unlike the Somerfords, who always left their dirty work to be done by
somebody else,” he said, when subsequently discussing the scene with one
who held opinions similar to his own; “why, Robert Somerford was
standing by all the time, and never opened his lips.”
Which was indeed quite true, and had already caused much unfavourable
comment, but then, as Mr. Robert remarked,—
“I have never agreed with the policy of our family, and much of their
practice seems to me utterly indefensible.”
“Still,” urged Grace Moffat, “you surely might have found some word to
speak.”
“Ardmorne said all and more in my opinion than was necessary,” Mr.
Somerford replied. “Hanlon’s a fool! why should I gratify him by
replying to his folly?”
Which was plausible enough and sensible enough too for that matter, but
Grace heard the sentence with a pain at her heart which had been coming
and going for a long time past, but which came more frequently and was
less swift about taking its departure as week followed week, and month
succeeded to month.
She was beginning to doubt Mr. Somerford; to think that, making every
allowance for his uncertain prospects, his dependent position, his dread
of seeming a mere fortune-hunter (a character of which he had often
expressed his abhorrence), he had not acted quite fairly by her.
Other men gave her at least the chance of saying no. Not so Mr.
Somerford. Her prejudices against marrying and giving in marriage might
be the same at twenty-four as at seventeen, but it was absurd to think
of a man honestly playing at the game of fast and loose for all the
years during which he had been her constant and devoted admirer.
Precisely as she had treated John Riley, so Robert Somerford was
treating her, and Grace was beginning to think very seriously over his
position and hers. She had done so often since the day of the earl’s
funeral. She was trying to see what she ought to do, how she ought to
act. Instinctively she felt affairs could not remain as they were.
Two lives now only intervened between Mr. Somerford and the earldom; two
lives held by feeble threads, the strands of which might any day give
way. The fact was well known in Kingslough; it was discussed over every
tea-table, and friends with the same frankness which had distinguished
their utterances in days gone by were now asking Miss Moffat when she
meant to become My Lady.
And yet Mr. Somerford had never once alluded to the possibility either
of his attaining to the peerage or of her assuming a title. Delicacy
might of course have restrained him in the one case as in the other, but
there are times in life when delicacy may be a little overstrained, and
Grace had arrived at the conclusion that if Mr. Somerford ever meant to
take her into his confidence, it was high time he commenced.
Would she marry him if he asked her? Miss Moffat was quite old enough,
and quite sufficient woman of the world to put this question to herself,
and answer it, but, even mentally, she turned aside from a direct reply.
“I am never likely to be tried,” she said, fencing with the idea. “Why,
in any case, should I marry? Have the married people of my acquaintance
been so happy that I should make haste to run my head into the noose?
And yet if I do not marry, what will my life prove? I shall be a comfort
to my father for the rest of his days; I can help the poor a little; I
shall either die young, or else remain till I am old, and be courted and
flattered for my money, and not be able to make up my mind to whom to
leave it. I wish I could fall in love; I wish I could like some one, as
I think I liked Robert Somerford when I was a girl. Oh dear, what a
beautiful world this is! Why are we not happier and more contented in
it?”
And assuredly it was a lovely scene that on which Miss Moffat’s eyes
rested, as she paused on her way to the Castle Farm to take in the
beauty of land and sea stretching below her. Gone were the November
mists; the snows and frosts of winter; past were the vernal equinoxes;
against a clear blue sky the ruins of the old abbey stood out in sharp
distinctness; with scarce a ripple the sea swept gently in upon the
shore; a burst of April sunshine illuminated the distant hills; the
fields were dappled with white lambs and bleating sheep; from the
chimneys of whitewashed cottages, embosomed in trees arrayed in the
tender foliage of the early spring, wreaths of smoke were ascending
almost straight upwards; by the wayside bubbled a clear, swift
streamlet; the air was filled with that indescribable scent which
departs ere the hawthorn blossoms open, and is as surely the smell of
quick, healthy vegetable life, as the decaying leaves of autumn are the
smell of Nature’s death.
Well might Grace Moffat pause, and look at the landscape, though she had
gazed upon it hundreds of times previously: for is not a lovely view
like a fair countenance? does not the beauty grow and grow as each
feature becomes more familiar? did not those who knew Grace best find
some fresh charm each time they beheld her face?
“A delightful morning, and a divine prospect,” remarked some one close
behind her; and, turning, she saw Mr. Hanlon, who had come across the
fields from Kingslough, and now, leaping the narrow rivulet, raised his
hat, and then held out his hand.
“Have you heard the news, Miss Moffat? No; I see you have not. Lady Jane
Somerford is dead.”
“And Amos Scott’s old lease is out,” added Grace, uttering the first
idea suggested by the intelligence.
“And Amos Scott’s old lease is out,” he agreed.
“What will he do now?” she asked.
“If he be well advised, one of three things. He will rent another farm
under Ardmorne as yearly tenant, and take his chance of being turned out
at the next election unless he chooses to change his politics; he will
sell every stick he has and go to America, or he will blow his brains
out. As, however, he is certain not to take advice, no matter how good,
he will probably go to law or try to defy law and justice so called, in
which case we may predict the final result with tolerable accuracy.”
“Will not Mr. Brady come to terms? I would gladly help Scott if any
arrangement could be come to. You are a friend of Mr. Brady, and—”
“Pardon me,” interposed Mr. Hanlon, “I know the master of Maryville. I
attended his children when they had scarlatina, and I tried my best to
save the little girl who would die in spite of me; but I cannot claim
the honour of calling myself Mr. Brady’s friend. Friendship implies some
congeniality of temperament or disposition, and I fear my nature will
never permit of my becoming a sufficiently finished scoundrel to suit
the taste of Scott’s opponent.”
“Then how does it fare with Nettie—with his wife I mean?” Grace asked
eagerly.
“You ask me to tell you something, Miss Moffat, which I do not know
myself, which I do not want to know, of which I should not speak if I
did know. To quote Dr. Girvan, a medical man should be blind and deaf
while in a patient’s house, and dumb when he comes out of it. Poor old
man! he is fast compassing the two former states without any effort of
will; but, indeed, he is right in principle, more particularly in such a
gossiping little town as Kingslough. This much I may say, however,
without any breach of confidence; Mrs. Brady is an admirable wife—as
admirable a wife as she is a devoted mother; and whether she is happy or
whether she is the reverse, no one will ever hear from her.”
For a moment Grace did not reply; her thoughts were in the far away
past, with Nettie in the days when they two were never apart, when, if
their love was not as pure and absorbing as that of Hermione and
Rosalind, it seemed to be so. Very grievous had that severed friendship
proved to Grace; and as she stood silent tears from some hidden fountain
of tenderness welled up and filled her eyes almost to overflowing.
“You were very fond of Mrs. Brady,” Mr. Hanlon suggested; he was not
possessed of sufficient sensitiveness, or of that which stands in as
good stead sometimes, sufficient _savoir-faire_ to appear nonobservant
of her emotion, but Grace Moffat was not one who cared to wear her heart
on her sleeve, and therefore answered quietly,—
“I am so fond of her still, that the opinion you express of her husband
grieves me more than I can say. And how will it fare with Scott?” she
went on rapidly. “Surely Mr. Brady, let him be what he may in other
respects, would not refuse to listen to reason; but, if paid for it,
would be willing to humour the fancy of a man no longer young, who hoped
to die, as he has lived, on the Castle Farm. He can have no associations
with the place. It never belonged to him nor to one of his family.
Money, or another farm, would surely be as valuable in his eyes as our
poor Naboth’s vineyard, and amongst my friends I am certain—”
She paused suddenly. For a moment she had forgotten herself, forgotten
her antagonism against, her distrust of the man she was addressing; but
the look of undisguised admiration with which he listened to her hurried
sentences brought her to a stand.
“I must apologize for my vehemence, Mr. Hanlon,” she resumed, blushing
as she felt with angry consciousness while she spoke. “Of course you
cannot carry my proposal to Mr. Brady. I will speak to my father. I
will—”
“I should think Mr. Somerford would be the best agent you could employ,”
interrupted Mr. Hanlon.
“I should think it most unlikely he would wish to meddle in the affairs
of his most unhappy family,” she retorted.
“No one would stand a better chance of success in persuading Mr. Brady
to a distasteful course than the future Earl of Glendare.”
“He may never be Earl of Glendare.” She spoke sharply, almost rudely.
“What is to prevent him?”
“The present Earl may live,—Mr. Somerford may die.”
He looked at her in amazement. In common with all Kingslough he had
considered the marriage as settled, the engagement certain, and yet she
spoke coolly of the possibility of the man dying. Was this feminine
finessing, or an unconscious evidence of indifference?
More interesting than the study of man’s body was the study of man’s
mind to this self-constituted champion of the people’s rights.
He would study Miss Moffat—the greater included the less; and, although
she was but a woman, still he might learn something during the course of
his investigations that could be turned to account in his dealings with
men.
“You were on your way to the Castle Farm, I conclude, Miss Moffat?” he
said. “Will you allow me to walk there with you?”
“I was going to see Mrs. Scott,” said Grace, “but I will turn back
now—I—I should not like to be present when they hear the news;” and
without any more formal leave-taking she began to retrace her steps.
For a moment Mr. Hanlon stood still, and watched her retreating figure.
“It is delightful to consider,” he remarked to himself, “how in any
emergency of this kind, in a word, when an easy way of backing out of a
difficulty has to be found females at once take refuge in the delicacy
of their sex. She did not want to walk to the Castle Farm with me, and
so she makes a dislike to the sight of pain her excuse. She is a good
woman, but the best of Eve’s daughters are ‘kittle cattle’ to have any
say to.”
CHAPTER VI.
THE MUTTERING OF THE STORM.
Meditating that feminine problem which has puzzled the heads of so many
men, wise and foolish, Mr. Hanlon walked slowly on.
It is a curious fact that the moment any one begins to speculate on the
motives influencing the actions of his fellows, he at once flings aside
as untenable the possibility that those alleged can be true.
A good story has been told concerning a gentleman who offered a friend
five guesses as to how a mutual acquaintance spelt “cat.” The friend
tried every erroneous combination he could think of, and, each guess
proving a failure, finally inquired with impatience, “How the devil does
the fellow spell it, then?”
“C A T,” was the reply.
In the same manner people are apt to go far afield in order to discover
causes that really lie immediately under their noses. Miss Moffat did
not like Mr. Hanlon, it is true, but no thought of evading his
companionship entered her mind.
She had stated the literal truth when she said she should not care to be
present when Amos Scott received the tidings of Lady Jane Somerford’s
death; but of course Mr. Hanlon did not believe this, and so walked
slowly on, full of cynical ideas anent women in general, and ladies in
particular, with a very sufficient amount of bitterness towards the rich
and those “who called themselves the gentry” added to the mental draught
he was swallowing at the wish of no one in particular, unless indeed it
might be himself.
After a little time he heard some sound cleaving the clear, crisp air;
and, looking round to ascertain whence it proceeded, he saw Miss Moffat
following in his path with rapid steps.
“You were so lost in thought I could not make you hear,” she said,
looking so honestly at him with her fine frank eyes, that, remembering
what his thoughts had been, he felt for the moment almost ashamed of
them. “I called to you a dozen times, at least. It is a woman’s
privilege to change her mind, is it not, Mr. Hanlon?” she added, “and I
have changed mine. I was a coward for a moment; but I mean to be brave
now, and go to the Castle Farm with you, if you are not of the Quaker
persuasion, and will allow me to say yes, after having once said no.”
Concerning this speech Mr. Hanlon felt no inclination to attribute
underhand motives; and yet the fact was that Grace having, after the
manner of her sex, hurried to conclusions very rapidly, had decided she
ought to be present when the people’s friend bore the news of his
misfortune to Amos Scott.
“I can do something—some trifle towards moderating this man’s bitterness
and Scott’s sorrow. Why should I spare myself? Of what use shall I ever
be in the world if I fear to see grief?” and so she assumed her
pleasantest manner; she talked naturally and genially, all to try to
induce her companion to “moderate the rancour of his tongue,” and to
bring herself into a frame of mind likely to influence Mr. Scott and his
wife, and to enable her to advise both of them for their good.
As they walked, Mr. Hanlon propounded the following question to his own
soul:—
“Shall I make myself agreeable to this heiress and ask her to marry me?
Would not her money assist the cause I have made my own? Could not I
mould her ideas to mine? and is there any social position to which, with
her as my wife, I might not aspire?”
To a man of his intense self-appreciation the very idea of such an
undertaking was agreeable, but there were many reasons why he never
carried it out.
In the first place, Miss Moffat, with all her gracious kindness, was not
an accessible person; in the next, he could find no pretext for
thrusting his company upon her; further, he was doubtful as to the
reception which his suit might meet; and fourth and most potent of all
reasons, he felt that the sentiments he entertained towards the lady
were those rather of awe than affection. She had taken his
measure—unconsciously perhaps, but certainly—and unconsciously he knew
this was so.
Upon the whole, Mr. Hanlon decided against the speculation. It is not
always pleasant for a man to make love to a woman possessed of
sufficient brains to gauge the depth of his character.
There came a day when both fully understood the other; when she
comprehended his weakness, he her strength. But that day had not yet
dawned when, under the bright spring sunshine, they walked together to
the Castle Farm.
The external aspect of the place was not much changed since Mr. Moffat
had driven up the divisional road seven years previously, but time had
not dealt leniently with its inhabitants.
Mrs. Scott, standing in the doorway to give her visitors “kindly
welcome,” looked aged and haggard; the elder boys and girls had the
appearance of middle-aged men and women with cares upon their heads,
while the younger children walked about with staid gait and set faces.
There had been something over the place for years, and that something
was now about to take definite form at last.
“It’s myself is glad to see you, Miss Grace,” said Mrs. Scott, “and ye
too, doctor,” she added, turning, with that never-failing courtesy
characteristic of her country, towards Mr. Hanlon, “this beautiful
morning, God bless it! Sure a day like this puts heart into one. It’s
grand weather for the crops. Amos? he’s out in the long field, but I
will send for him. Miss Grace, there is a clutch of chickens off to-day,
and one of ducks yesterday. Would you like to see them? It was only last
night I was saying Miss Grace was fond of the first brood. But you look
white and tired,” she added suddenly; “Doctor, is not our young lady
well?”
“I am well enough in body,” answered Grace gently, “but sick in mind,
sick and sad, dear Mrs. Scott,” and she put out her hand, and pressed
that of the farmer’s wife as she spoke.
“What is it, Miss Grace?” asked the woman trembling; “is it the masther?
sure your father was well and hearty yesterday, and—”
“It is your trouble,” Miss Moffat answered; “and your trouble is mine.
Lady Jane is dead! and I am afraid for Amos—”
“Oh, God help us! God help us!” cried the woman, as she threw herself
into a chair, and covered her head with her apron.
“I will go and meet Amos,” said Miss Moffat in a low tone to her
companion, and, rising, she left the house.
Well she knew her way to the long field, not an inch of the Castle Farm
but was familiar to her; it had been almost as much her home at one
period as Bayview, and her heart sickened as she looked over the
familiar landscape, and thought of those who could soon look at it no
more.
Afar she beheld Amos Scott striding towards her, a spade over his
shoulder, his left hand swinging free, his gait that of a man whose mind
is in disorder.
As he drew nearer she saw his face was flushed and his eyes bright.
The news had already reached him. It was not left for her to tell.
“Ye’ve heard, Miss Grace, ye’ve heard; and now they’ll be for trying to
turn me out; that’ll be the next game, won’t it, miss?” he asked,
stopping suddenly, and shooting the words at her singly, and with a
might of suppressed fear and passion in his tone.
“I hope not,” she said; “I do hope and trust, Amos, you will leave this
matter to your friends, and let them settle it for you.”
“My friends,” he repeated, “who are they? Th’ airl, whose father robbed
me of my money; Brady up yonder, who wants to rob me of my land;
Dillwyn, who stands by and says, ‘Hold hard, Scott: have at him, Brady;’
Mr. Robert, who puts his hands in his pockets and declares he has been
as badly treated as myself?”
“And Grace Moffat, is she not your friend?”
“God bless you, Miss Grace; you are the friend of every man, woman, and
child who needs help, but you cannot help me, I must help myself.”
He was softening—at least she thought so.
“Amos, I will go to Mr. Brady.”
“Miss Moffat, I tell you it’s no use; he has sworn to have this place;
but he sha’n’t have it—no. Not as long as I am aboveboard, no man,
gentle nor simple, shall own the Castle Farm.”
“But you do not own it,” she ventured; “you only rent it.”
“And where’s the odds, miss? As long as I paid my rent and my renewals,
was it not mine as much as th’ airl’s? Did not I always vote for the
Glendares’ man, let him be who he liked? Hadn’t I always my rent ready,
no matter how me and the mistress and the children fared? Didn’t I do
justice by the land? Look there, miss; would you see cleaner ground or
straighter furrows in the whole of Ireland? I never grudged the dung,
even when I had to draw it from Glenwellan. Though I say it as shouldn’t
there is not a bit of ground better done by in the county. Me and my
sons, haven’t we worked early and late? and now—but see there, miss, as
sure as I stick that spade in the ground, Brady shall never have this
land. I have took my Bible oath of that, and I never was one to go back
from my word, let alone my oath.”
Grace shuddered, she could not help doing so. She knew—none better—what
all this meant, what all this might lead to. She, born and bred amongst
them, understood what a passion for the possession of land overmasters
the Irish; how it hounds them on to the commission of deeds at which
calmer nations stand appalled; how, nearer and dearer than wife, child,
honour, life even, an acre of daisy-covered turf may become.
Involuntarily she looked towards the house. It needed no special gift of
prophecy, no extraordinary amount of imagination, to prefigure the
appearance it would present in days to come; roofless, doorless,
windowless, abandoned by man and animal, a place near which no child
played by day, a spot no man dare pass at night—the vision appalled her.
“Come with me, Amos,” she cried; “come with me to your wife, and let us
and the children talk it over together.”
They walked side by side in the spring sunshine, they passed into the
house where Mrs. Scott still sat with her apron thrown over her head,
and Mr. Hanlon, standing with his back to the great fire, was
discoursing to an utterly inattentive audience concerning abstract
principles of government, and the utterly erroneous policy—suicidal he
called it—pursued by England to Ireland.
“Well, mother, and so you’ve heard that the tug of war has come!” began
Amos excitedly, without any formal greeting of his visitor; “but ye
needn’t be feared, ye needn’t pack up to-day. I’ll have my rights. No
earl, dead or living, shall keep my money and take my farm—money hard
earned, honestly come by, more nor ever a Glendare could say. And Brady
too—well, he’s not master here yet, and he never will be.”
“It is of no use kicking against the pricks, Scott, my friend,” said Mr.
Hanlon; “the dead earl and the living rogue will be too many for you in
the long-run. You’d best take another farm, or, better still, sell your
goods, while you have any to sell, and go away to a free country, where
you and your children can have liberty to work for yourselves instead of
for a landlord; where you can live like men instead of worse than dogs;
where you will be able to call your souls your own, and be rid of the
yoke under which the toilers in this wretched country groan from the
cradle to the grave.”
“I thank you for yer advice, Doctor; I’m sure it’s well meant and kindly
given: but I am not going to America, and I have no intention of leaving
the Castle Farm—till I am carried out of it feet foremost,” said Scott,
not without a certain dignity.
“But supposing no arrangement can be made with Mr. Brady, Amos?” Grace
began.
“No arrangement can be made, Miss Moffat,” interrupted Mr. Hanlon. “He
is a very Shylock, he will have his pound of flesh though the fairest
Portia in Ireland seek to prevent him.”
“I don’t know rightly what you are talking about,” said the poor dazed
farmer; “but if it means that Brady’s going to take my home from me—that
when it comes to the bit, Mr. Dillwyn and the young airl will stand by
and see me and mine driven out to die by the roadside—just let him and
them try it, that’s all. I’m a man of few words, but you can all of you
remember what I say, let them try it.”
“But, Amos,” pleaded Grace, “is not one farm as good as another?”
“Miss Grace, I wonder to hear you!” he answered reproachfully. “Would
another wife be as good to me as her yonder? would other children be as
good to me as those I have dandled on my knee, and sat up with when they
were sick, and ‘threatened’ when they were impudent to me and the
mother, and given the ‘tawse’ to when they wouldn’t do what they were
bid? Oh! ye don’t know—Lord forbid ye ever should—what a home means to a
man of my years, that the great of the land are conspiring to leave
homeless.”
“Poor Amos!” murmured Grace, with a pity too deep for words welling up
in her tone. “I think—I hope I do understand what you feel; still place
ought not to be so dear as people. If I had to leave Bayview to-morrow,
I believe—I feel certain I could in time learn to love another place
almost as much.”
“Ay, but then you are a woman, and that makes all the differ,” commented
Mr. Scott, with that sublime contempt for the sex which, spite of their
gallantry, is a fundamental characteristic of his class in Ireland.
“That is quite true,” she answered, with a faint smile. “I am only a
woman; if I were a man, I would try to do more to help you. As it is, I
do not want to see you break your own and your wife’s heart for no good
purpose. Come, Amos, be persuaded; let me look you out a farm. It shall
not cost you a penny to go from the one place to the other.”
“And let the young airl keep the money his father robbed me of; and let
Brady laugh and say, ‘I got the best of him, as I have of everybody
else’? No, faith, if he laughs when he has done with me, it’ll be on the
wrong side of his mouth I’m thinking.”
“Why not go away, then, where it cannot matter whether he laughs or
cries? Land is cheap enough in America; and you may be your own tenant,
and landlord too for that matter. You might found a family there, and be
a great proprietor before you die.”
“You mean well, Miss Grace, and I am beholden to you; but you don’t
understand. I’d rather have my own bit of ground here, that I know every
rood of, than own the whole of Canada. What would I do among strangers
and foreigners? It is not much I want—only my rights, and I’ll have
them,” he went on, lashing himself up into sudden fury. “Come, mistress,
what are ye sitting for there, and the work all standing? and what am I
doing here, talking foolishness, while the men and the horses are idle
in the field? Good morning, Miss Grace, and thank you kindly, and you
too, Doctor, and if ye see Brady, and me and my farm come up, ye can
tell him Amos Scott is not going to be put upon or turned out of the
land he paid his golden guineas for to him that’s dead and gone.”
Having delivered his mind of which speech, the farmer hurried out of the
house, followed by some of the younger children.
When he was gone, Mrs. Scott put down her apron, and drew her hand
wearily over her eyes, that ached because no tears would come.
“Ye’ll excuse him,” she said, speaking to both her visitors, but
addressing her remarks more especially to Grace; “he is not himself. He
is just out of his mind with trouble. He has been a changed man since
th’ airl died, and the young lord went away without putting the wrong
right. Everything is going to the bad with us. What the end of it will
be, I don’t know, I’m sure I don’t!”
“I wish Amos would listen to reason,” said Grace, with a sigh.
“What is the use of his fighting when he has got money, and rank, and
law, and power all against him?” observed Mr. Hanlon.
“Ah! Miss, as he says, you don’t understand; what seems reason to you,
sounds like folly to him; and as for every body and thing being against
him, Doctor, each word you say concerning that makes him madder. A lion
in a cage could not be worse nor him when anybody speaks to him about
having to leave the old place and see Brady get it.”
“But it is not the first time by many the same thing has been done,”
urged Mr. Hanlon. “Renewal fees have been taken time after time on this
estate, and the people who paid fought the matter out, and ruined
themselves just as Scott will do.”
“Somebody must win, Sir,” she answered, in unconscious vindication of
her husband’s tactics.
“I think I had better go now,” suggested Miss Moffat. “It seems to me we
are working more harm than good. After a few days, perhaps, Amos will
come to Bayview, and let me know what he intends doing.”
“I have to call at Maryville,” said Mr. Hanlon, looking at Grace as
though he imagined she might regret his inability to accompany her home.
“Any one ill there?” inquired Miss Moffat.
“The youngest boy is ailing a little.”
“What terrible bad health Mrs. Brady’s children have, to be sure!”
exclaimed Mrs. Scott.
“Yes,” answered Mr. Hanlon with a laugh: “Doctor Girvan says the young
ones about Kingslough were strong enough when he had more to do with
them. Inference obvious.”
“Is Maryville a healthy place?” asked Miss Moffat, looking straight into
Mr. Hanlon’s face.
“Pretty well for some people, not for women and children, I should say.”
_His_ meaning was obvious, at least so Grace decided; “I must know
something about Nettie,” she thought.
“I will tell Mrs. Brady I have had the pleasure of meeting you,” said
Mr. Hanlon, as if guessing what was passing through her mind.
“Yes, please do,” cried Grace eagerly; “and tell her how sorry I am to
hear of her little boy’s illness.”
When next Miss Moffat met Mr. Hanlon, she asked,—
“Did you give my message to Mrs. Brady?”
“I did,” he answered, with a curious smile.
“And what did she say?”
“Nothing,” he replied, adding, as Miss Moffat turned red and tried to
help looking annoyed, “that is about the extent of Mrs. Brady’s
conversation with any one. She listens when she is obliged to listen,
and answers when she cannot well avoid doing so.”
“Poor Nettie!” said Grace involuntarily, and she fancied she heard her
companion mutter,—
“Poor indeed!”
Before Miss Moffat reached the end of the divisional road on her way
homeward from Amos Scott’s, she heard hasty footsteps following, and,
looking back, saw the farmer’s eldest son striding after her.
“Could I speak a word to you, Miss Grace?” he asked.
“As many as you like,” she answered, and at once took her seat on a
large stone lying close at hand, to show him she was in no haste, but
could listen to all he had to say.
During the interview at his own home the young man had sat on a settle
near the fire, his body bent forward, his head drooping, his hands
clasped. He never opened his lips, he never lifted his eyes save once,
and that was to look at Mr. Hanlon.
Now, however, the spell seemed broken, and he began eagerly,—
“Miss Grace, will you help me to go to America?”
“You, David—without your father?”
“Yes, Miss, he’ll never go—leastways, I don’t believe he will; and my
heart is just broke, to see things going on as they are at home. What
for should I not go? If I stay here, I’ll have to hire myself as a
labourer—maybe to Brady. Father ’ll fight him till we haven’t a bed left
to lie on. Since the earl died he has been like a man possessed. He
carries on about the Glendares and Brady till I’m fairly sick and tired
of hearing their names. I don’t say but he has been badly treated. It
was a stocking full of money he gave the earl; but, as Mr. Dillwyn says,
if he was so foolish as to let his hard earnings slip through his
fingers on the strength of a bit of a promise, he must take the
consequences.”
“You must not speak so disrespectfully of your father,” said Grace
severely; “it is not right.”
“I did not intend any disrespect, Miss,” he answered. “I’d do as much—I
have worked as hard for him as a son could; but I’m not a child, and I
can’t shut my eyes to what must come of all this. He won’t leave, and
Brady will take the law of him, and we’ll all be brought to beggary. He
was headstrong enough before Mr. Hanlon came to Kingslough—bad luck to
the day he left his own part of the country—but to hear him discoursing
now, anybody might think he was distraught. What is the use of talking
about wrongs unless they can be put right? Maybe, Miss, you consider I
am speaking wild-like, but I sometimes feel as if I was going crazy
myself. Once we could eat our stir-about[1] and potatoes in peace, but
now I often have to leave my breakfast and dinner for fear I should be
tempted to say something that might put a division between us.”
Footnote 1:
Oatmeal porridge.
“Oh, David,” she cried, “do stop, please, you hurt me! When I think—when
I think of the happiness and contentment I have seen in your home, I
feel as if I could not realize the present misery—as if I would do
anything, give anything to put matters straight.”
“And when I think, Miss,” he rejoined, “I feel as if I could go up to
Maryville, and shoot Brady on his own door-step,—and I would too if it
could do us any good.”
“Do not talk in that wicked, reckless way,” said Grace; “it was not Mr.
Brady’s fault that the late earl took your father’s money.”
“It was his fault, taking the land at any rate,” returned the young man
doggedly. “What did he want with it? Wasn’t there farms to be had in
plenty without ours? Was it fair dealing to make a bid for it over my
father’s head, turning an honest family out of house and home? I never
hear our minister read that chapter about the man who had a vineyard he
wouldn’t sell, or about that other who had only one yow[2]-lamb, but it
puts me in mind of our farm and Brady. We had but one vineyard, and I
misdoubt me much if it doesn’t cost my father his life. We had only one
yow-lamb, and he wants that from us.”
Footnote 2:
Ewe.
His voice quivered as he spoke; the passion and pathos of his country
lent eloquence to his words, homely though they were; and tears, which
she could not restrain, coursed slowly down Miss Moffat’s cheeks at the
picture of a shattered home presented to her.
Amos could never make another; she clearly understood that if by no
effort the Castle Farm could be preserved, his future presented no
prospect but that of utter shipwreck. She could see the misery, the
poverty, the certain ruin, the possible crime, but she could perceive no
way of averting the calamity.
Her will, her money, her influence, were powerless here. A wrong had
been committed which only one man living could put right, a wrong which,
simple as it seemed, made her for the moment marvel how the earl could
rest in his grave, considering the wretchedness his act had wrought.
Never before had she touched that hard spot in the Irish nature which
has puzzled the most thoughtful of psychologists, and baffles the wisdom
of the wisest statesmen, which not time, or experience, or kindness, or
remonstrance can soften, and which seems as indifferent to severe
treatment as it is insensible to gentle handling.
Had any one told her a year previously that Amos Scott would turn a deaf
ear to her entreaties, her advice, her offers of assistance, she must
have laughed outright; and yet, behold, it was not more than an hour
since she walked up to the farm with Mr. Hanlon, and already she felt
herself beaten.
As she could not help Amos to what he wanted, he would not have her help
at all. She was powerless to give him the Castle Farm, and consequently
he turned his back both on her assistance and her advice.
She had thought, in her ignorance, money and the will to give it could
effect almost anything; and yet here was a case where it could effect
nothing, literally nothing, unless Mr. Brady could be bought off.
She would try if that were possible. It was a forlorn hope, but it was a
hope nevertheless. She would see Mr. Dillwyn and Mr. Somerford, and, if
need be, Mr. Brady himself; and she was planning the form of words she
should use, when her short reverie was broken by David,—
“So, Miss, when I heard you speaking so kind and sensible, I made up my
mind I would ask you to lend me enough to go away. I can be of no sort
of use here. If I stay, I may do an injury to myself or somebody else. I
have long had it in my mind—months,—ever since the earl lay a-dying.”
“But I thought you were going to be married?” suggested Miss Moffat.
“I am ‘speaking’ to Maggie Lennen; but I’ll never marry her, Miss, if I
can’t better myself. She’ll wait for me, and when I am able to send for
her, she’ll come out; and then, if things go as I am feared they will, I
can spare a pound now and then to my mother.”
“And you would leave her to bear all this trouble alone?”
“She won’t be alone; she has the rest of them. I wish we were every one
of us sailing to-morrow; but as that can’t be, I’ll go. I have made up
my mind, Miss Grace, whether you lend me the money or not.”
“I will not say ‘yes,’ neither will I say ‘no’ to-day. I will think over
what you have told me, and see whether nothing can be done for your
father. I am more grieved for his trouble than words can tell.”
“Ah! Miss Grace; its yourself had always a kind heart. If the old man
didn’t seem to set a right value on your goodness to-day, it was only
because he is not just himself. He’s that throng[3] with sorrow, he
can’t fairly understand; but the time will come when he’ll mind it all.
I don’t say much, and mother she says nothing; but we feel. If our
heart’s blood could serve you, there is not one of us but would give it.
There is nothing father would not do for you, letting alone leaving the
farm.”
Footnote 3:
Busy.
“I think that is always the way, David,” she said, with a mournful
smile. “The ‘except’ is generally the one request we make. Suppose, now,
I were to ask you, as a personal favour to myself, to remain with your
parents; you would say, ‘I will do anything for you, Miss Grace, but
that.’”
“I would not,” he answered vehemently. “If you bid me stay, I’ll stay.”
“I will neither bid you stay nor go,” she replied, “till I have talked
the matter over with people older and wiser than I am.”
And so saying, she rose and wended her steps slowly homewards.
“You may find people older, and maybe wiser than yourself, Miss Grace,”
soliloquized the young man, as he watched her retreating figure, “but
ye’ll never find anybody better, search the wide world through.”
CHAPTER VII.
FEET OF CLAY.
It is not the fashion generally to admit the fact, and yet a great deal
of disappointment might be spared the rising generation were parents,
guardians, and others to assure them no money yields such poor interest
as that invested in philanthropic pursuits.
There may be many reasons for this besides the innate wickedness of
mankind, but one seems sufficient for the present purpose.
Taking philanthropy as a rule, we find it desires not merely to help its
fellow, but to help him in its own way; and as there is probably nothing
more difficult to do than this, when the good intended and the good
effected—when the gratitude due and the gratitude received come to be
balanced—the well-meaning benefactor generally finds himself
considerably poorer, and no one else very much the better than if he had
been content to leave well alone.
Truth is, kindly disposed persons are apt to imagine that money has the
power of conferring upon them the position of a sort of minor
Providence; and then, when the events they have influenced, and the
changes they have wrought, turn out to have worked together for anything
rather than good, they are inclined to become misanthropical.
Few men who benefit their fellows have the slightest idea of leaving
them free-will; and when free-will rises and asserts itself,
philanthropy is very naturally disgusted at such a display of
ingratitude.
Perhaps when those who give and those who help, give and help merely
because it is right to do both, and not because they expect thanks or
return, doing good may prove a more useful and pleasant pursuit than is
generally the case at present.
No idea of exorbitant interest in the shape of either thanks or
gratitude had influenced Grace Moffat in any of the efforts she made to
ameliorate the condition of the men and women by whom she was
surrounded; nevertheless, it was scarcely in human nature to avoid
feeling a sort of sick disappointment when she came calmly to review the
incidents of her visit to the Castle Farm.
With all her heart she desired to set matters straight for Amos Scott;
but the longer she thought, the more difficult the task appeared.
She had little hope that Mr. Brady would relinquish his claim. She could
not see in what way either Mr. Dillwyn or Mr. Somerford might help her
in the affair. In any event she was not sufficiently strong-minded to
apply to one of the three, without first taking some friend into her
confidence, and friends likely to take the slightest interest in the
farmer’s concerns had passed beyond Grace’s reach. She had her father,
however, and although his views on all such subjects were well known to
her, she determined to consult him.
For love of any abstract principle of right, or any general affection
for his fellow-creatures, she was perfectly aware he would not lift a
finger; for love of her, however, he might be moved to exertion; at any
rate, she would try.
She chose the best hour in the day for her attack—that when the cloth
was removed, and the dessert reflected itself from the face of a shining
mahogany table—when the door was closed, and the servant gone, and the
wine placed near the elbow of Mr. Moffat’s chair.
A bright fire blazed on the hearth; no sound broke the stillness, save
an occasional gust of wind blowing amongst the trees. Mr. Moffat liked
the fire, and the perfect sense of solitude. He sat looking into the
blaze for a few minutes, and then, turning to his daughter, remarked,—
“You are very quiet this evening, Grace; are you not well?”
“Yes,” she replied, “but I am troubled and vexed and perplexed. I want
to consult you, papa; may I?”
“Certainly, my dear, having already, no doubt, made up your mind whether
you mean to say yes or no.”
She smiled and coloured. “I think I have come to an end of my suitors,”
she answered. “It is quite six months since any one made love to my
fortune. I am not in a perplexity of that kind, but I am greatly
troubled about poor Amos Scott.”
“What is wrong with him now?”
“Lady Jane Somerford is dead, and the land consequently belongs to Mr.
Brady.”
“Well?” Mr. Moffat’s tone was not encouraging. Truth is, feeling a
certain amount of self-reproach at not having interested himself in the
smallest degree about Mr. Scott’s affairs when that interest might have
proved beneficial, he would now have preferred ignoring the subject
altogether.
Nevertheless, when Grace remained silent, he repeated his inquiring
“Well?” with a slight access of irritability.
“Dear papa,” she said gravely, “if it vexes you to hear me talk of these
things, say so, and I will be silent, only—only—if I may not come to you
for advice in my trouble and perplexity, where can I go?”
He stretched out his hand, and drew her towards him. “Gracie darling,
talk away, and I will help and advise you if I can; but I am old, and
you are young; and young people think it an easy matter to put the world
right, and we old people know it cannot be done. That is all. If you
will make allowance for me, I will for you. Now say on.”
“Amos does not want to leave his farm,” she began, after kissing him.
“Naturally—no Irishman ever did,” was Mr. Moffat’s comment on this
announcement.
“Do you think there is any chance of his being able to remain?”
“Not the slightest; Brady has law on his side, and he is not the man to
forego his rights—at least, so I am assured. Of the man I myself know
nothing, and want to know nothing.”
“But do you not think, if it was made worth his while to forego them, he
might do so?” she asked.
“Meaning, I suppose—do I not think, if soft-hearted Grace Moffat liked
to make herself by some hundreds of pounds a poorer woman than she is
to-night, would Mr. Brady give up the Castle Farm? No, my dear, I do
not; Mr. Brady has, as I understand, many undesirable qualities. Amongst
others he is intensely Irish—using that expression in its most
disparaging sense. I do not mean that he is Irish in impulsiveness,
recklessness, generosity or folly; but he is Irish in cunning, in
hatred, in revenge, in acquisitiveness, in every undesirable quality the
worst classes in Ireland hold in common. He has been waiting for this
land for years; grudging Scott his possession, and yet gloating over
every stone the poor wretch laid, one on the top of another, for his
(Brady’s) benefit. You may give up the notion, Grace; money will not
give Scott back the Castle Farm.”
“Do you not think the Glendares might?”
“You can try, Gracie.” Mr. Moffat said this very drily.
“I mean do you not think Mr. Brady might be susceptible to the influence
of rank?”
“I do not exactly see how rank is to use its influence,” was the reply;
“and, if I did, I believe Mr. Brady would talk rank over.”
“You have not much opinion of the Glendare strength of character,” she
said, as though in jest.
“Perhaps I have not much opinion of any part of the Glendare character,”
he answered bitterly. “However, that is a question we need not discuss
to-night. If I understand you rightly, you thought, perhaps, some member
of that family might exert his or her influence over Mr. Brady. Suppose
the experiment worth trying—who is to try it? Not the young earl, who is
dying, no doubt, with a rapidity commendable in the eyes of the next
heir, who, in his old age, it is said is seriously considering
matrimony; not that next heir, who, whether earl or not, will never
consider any human being except himself; not Lady Glendare, whose star
has waned; not Mr. Robert Somerford—”
“Why not?” Grace inquired.
“Well, I am sure I can scarcely say why,” returned her father. “Try him,
my dear; ask him to use his influence; perhaps he might, if he has any.
Perhaps Mr. Brady might be influenced by him. Mr. Somerford has received
a certain amount of kindness from us during the last seven years;
perhaps he would not object to do us a trifling kindness in return. It
is all problematical, Grace. I have not much faith in its satisfactory
solution, but you can try.”
There was a pause, during which Grace sat with her cheek resting on her
hand, her thoughts straying over many subjects, and not one pleasant
subject amongst the number.
“Is there not such a thing as equity?” she inquired at length.
“Do you mean in law or in public opinion?” asked her father.
“In law.”
“There is a thing called equity.”
“Would it not help Amos?”
“Most decidedly not. Nothing can help him. No person can help him unless
he like to help himself.”
“How can he do that?”
“He made a mistake once by acting on his impulses; he had better not
make a second by following his impulses again. He has had a long, long
term of his farm, but now he will have to leave it, and he ought to
leave it peaceably. He cannot fight with the least chance of winning. If
the dead earl came back to life, he could not remedy the wrong wrought
by his carelessness. Scott might establish a claim against him, if the
fact of ever having received money could be recalled to the memory of a
Glendare; but money is not what Scott wants; he wants his farm, and all
the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not give it to him. Brady
is the only man who could, and he won’t; and the sooner Scott realizes
that fact, the better for him and all belonging to him.”
“You think his case hopeless, then?”
“Utterly—so far as his present holding is concerned. There are other
farms—”
“Yes,” she said, “but the Castle Farm is to him just what I am to you.”
For a minute after neither spoke. Involuntarily Mr. Moffat’s thoughts
sped back to that bright summer’s day when first he heard of the Earl’s
Promise, and never thought of asking a question concerning it.
If he had known then, by one sentence he might have averted the misery
now close at hand. He might have asked, “What have you got to show for
this? where is the earl’s receipt? where his promise in any shape that
shall avail you hereafter?”
He might, with his knowledge of the world and its weary, wicked ways,
have stood between this poor, hard-working, trusting son of the soil,
and ruin. It all came back to him, as past sorrows sometimes do, in a
bad dream, with their anguish fresh as at the original moment. It all
came back: what he might have done—what he had left undone. The years
returned, each one laying a reproach at his feet ere gliding away to
give place to its successor.
He saw his motherless child returning bright and happy from her visits
to the Castle Farm; he beheld the honest faces of those from whom she
had never learnt harm—nothing but good; he could recall the words in
which she recounted the day’s doings, when she went to visit the Scotts,
clearly as if it had all happened yesterday; he could see her bringing
back treasures for him to inspect, turning out her little pocket that he
might look at all she had got.
And when she was ill of some childish disorder, had not Mrs. Scott left
her own home to come and help nurse her? Through all the years, had the
love and respect and admiration they felt for his darling ever abated?
Ah! well-a-day! Oh! tiring, harassing memory!
“Grace—” he began.
“Yes, papa!” she said, waking from her reverie with a start.
“I am not a demonstrative man; I do not talk in a general way about what
I feel; but if money could enable Scott to stay where he is, money
should not be wanting.”
The truth of this statement was not likely to be put to the test, but
Grace knew he meant what he said—every word.
“If anything could make me happy to-night,” she murmured, “that
assurance would; but, oh, papa, it is dreadful to think what may come of
all this, and we powerless to avert the evil!”
“Ay, Gracie, it is,” he answered. “By the time you are my age you will
know there are many evils we are powerless to avert. But now listen to
me, child: speak to Robert Somerford, and see what he will do in the
matter. If that fail, I will see what I can do myself.”
She did not reply to him verbally; she only took his hand, and stroked
and kissed it.
“Remember,” he went on, with a sudden change of tone, “I am now acting
in entire opposition to my own principles. I have always believed in
letting other people manage their own affairs, in allowing them to get
into difficulties if they please, and getting out of them as they can.
My opinion about Ireland has always been that her misfortunes arise as
much from the laxity as the severity of her landlords. I consider the
whole system of tenant-right a mistake. I have been, and am, utterly at
a loss to conceive why the fact of a man having rented a farm for a
certain number of years, during which he has probably exhausted the
land, and allowed the house and outbuildings to fall into decay, should
entitle him, and his children after him, to a renewal of the lease. I do
not see, if I were a landlord—which happily I am not—why, supposing I
prefer one tenant who applies for a farm rather than another, the one I
prefer should have his ricks burned down or find his best mare
hamstrung. I do not see the beauty of charity; in my opinion it benefits
neither him who gives nor him who receives—”
“Oh fie, papa!” she exclaimed.
“My dear, I only speak the truth. What good to themselves or any one
else are those sturdy and picturesque beggars who come to you as
regularly for their Saturday’s dole as if they were annuitants, or had
worked for a week’s wages?”
“I would rather give them wages,” she said; “but what am I to do?”
“I do not interfere with your almsgiving, Grace; nevertheless it seems
to me that whilst you are relieving distress, you are perpetuating an
evil.”
“Do you really believe,” she asked, “that the little I give away does me
no good?”
“I hope it does you no harm—that is the utmost I can say. I do not think
it a wise thing to assist in pauperizing a nation.”
“But we are expressly told that the poor shall be with us always.”
“Granted; but you do not mean, I suppose, to interpret the poor into
professional beggars? I am not much interested in Ireland or the Irish;
most persons would call me, and call me truly, an unobservant man; yet
there are things passing every day before me to which I cannot shut my
eyes; which you, Grace, would see as plainly as I if you did not
wilfully shut your eyes. First of all, I behold a number of landlords
who reside principally out of Ireland, for the very good reason that
they prefer living in London, or Paris, or Florence, or Vienna, wherein
they show their discrimination. Immediately there is a cry about the
evils of absenteeism, the popular idea being that if a man resides in
Ireland he must of necessity spend his income in Ireland likewise, just
as though any English duke, or earl, or baronet spent the whole of his
income at his country-seat.”
“Don’t you think there is a little difference between the two cases?”
said Grace. “If the Irish landlords resided in Dublin, for instance—”
“My dear girl, do you suppose that would satisfy tenantry residing in
the north? What the malcontents really want is to have the ‘good old
times’ back again; when there was open house and a ‘bite and sup’ for
everybody, broken victuals for the beggars, and a ‘drain of whiskey and
a cut of mate’ for persons supposed to be ‘earning their bread,’ whom
chance, design, or necessity led into kitchens, the doors of which
always stood wide. To put it in a sentence, people are now living almost
at the end of a system, and they want to go back to the beginning of it,
to the time when there was plenty of money instead of beggary; to the
commencement of borrowing, and mortgaging, and taking credit, instead of
paying back, and bankruptcy, and no money, no goods; to the wild,
reckless youth of families which are now expiating in unhonoured old age
the sins and the follies of that faraway time.”
There was truth in the picture he drew, and his daughter felt it; but
the truth was bitter, the picture too faithful in detail to be perfectly
life-like in fact.
“But surely people are not to be blamed because they look back to the
good old times with regret, and wish they could all come over again?”
said Grace, whose imagination had often held high revel amongst those
past days and doings of which her father spoke so contemptuously.
“Were they good old times?” he asked, with unwonted animation. “By the
grain men reap, by the fruit they gather, we can tell the sort of seed,
the manner of tree which was sowed and planted by those who went before.
There was wild sowing, there has been bitter reaping, and there will be
reaping still more bitter before Ireland becomes the paradise patriots
(so called) conjure up before the imagination of an excitable,
passionate, dissatisfied people.”
“What would benefit Ireland, papa?”
“How can I tell, child? Can the work of centuries be undone in a day?
can the education of generations be unlearned at the word of command? If
the country and the people be let alone, perhaps they may do something
for themselves, but I am extremely doubtful about the matter; it very
rarely happens that those who have been for eleven hours praying,
entreating, cursing, threatening in order to obtain help, turn round at
the twelfth and help themselves.”
“How prejudiced you are!” she said, but sorrowfully holding his hand the
while; “you only look at the faults, you never think of the virtues and
the wrongs.”
“My dear Grace, if there be one thing I dislike more than another, it is
the use of cant expressions. That is probably the reason why I have
always eschewed mixing myself up in political matters. There is
something particularly offensive to me in the war-cries of party; and,
speaking confidentially, I object quite as much to the music of ‘Vinegar
Hill’ as of ‘Protestant Boys.’ You have managed to adopt some cant
phrases, as for instance, that you used just now. Tell me, if you can,
what are Ireland’s wrongs.”
“The poverty, the distress, the misery.”
“Anything else?”
“The way in which the Irish are looked down upon by English people, the
laws that press so heavily on the Roman Catholics.”
“Anything else?”
“The money earned in a country being spent out of a country, the men who
earn that money living so hardly; Ireland being taxed for the benefit of
England.”
“Anything else?”
“Oh! yes; there are hundreds of other things, but I have mentioned
sufficient.”
“I think you must have been sitting at the feet of Mr. Hanlon, Grace,”
answered her father. “If either you or he can prove to me that Ireland
is taxed for the benefit of England, I shall be surprised. On the
contrary, Ireland is exempt from many most irritating taxes which clever
chancellors of the exchequer have devised for the express purpose of
reducing that plethora of riches from which Englishmen are supposed to
suffer. The amiability of Britannia has even exempted Ireland from the
soap-tax; another instance, I conclude, of that brutal ignorance of
Irish wants concerning which Mr. Hanlon speaks so freely. To a nation
that thinks the use of water unnecessary, it seems nothing less than an
insult to give soap free. As to your next point, making my way
backwards, men who earn money live hardly everywhere. It is in the
nature of things; from the London merchant, toiling to leave a fortune
or found a family, to Amos Scott, labouring to meet the next ‘gale day,’
the worker must live hard. Then you say it is wrong that money earned in
a country should be spent out of it. Perhaps so, but I fail to see how
you would propose to remedy the evil.”
“I would make all the people who derive their income from Ireland live
in Ireland,” said Grace energetically.
“It seems to me you would be guilty of a great injustice, then,” he
replied; “but, however, we will suppose, for the sake of argument, that
the plan you suggest is fair and practicable. Suppose, in a word, you
have the landlords here, how is the money to be kept in Ireland? Are the
nobility to have their portraits painted by local artists? are they to
buy the pictures on their walls from some vague Milesian genius, and
their statuettes from a Celtic stone-mason? Are their wives and
daughters to play music composed by the parish organist, on pianos made
by an enterprising country carpenter? I suppose you would have the
gentlemen wear frieze and carry bog-oak sticks, and the ladies array
themselves in poplin and Limerick lace. You would have the houses
furnished with chairs and tables made from arbutus wood, and the
cabinets filled with ‘speciments’ from the Giant’s Causeway and tokens
from Killarney. Turf should be burnt universally, instead of English or
Scotch coal. That is the only way to keep money in a country, Grace.
Does the programme please you?”
“You are jesting with me,” she said, “and yet you would not, if you knew
how near it all lies to my heart.”
“What lies near your heart, Gracie? which of the grievances? I am
running through them as fast as I am able. Which was the next sorrow?
Oh! I remember, the Roman Catholics. Well, they certainly had a
considerable number of grievances at one time, but that time is past and
gone. The Protestants, at one period of England’s history, did not sleep
exactly on roses, so that perhaps there might be some excuse to urge
even in this matter. I do not want to excuse, however. It is a pity, to
borrow one of Mr. Hanlon’s figures of speech, that the Roman Catholics
‘ever were trampled under foot and forced to kiss the shamrock-spangled
sod of Erin;’ but all I have now to remark about the members of that
Church is, they have nothing in the present to complain of, and are
quite at liberty to commence taking that ell which is popularly supposed
to be the next step after receiving an inch. I have no particular
prejudice against the Pope, or his clergy, or his followers myself, but
I think that part of the population which Mr. Hanlon’s ‘stalwart
peasantry, their country’s pride,’ call the ‘Papishers,’ will take one
ell—probably many.”
Grace sat quite still and silent. This, she said to herself, was the
reasoning the friends of Ireland had to listen to and bear patiently.
Well, Ireland’s time would come. In the meanwhile, the speaker was her
father. Although he, being English, could not possibly understand
anything about Ireland, still she, Grace, could not argue with and
contradict him.
“The next grievance stated,” went on Mr. Moffat, “is that the English
look down on the Irish. Now, may I not inquire whether that feeling be
entirely one-sided? Do not the Irish look down on the English? Have I
not heard ridicule directed to their ‘mincing talk,’ to their ‘cutting
away’ of words, to their drawl, their airs, their notions, the whole
tirade ending, ‘But what else can be expected from foreigners?’ Going
down to the lower orders, it is generally supposed few Englishmen ever
sound an ‘H’ in its place, or fail to put one in where it is not wanted.
I have laughed over and over again at such ideas, but it certainly never
occurred to me that the ignorance in which they originated was a
grievance. Further, English cleanliness is an offence, ‘What a dirthy
people to nade so much washing!’ is a neat way of putting the Irish
prejudice into a nutshell.”
“Pray stop; pray do;” Grace cried; “we do not agree, we cannot—”
“Why not? I was going on to say that, if I may be allowed to make a
bull, all England’s best men have been Irishmen; in England they have
made their mark, and England has not been chary of recognizing their
merits.”
“She dare not!” exclaimed Grace.
“We won’t go into that question,” said Mr. Moffat calmly. “It is natural
enough when gangs of imperfectly-clothed, strange-tongued, foul-mouthed,
ill-looking, unkempt, unwashed Irish sweepings go over to the English
harvest, a highly-civilized community, though composed of the lower
orders, should—not comprehending that these gangs are the very dregs of
the population—think but little of the bulk, judging from the sample;
but the upper classes, better informed, look to the higher specimens,
and judge accordingly—judge of the capabilities of the Irish on much too
exalted a scale.”
“And you?” interrupted his daughter.
“I try to hold the scales even, but find it hard work. If O’Connell were
to present a glass which could not flatter to the face of his
countrymen, even he would find they and their circumstances capable of
presenting some very ugly features.”
“I love and respect that man!” cried Grace.
“Well, my dear, so far as I am concerned, I have no objection to your
doing both. He certainly is a very wonderful man; whether he is a great
one cannot be determined yet, those who live to see the end will know.
Meanwhile I have nothing else to answer except the misery, the distress,
the poverty. All are—why, we cannot tell with any certainty. You talk of
England: there are hundreds, thousands of people in London even, who
would not let a dog want if they knew it, and yet in wretched garrets
men, willing to work, die; into the cold rivers women, unwilling to face
the last alternative, throw themselves, as though death were a friend
tried and trusted. Do you think there is any place on the face of this
earth where misery, distress, poverty, are not? I have never seen it; I
do not expect ever to see it. Indeed, I consider Kingslough singularly
exempt from the common epidemic of chronic and unrelieved poverty. The
poverty is, but the relief is also—often foolishly given—like yours,
Grace.”
“Like mine, papa?” and Mistress Grace fired up.
“Like yours, my dear,” he answered calmly. “But for you, and such as
you, the paupers would work or go into the poorhouse. They say, ‘God’s
mercies are better than the house.’ Translated from their glib language
the phrase means, ‘What we can beg, threaten, or steal, is better than
that we receive as a right by line and plummet. The casual halfpenny,
with the wind blowing free about our exposed persons, is sweeter than
stir-about served in a house, where we are expected to conform to
rules.’ Let me go through your annuitants. First comes that patriarchal
and religious gentleman who, if he could be transported to London, would
make his own fortune as a model, and the fortune of any artist who
painted him. His is a splendid and a venerable presence, is it not? He
might be an Irish Melanchthon—on canvas. His head is worn bare by taking
off his hat. He impresses the beholder with the idea of former
respectability and of present sanctity. He can quote the Scriptures with
marvellous fluency, and has a text ready for every occasion. His talk is
of another world, and when he sees a fitting opportunity he bestows the
penny just dropped into his hat on some one who, to use his own
expression, ‘wants it worse than himself.’ He is a prince amongst
beggars—a cross between an archbishop and an emperor. Now suppose we
trace his career.”
“I know what you are going to say, papa, but, it is not true. I am
certain it cannot be!” exclaimed Grace vehemently.
“It is quite true. His father had one of those small freehold farms
which are amongst the misfortunes of this country. He did little
himself, and he brought up his two sons to do less. Nevertheless when he
died, one of the two, not our venerable friend, but his brother, worked
on his land after the prevailing fashion. He tickled the soil, he went
through a pantomime of manuring it. He sowed seed which produced
miserable crops, though better than could have been expected. In due
time the brother died, and then, while his supposed grief lay heavy on
him, the neighbours said, ‘It’s is plantin’ time, Barney; arn’t ye goin’
to put in the corn and the praties?’ Solemnly Barney answered, ‘The Lord
will provide.’ Thinking him crazy with trouble, the kindly-foolish
people ploughed his acres, and bringing their seed potatoes and their
seed corn, set and sowed for the gentleman within doors. Further, having
a certain interest and pride in the matter, ‘consate’ as they call the
feeling, they moulded the potatoes, and dug them up; they reaped the
corn and thrashed it. Nothing could have been found to please our friend
better. He thanked them in his best manner, lived off the produce they
had garnered for him, and spent the winter not unpleasantly. Seed-time
came again, but the people did not quite see their way to providing and
planting once more, so the land lay untilled, the fields yielded no
increase. He sold his cow, his horse, his pigs, his fowls; he sold the
furniture, his farm, his house; he lived on the money thus procured so
long as it lasted. When it was gone he took to begging, and he has gone
on begging ever since, with a brief interval, when he tried ‘the house.’
One day, while in residence there, he saw some bundles of new spades
arrive. Foreseeing what that portended, he left, and returned to his old
haunts and his old occupation, and was sufficiently fortunate to please
a young lady, who, charmed by his acquaintance with Scripture, actually
settled a pension upon him. Then there are your three idiots, who,
harmless though they may be, ought never to be allowed to go roaming
about the country, frightening children into fits, and disgusting every
one who has not a fellow-feeling for the ‘naturals.’ That deaf and dumb
girl you encourage is a perfect nuisance to the neighbourhood, making
believe to tell fortunes and to prophesy, in her hideous gibberish, good
or evil. As for the women, Grace, I don’t like to speak as I feel about
them. Harmless, toothless old hags they seem to you, no doubt, shivering
with cold, barefooted, scantily dressed, with a tattered patchwork quilt
covering their shoulders; but, so far as I am concerned, rather than
meet one of them I would make a _détour_ of a mile any day. But, there,
I will not vex you any more. We do not agree on this matter, and I see
no chance of our ever doing so.”
“We are agreed on one point, I am sure,” said Grace slowly, “they are
poor—”
“They are certainly not millionaires.”
“And we have comparative wealth.”
“We should not be wealthy long if their wishes were gratified.”
“And being rich,” went on Grace, unheeding, “I fancy we ought to help
those who are poor. They may be lazy, and dirty, and deceitful, and
wicked, very possibly they are; but when I lie awake at night, warm and
snug, I do not think the remembrance of their sinfulness would make me
feel more comfortable if, through any fault of mine, they were sleeping
on the bare ground, with the stars looking down upon them, and not a
morsel to put in their lips when the day broke. The system may be bad,
and the people too, but I did not make either, and I would fain be of
use to somebody, if I can.”
“You are a good girl, Grace,” answered her father, “and if it be a
pleasure to you to give, give; it would be no pleasure to me, and so I
refrain. To show you, however, that I want to please you, I repeat, if
your eloquence fail to touch the possible future earl, I will see
whether I can do anything. By the way, Grace, we see little,
comparatively, of Mr. Somerford now.”
“I suppose he is studying how he shall bear his new dignities when they
are thrust upon him,” said Miss Moffat a little bitterly.
“Have you heard that Lady Glendare was extremely anxious for her son to
marry?”
“Impossible!”
“Perfectly possible; she found the young lady, too. But his lordship
seemed, so Dillwyn tells me, to consider there had been sufficient
division in the family; in a word, he does not think the idea of
disappointing his cousin so entrancing a one as it might have appeared
formerly. Further, the bride he is bound to will not hear of
disappointment, so Mr. Somerford may awake any morning and find himself
one step nearer the earldom of Glendare.”
“He will have much in his power;” that was all Grace said or meant to
say about the matter.
“I am not quite sure of that,” replied her father, “the property is
frightfully encumbered.”
“But a few years of retrenchment and good management would work a great
change in the state of affairs,” she suggested.
“It will have to be wrought by some one not a Somerford, or I am greatly
mistaken,” said Mr. Moffat, and then Grace understood that Mr. Dillwyn
had been depreciating Robert Somerford to her parent.
A few days later she felt disposed to depreciate him to herself. Walking
back from Kingslough she met the possible earl riding towards the town.
At sight of her he dismounted, and, leading his horse, retraced part of
his way in her company.
She had wished to see him, and said so frankly; she wanted to speak
about Amos Scott, and ascertain if anything could be done for him, and
if so, what? She spoke of the great trouble which had come to her humble
friend, spoke out of the fulness of her heart of the wrong he had
sustained, of the misery he was suffering, of all the wretchedness she
feared might arise from the affair.
“Such cases have been, unhappily, not uncommon,” said Mr. Somerford. “It
is no wonder a judgment has fallen on our race.”
“When you come into the title you will try to put all the wrong right,”
she said eagerly, forgetting herself—forgetting him, as she thought of
Amos Scott, and others in a like predicament, who had been left homeless
through the carelessness or wickedness of the Glendares.
“If ever I am Earl of Glendare,” he replied, in a tone which told Grace
the full extent of the error she had committed, “If ever I have the
misfortune to be Earl of Glendare, I expect I shall find everything
wrong, and nothing left wherewith to put wrong right. As to Scott, I
know not what to say or to do. I will talk the matter over with Dillwyn,
and, if anything can be done, I will write to you or call.”
She had gone so far, that she felt disposed to go a little farther. She
would put affairs upon some different footing, let the consequences be
what they would, let her companion think what he chose.
“We have not had the pleasure of seeing much of you lately,” she said in
a tone studiously careless, though her voice almost trembled as she
uttered the words.
“I have been scarcely my own master since Henry went away,” he replied.
“The fact is—” but there he stopped.
“You did not complete your sentence, I think,” she said, after an
instant’s pause.
“No, it was an awkward sentence, one I ought not perhaps to have begun;
but the fact is, my time is so little at my own disposal; my position is
now so different from what it was formerly—that—you are so clever, Miss
Moffat, I am certain you understand.”
“I am not particularly clever,” she retorted; “but I fancy I understand,
and I will speak more plainly than you. We, my father and I, made you
welcome to come to Bayview; we now make you equally welcome to stay
away. Good morning, Mr. Somerford,” and, with a slight curtsey, Grace
left him, as greatly disconcerted a gentleman as any gentleman who has
got what he wanted, but not in the way he wanted it, could possibly be.
For Grace, she was like one who, receiving a wound in the heat of
battle, feels neither ache nor pain. She was in such a tempest of
passion, that she could not tell where she was hurt, or whether she was
hurt at all. A man had trodden her pride under foot. She had been
jilted, and that by Robert Somerford!
CHAPTER VIII.
BY THE SAD SEA WAVES.
Times goes on, whether people are glad or sorry, sick or well, rich or
poor, and it never paused for a moment, although Miss Grace Moffat was
mortified beyond expression because a man had served her as she had
served Mr. John Riley.
Fast and loose is a game at which people only like to play when they are
the winners. It had been a small matter in the opinion of the girl Grace
to discard a lover. Seven years later it seemed no small matter for a
lover to discard her.
It is a curious thing to consider how rarely in matters of great or
little importance men and women are able to avenge themselves, and yet
how surely retribution is compassed for them by others. Thousands of
miles distant, John Riley never dreamed his lost love was receiving from
Mr. Somerford the same measure she had meted to him. Grace, as was
natural, felt very indignant about the matter, but it never occurred to
her that it had been rather nice of John Riley not to feel anger against
her in the days that could never come back.
It was not a pleasant experience, but I am very certain that she was the
better for it; that the heiress, who found her money could not buy
everything for her, could no more prevent slights being put upon her
than if she were a girl without a sixpence, was much improved by the
discovery.
In affairs of the heart, when their own is not touched, women are as
instinctively cruel to men as children to insects, perhaps for the same
reason; and if the lesson which makes them “feel too” be sharp, it is
nevertheless better for them to understand that what may seem fun to
their ignorance is death to their victims.
The blow to Grace’s pride was so severe that it almost deadened the pain
of the wound received by her fancy. I use the word advisedly, for her
heart had never been very deeply concerned in the matter.
Robert Somerford never was to her what Daniel Brady had been to poor
Nettie. She never loved him with an absorbing attachment; if she had,
however, that love must indeed be remarkable which can subsist for years
on hope and expectancy. People may marry after a probation of this kind,
as they may marry after a long engagement, but the probability is that
the final wooing and wedding will prove a somewhat prosaic affair.
No; now the scales were removed from her eyes, Grace Moffat knew she had
never cared for Robert Somerford as she understood a girl should care
for the man she intended to take as husband. She had been dazzled by his
good looks, his accomplishments, his manners, his rank, his prospects.
She had felt as the poor people around her would have said that she was
“getting value for her money.” Oh, that money! In the first bitterness
of her disappointment Grace wished she had not a penny. “Then perhaps
somebody might care for me for myself,” she thought, as if John Riley
had not cared more for her little finger than for all her fortune.
But, then, she did not care for John Riley, which made the difference.
One mortification, however, Miss Moffat was spared. The world (that is
to say, her world) never knew exactly how the matter stood, for the home
thrust she administered had only the effect of bringing Mr. Somerford as
a more frequent visitor to her father’s house. He wrote Grace a note,
complaining of how utterly she had misjudged him, and declaring that
till the last hour of his life he could never forget Bayview; the dear
friends who lived there; the happy hours he had spent beneath its roof.
What he said was specious enough, and Grace, wise in her generation, and
mindful always of what “Kingslough might think,” accepted his
explanation.
But she knew perfectly well that she had not misinterpreted his meaning;
and he knew this. Perhaps because he did know it, he came to the house
more frequently, feeling relieved at the idea that now Grace could not
expect him to propose for her, and yet with a vague idea that at some
future period he might ask her to marry him.
But for his expectations he would have asked her to do so long before.
He was very fond of her, but he was not one half so fond of her as of
himself. Never had he liked her better than when she said he could stay
away. There was a spirit and a directness, and a comprehension about her
swift retort which gave a piquancy to the transaction.
And he liked to think no one knew, no one would ever know, anything
about it excepting they two. He felt satisfied she would feel as little
desire to speak of that short skirmish as he. They understood each
other, and the only drawback to the pleasure of her society he had ever
felt was removed. Altogether it was as well she had spoken; altogether
Grace acknowledged it was better he should still visit at Bayview.
But she could never care for him again. Hero in her eyes he might never
seem more.
It was at this period he would have talked to Mr. Dillwyn concerning
Amos Scott’s affairs, had that gentleman not told him he declined to
meddle in the transaction, that there was nothing to be done about the
matter, that if the old earl rose from the dead he could not give Scott
the promised lease, and that, in fine, there was no use in discussing
the question.
“If you believe your uncle had the man’s money, and feel any desire to
repay the amount—pay it,” finished Mr. Dillwyn; “but neither you nor
anybody else, except Brady, can give him a longer term of the Castle
Farm, and Brady won’t give it to him.”
“You think not?”
“I am sure not!” was the reply.
Nevertheless Mr. Somerford rode over to Maryville in the hope of
affecting Mr. Brady’s heart by his powers of persuasion. But Mr. Brady
was firm. He would only, so he declared, have been too glad to accede to
Mr. Somerford’s request had the land been any other land than the Castle
Farm, and the man any other man than Amos Scott.
“If I were to give in to him now,” he said, “I might leave Maryville. He
would regard my concession as an act of weakness; he would be setting
himself up in opposition against me at every turn. I should have no
peace of my life. It really grieves me, Mr. Somerford, to have to refuse
a request coming from one of your family, and more particularly as I
understand Miss Moffat is also interested in the matter. But if you put
yourself in my place, you will see, I think, how utterly impossible it
is for me to do what you ask.”
All of which, and many other regrets, and apologies and excuses, Mr.
Somerford repeated to Miss Moffat, who, thanks to the fresh light thrown
across his character, understood perfectly that if the earl’s nephew had
stood in Mr. Brady’s shoes, he would most likely have acted in a
somewhat similar manner. As indeed why should he not?
Even Grace would have been unable to say with authority that Mr. Brady
ought to give up his rights for any other reason than because “it was
such a pity of poor Amos,” and this sentiment, although pretty coming
from a woman’s lips, would scarcely, I imagine, satisfy a jury as to the
justice of a man’s claim. Undoubtedly it was a pity of poor Amos; but
then, as Mr. Dillwyn remarked, he had no one to thank for his
misfortunes except himself.
Amos, on the contrary, thought every one was to blame for his
misfortunes except himself, and Mr. Brady he regarded as the chief of
the offenders, because, knowing Scott wanted the farm, he had gone and
taken it “over his head.”
“I shall fight it out with you,” said Scott, shaking his fist in Mr.
Brady’s face.
“Very well,” answered Mr. Brady, “I am content.” And it required no seer
to tell what the end of the matter would be as regarded the Scotts.
Meanwhile, however, a strong feeling was developing itself against Mr.
Brady. Popular opinion, which in other places besides Ireland generally
rears itself in opposition to law, considered Scott had been hardly done
by—that “Brady had taken an advantage of him,”—that “he knew well enough
the decent man had paid his savings honestly come by, to the earl”—that
the “Castle Farm could be no more to him nor any other farm,” and that
“he might have taken the sum Mr. Moffat offered him to let Scott and his
wife and the boys and girls stay on in the old home.”
“But it’s himself is the hard man,” said even the beggars, when
rehearsing Mr. Brady’s sins of omission and commission.
“An’ it’ll come home to him yet,” chorused dozens of self-constituted
partisans, for it was a noticeable fact in the affair that Mr. Brady was
the person on whose head all the vials of righteous wrath were poured.
As for the earl, “In course a gentleman like him had plenty to think
about; and it was no miracle, with all the trouble he had on him, that
Scott’s lease should have slipped his memory.”
There was some truth in this view of the question, and it was a natural
view, at all events to a nation who probably never will be induced to
understand that as much evil may be wrought through carelessness as
through set purpose, that the indifference of selfishness may curse as
many lives as the deliberate plotting of a clever schemer.
Be this as it may, however, people were beginning to take sides in the
matter. One party considered Scott ought to be supported; another,
though perfectly indifferent to his opponent, thought Brady was entitled
to enter into possession.
“The law is clear enough in the case,” said Lord Ardmorne, “and those
who are inciting the poor fellow to resist the law, are doing him but a
sorry kindness.”
Wherein the marquis was quite correct, only he overlooked the fact that
Scott was quite ready to resist the law without any incitement from his
fellows. Further, if such a paradox be admissible, he believed the law
to be on his side; that is, he was looking out for a solicitor whom he
could persuade to be of his opinion. Somewhere on the earth justice
would be done him, if not in one court, why in another.
The man was unreasonable, mad if you will; but Mr. Brady, as he
imagined, was trying to despoil him of the labour of years, the fruits
of his toil, and it is not alone in Ireland that people who fancy they
have been ruined without any fault of their own are irrational and
implacable.
Besides, he had a vague idea that if he could pour the tale of his
wrongs into the ears of the proper person, Brady might be worsted, and
he righted; and there is perhaps nothing more difficult to combat than a
conviction, decided, though formless, of this kind.
As for Grace, she was growing sick at heart of the whole business. All
her sympathies were with Scott and his family, but she had sense enough
to see there could be only one end to the course the farmer had elected
to tread—ruin; and sometimes she could not help agreeing in her father’s
openly-expressed opinion that the best thing which could now occur at
the Castle Farm would be for Amos to take a fever and die, and so leave
the mother and children free to quit the place, and let those who were
willing to help them do so.
It was whilst things were in this unsatisfactory state that Mr. Hanlon
one day brought Grace a note from Mrs. Brady. He presented it with
formal politeness, saying he had been asked to give it in private into
Miss Moffat’s own hands.
“Will you not read it?” he asked, as Grace held the letter unopened.
“Does Mrs. Brady wish me to return an answer by you?” was the reply
spoken coldly enough, for Miss Moffat by no means approved of the
messenger chosen by her old friend.
“No; as I understand the matter, that note only contains a request which
Mrs. Brady is sure you will comply with. She had no other means,” he
went on hurriedly, “of sending to you: she was afraid of the letter
miscarrying in any way, of it falling by mischance into her husband’s
possession.”
“Did she tell you so?” Grace inquired.
“There are some things, Miss Moffat, one knows by intuition.”
Grace broke the seal and read the few lines Nettie had traced; then,
turning to Mr. Hanlon, she said, “Do you know by intuition the contents
of this note?”
“I gathered from a few words Mrs. Brady let fall that she wishes to see
you,” he replied ignoring the ironical repetition of his own remark
contained in Miss Moffat’s inquiry.
“Do you know why she wishes to see me?” Grace persisted.
“I do not,” was the reply. Then more earnestly, “I assure you, on my
honour, I have not the slightest idea—”
“Mr. Hanlon,” Grace began, “I always was, I always shall be, attached to
Mrs. Brady; but I do not like commencing any correspondence with her
which involves mystery and secrecy.”
“That I can well understand; but from what I have seen of Mrs. Brady you
may be certain she has some sufficient reason for her request; from what
I have seen of Mr. Brady, it might be perilous for her openly to disobey
his commands.”
“Perilous!” exclaimed Grace.
“I use the word advisedly—and—confidentially,” he answered. “It may be,”
he went on, “that in meeting Mrs. Brady as she asks, you may be doing
her a great service. In any case you cannot be doing her an unkindness,
for she is very lonely and—very unhappy.”
Grace did not reply, she took up Nettie’s note and read it over once
more:
“This evening soon after dusk, I shall be at the Lone Rock. I want to
speak to you; meet me there. _Be sure you do._ Burn this note, and say
nothing about it to any one.”
When she had finished, she said,—
“You are going back to Maryville, I suppose?”
“No, I may not perhaps be there again for weeks, unless, indeed, you
wish me to convey a message to Mrs. Brady.”
“It is not a matter of any consequence,” was the reply; “I only wanted
to let her know I would do as she asks.”
“That I think she expected,” he said; and then, having completed his
mission, and finding that the conversation languished, Mr. Hanlon took
his leave.
It would be difficult to say why Miss Moffat shrank from the idea of the
interview suggested by Nettie. Had Mrs. Brady proposed coming to
Bayview, Grace would have welcomed her with open arms; but she
distrusted mysteries. She could not help remembering all the evil
Nettie’s secret ways of proceeding had wrought in the days gone by, and
she could not endure being a party to a clandestine meeting, the note
appointing which was brought to her, of all people in the world, by Mr.
Hanlon.
Instinct in most women is a truer guide than reason, and instinctively
Grace felt that Nettie’s note portended trouble; that her choice of a
messenger was indiscreet; that matters at Maryville were even worse than
most people imagined; and that time, instead of drawing Mr. Brady and
his wife closer together, was widening the breach that had been made
when injudicious but well-meaning friends forced Nettie on a man who was
but half-willing to marry her.
“I must try to gain her confidence,” thought Grace, as though after
seven years she could hope to win a trust which Nettie then withheld.
Mrs. Brady had never confided in any one. It was not likely she intended
to change her tactics now.
The grounds at Bayview extended to the seashore. At high tide the trees
spread their branches over the water, and when storms were fierce and
the waves came rolling in, the long gravel-walk on the top of the
sloping bank was impassable. In calm weather, however, the place gave
one the idea of utter peace and repose, and Grace had always been fond
of wandering upon the shore, looking now away to the open sea, and again
to the soft green hills, with Kingslough nestling under their shadow.
Not a stone, not a tree, not an effect of sun and shade, not an illusion
of twilight, not a fairy touch of moonlight, but was familiar to Grace;
and as she neared the Lone Rock in the growing darkness of a still
summer’s evening her accustomed eye saw a figure leaning against the
stone, which came forward to meet her.
“Nettie!”
“Grace!” That was all; then they sat down, hand clasped in hand, and
kept silence for a minute.
It was broken by Nettie.
“I knew you would come,” she said.
“Yes.” Grace could not find it in her heart to speak the words she had
intended, at least not then.
“Perhaps you thought it strange my not going to Bayview?” resumed
Nettie; “but I dare not.”
“Why?” asked the other.
“In the first place, because Mr. Brady never would have forgiven me if I
had; in the next, because he would have wanted to know what I could have
to say to you.
“And supposing he had?” Grace inquired.
“When I have told you, there will be no need to suppose how he would
feel about the matter,” replied Nettie shortly. “Before, however, I get
to that part of my story, I want to say something. When I was first
married, I felt your not coming to see me very keenly. I was bitter
against you; I am not bitter now. I am glad you never entered Maryville;
you were right.”
“That is a point on which I have never been able to satisfy myself,”
said Grace sadly. “I did not want to desert you, Nettie, but I could not
run counter to the wishes and desires of all my friends.”
“We will leave your friends and their wishes out of the question,” was
the answer. “I tell you I am glad. I say it was right for you to have
done with me. It was I who deserted you; it was I who, without counting
the cost, gave all for love and the world well lost.”
“I cannot ask you questions which might pain you,” said Grace; “but
anything you like to tell me, do, though I am almost afraid to hear what
your married life has been.”
“You need not be afraid, for you will never hear, neither you nor
anybody else,” Nettie replied. “I have borne, and I can bear. No human
being knows what I have borne but myself.”
There was a little catching sob, and then she proceeded,—
“Grace, you must never let any one suspect how you got to know what I am
going to tell you.”
“Perhaps you ought not to tell me?” suggested Miss Moffat.
“You will be able to judge better about that when you know what it is,”
retorted her companion.
“But I do not like having to keep secrets,” Grace pleaded, “I never did
all my life; they are always productive of anxiety, or misery, or
shame.”
“Don’t talk nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Brady; “people must have secrets,
and they must hear and tell them too sometimes. The matter I have to
speak about does not concern me, though it concerns people in whose
prosperity you ought to feel interested.”
“Do you mean the Scotts?”
“No, I do not mean the Scotts; I mean a family who will find themselves
in a worse position than the Scotts some day, if they are not wise in
time. If John Riley were at home, I should not have troubled you about
the matter.
“What has John Riley to do with it?” asked Grace.
“Just this much: you know Woodbrook is heavily mortgaged? of course you
do, that was one reason why you would not marry John.”
“Nettie!”
“It is of no use interrupting me in that ridiculous manner,” said Mrs.
Brady pettishly. “If John had been a rich man, I believe you would have
married him; but as he was only a poor, honest fellow, with a plain
face, who loved you with all his heart and soul, you sent him adrift,
and let him go to India, where I hope he may make a fortune, and come
home, and meet with some good, sensible girl, richer than ever you were.
Yes, you may take away your hand; I did not come here to-night to
flatter you, be sure of that.”
“What did you come for?” asked Miss Moffat; “do not beat about the bush,
and talk of all sorts of irrelevant matters, but tell me in a word what
it is you want to say.”
“In a word, then, you know Woodbrook is mortgaged?”
“Yes; it has always been so.”
“Do you know who holds that mortgage?”
“I once heard, but I have forgotten the name.”
“Do you think you could remember it if I told you?”
“If any good purpose were to be served by my recollection, I would try,”
answered Grace.
“Well, then, the mortgage is really held by Mr. Daniel Brady of
Maryville.”
“You are not serious?”
“Am I not? The Rileys may find it a very serious matter to them,
whatever you may think.”
“But how could he hold the mortgage without the General being aware of
the fact?”
“I cannot tell you, for I do not know myself. All I am able to say, he
does hold it.”
“Are you quite certain?”
“As certain as that we are sitting here.”
“From whom did you hear this?”
“From Mr. Brady’s own lips.”
“And what does he say about it?”
“He never said a word to me concerning the affair.”
“But I thought you heard from his own lips that he held the mortgage?”
“So I did, but he was not talking to me.”
“To whom was he talking?”
“To his lawyer, and I was listening: and if he knew I had listened, he
would kill me—that is,” added Nettie reflectively, “if he was not afraid
of being hung.”
“Why should he mind your knowing about it?” Grace asked with a shiver.
“Why should he mind your knowing about it? why should he mind the
General knowing?” inquired Nettie contemptuously. “Because if once the
Rileys’ eyes were opened, they would move heaven and earth to pay the
interest regularly, or to pay off the mortgage altogether. If they do
not do this, he will own Woodbrook yet, as surely as he owns the Castle
Farm now.”
“What can be done?” said Grace helplessly; “do you think I ought to go
to the General?”
“I am sure you ought to do nothing of the kind,” answered Nettie. “He is
an old man, and he never was a very wise one. Do you ever write to
John?”
“Never.”
“What a shame! If I had not liked him well enough for a husband, I would
have tried to keep him as a friend.”
“Surely we need not talk of that now?” suggested Grace.
“Mrs. Hartley has not given him up, I suppose?” said Nettie, unheeding
the interruption.
“She hears from him frequently,” was the answer.
“But then you never see her,” remarked Mrs. Brady.
“She often asks me to go to England, but I always refuse.”
“Home attractions are so great,” said Nettie demurely.
“I am very fond of my home.”
“Are you still very fond of something else, or, to speak more correctly,
of somebody else?”
“I do not exactly understand.”
“Do you intend to marry Mr. Somerford or not?”
“It will be time enough for me to answer that question when he asks me
it himself.”
“I wish you would answer me though, Grace,” said Mrs. Brady earnestly.
“When Robert Somerford asks you to be his wife, what reply shall you
make?”
“He may never put such a question,” answered Grace, with an uneasy
laugh, “so what is the use of talking about it?”
“He will put just such a question before very long,” persisted Mrs.
Brady; “you are neither a child nor a very foolish girl any more. You
are a year older than I am, and I feel as if I had lived a century at
least. Tell me truly what answer you will return; do tell me, Grace, for
the sake of the days when you loved me.”
“I love you still, Nettie!”
Impatiently Mrs. Brady turned aside the remark.
“I do not want to know whether you love me or not. What can that signify
how? I want to know if you mean to marry Mr. Somerford when he asks
you.”
“How do you know he ever means to do so?” said Grace evasively.
“I will tell you when you have replied to my question. Will you say
‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
“In that entirely suppositious case I should say ‘No.’”
“Really and truly?”
“Really and truly I shall never be more to him than I am now.”
“Notwithstanding his handsome face!”
“Not if he were ten times handsomer than he is.”
“He is going to act extremely handsomely by you,” said Nettie, picking
up a pebble and throwing it out into the sea as far as she could. “He
means to propose to Miss Middleton, and when she refuses him, as she
will do, he intends to ask you.”
There was a matter-of-fact coolness about this statement which took away
Miss Moffat’s breath. Finding she made no comment, her friend continued,
“I heard that, also, the other evening. Miss Middleton is the daughter
of a great English brewer, who has bought an estate near Kilcurragh; but
her father will not hear of the match. Some one has been prejudicing him
against Mr. Robert, so you see the gentleman will fall between the two
stools.”
“It does not matter to either you or me where he falls,” said Grace
hurriedly.
“Not much certainly,” agreed Mrs. Brady. “And now that I have told you
my news, I will go home again.”
“Do not go yet!” entreated Miss Moffat. “Tell me what I ought to do
about the General.”
“Your own sense will tell you that,” Nettie answered; “only, Grace, on
whatever course you may decide, keep my name out of the affair. Never
let any one suspect you heard of it from me.”
“Are you not afraid of trusting Mr. Hanlon?” asked her friend gently.
“I do not trust him.”
“But he knew you wished to see me?”
“Yes; but nothing more. He does not know anything from me, though, of
course, he cannot avoid seeing.”
“What does he see, dear?” asked Grace, replying rather to the quiver in
Nettie’s voice than to the words she spoke.
“It is no matter,” was the answer, and the sentence sounded almost like
a sob.
Grace’s arms were about her neck; Grace’s tears were on her cheek.
“Nettie darling, am I not the nearest friend you ever had? cannot you
trust me with your trouble, whatever it may be?”
Gently and sorrowfully Nettie unclasped the twining arms, and put away
the lips which were pressed to hers.
“It is no matter,” she repeated; “I do not want to talk of myself at
all. I must go now, Grace, I must indeed.”
And she rose as she spoke, and drawing her dark shawl closely about her
slight figure, pressed Grace’s hand in token of farewell.
Grace held her hand tight.
“When shall I see you again?” she asked.
“Sometime perhaps—perhaps never,” was the reply. “Sometime, Grace, when
you are happily married and have a tribe of bairns about you, or are a
rich old maid with no bairns at all, I may ask you to give a helping
hand to my children. It is the thought of them that breaks my heart.”
“You lost one!” Grace said pityingly.
“Two,” corrected Nettie, “and sometimes I wish I had lost them all.”
“You must not speak in that way, dear!” expostulated Grace.
“I know it,” was the reply, “and so I do not want to speak.”
“Will you let me come and see you?”
“No, _never_,” said Nettie decidedly. “There is only one thing you can
do for me now, and that is save the Rileys. I think Mrs. Hartley will
find a way to do it. At all events she can warn John. He did the best he
could for me once, and I should not like to see his father and mother
and sisters beggars.”
“But why should Mr. Brady want to beggar them?” asked Grace, who could
not yet grasp the full meaning and importance of all Nettie had told
her.
“He hates them,” was the answer, spoken calmly and evenly. “He hates
everybody, I think, but he has an especial aversion to the Rileys,
because they made him marry me.”
“You were married to him before they interfered.”
“I am not so sure of that; I shall never know for a certainty whether
the first ceremony, if one could call it a ceremony, was legal. In any
case, but for the Rileys, he could have turned round some day and told
me it was valueless. Besides that, the General and John were not very
civil to him, and none of the family ever took any notice of me
after—after—I left my aunt.”
“Scant causes to produce such great results!” said Miss Moffat
reflectively.
“More than sufficient, however,” answered Nettie.
“Mr. Brady must be very rich,” remarked Grace after a moment’s silence.
“He is not rich; he is poor, he will always be poor; but he has the
command of money, he knows people ready to advance it. I suppose if you
and I wanted to raise money for any good purpose, we should not be able
to get it, but if we desired it to compass any evil, I do not doubt but
we should have more than we could use.”
“You seem to entertain some nice comfortable theories concerning life,”
said Grace, trying to speak cheerfully.
“I have no theories,” answered Mrs. Brady. “Everything with me resolves
itself into practice. I used to have dreams and fancies, but I have none
now, except one which haunts me night and day.”
“What is that?”
“Never mind, it may come true or it may not. I wonder, Grace,” she
suddenly added, “what you and I will be doing seven years hence, if we
live so long?”
“I hope you will be happier, Nettie.”
“I never said I was unhappy, did I?” asked the young wife. “Some people
are born to be very happy, I suppose, and some—are not so fortunate. It
was not such a bright fortune which lay before me when I was a girl,
that I need lament over my present lot. I have not everything I should
like, it is true, but I do not complain; no one ever heard me complain.”
“I would rather hear you complain, Nettie, than talk in the way you have
done to-night.”
“Ah! that is because you do not know, because you cannot understand.”
She was gone. Grace would have followed, but she waved her back.
“You must not come with me,” she said. “Good-bye.”
Slowly and mournfully the waves rippled in on the sands as Grace Moffat
walked homeward, her thoughts intent on Nettie and her extraordinary
confidence.
If the statement she had made were true, and it was impossible to doubt
its accuracy, then Mr. Brady intended to oust the Rileys out of
Woodbrook, as he proposed to turn the Scotts out of the Castle Farm.
As Nettie had said, it does not require so much money to compass evil as
it does to effect good. It is easier to ruin a man than to establish his
fortunes.
Mortgaging in Ireland was not in those days so unusual a thing as to
induce general ignorance concerning its possible, and probable results;
and although Mr. Moffat had never borrowed a shilling, never forestalled
his income by an hour, still Grace had heard enough of monetary
embarrassments among her acquaintances to understand tolerably well what
“foreclosing” would mean on the Woodbrook estates.
Her own fortune, it may be remembered, had at one time been destined to
redeeming that mortgage, and giving ease to a family who had never known
the meaning of the word: but when she refused Mr. Riley, of course his
relatives had relapsed into their old state of embarrassment, which was,
however, in their eyes relieved by John’s letters and John’s remittances
from India. If, therefore, the interest were accumulating, if the
indebtedness were increasing, if Mr. Brady were the real mortgagee,
Grace, without any gift of second sight, could see the end which must
come ere long, unless steps to avert the catastrophe could be taken, and
that without delay.
And the sea rippled in over the sands, and the scent of the flowers and
shrubs floated on the air as they had done that night when she refused
her first lover, and sent him out into the world to seek such fortune as
the world had in store for him.
CHAPTER IX.
WHAT THE WAVES WHISPERED.
There is no sadder sound in nature than the plashing of the waves on a
lonely shore in the twilight of a calm evening. As nothing more mournful
can well be seen than an expanse of sand stretching away to the far-out
tide under the first glimpse of light, so there is something melancholy
beyond expression in that perpetually recurring sob with which the sea
flings itself upon the land.
The sound is not soothing because it is intermittent, and the ear aches
with waiting for its return. It lacks the fury of tempest, and
consequently fails to kindle the imagination. Not even the soughing of
autumn winds amongst the trees is so plaintive and depressing as the
moaning of the sea. One could almost fancy that spirits haunted the
shore, and kept weeping and making lamentations bitter, though low. The
cry of the bittern cutting through the night is weird and sorrowful
enough, but it does not sink the soul with such a burden of utter
depression as that caused by the long drawn-out sigh of the quiet sea.
There are special times and particular moods of mind when, even to those
who love the ocean best, the monotonous lament I have tried to describe
becomes almost unendurable. It recalls unpleasant memories of the past,
it awakens dismal forebodings concerning the future, it shadows the
present with a mantle of gloom, and it tinges every thought and
recollection with a touch of involuntary superstition. In darkness and
loneliness people grow fanciful and imaginative. Provide melancholy with
a calm evening, a quiet shore, and the sea lapping in upon the sands,
and the solitary muser becomes her victim with scarce a struggle.
Melancholy, at all events, held Grace Moffat captive as she walked
slowly back from the Lone Rock, thinking as she went.
Given youth, beauty, health, fortune, should not her thoughts have been
pleasant? To all outward appearance Grace Moffat had not a care; and, in
reality, any trouble she might feel arose principally, if not entirely,
from her high ideal of life’s responsibilities, from her intense
sympathy with the sins, sorrows, and perplexities of her
fellow-creatures.
Through the gathering darkness she sauntered slowly homeward, and her
thoughts brooded thus: “Beauty! what does it profit? Has it won for me a
single true heart? Wealth! what use have I made of it hitherto, of what
avail shall it prove in the future? Youth! it passes away, it is gone in
an hour; whilst the soft green buds of April open into leaf, behold May
comes on us unawares; and almost ere we can scent the perfume of the
hawthorn, June’s roses are blooming, have bloomed, are dead. Friends!
they die, they change, they leave us. The plans and the projects of
life, they are either incapable of fulfilment, or our power is not
competent to perfect them. The hopes, the dreams, the aspirations of
early spring are chilled, dispelled, disappointed, ere the first breath
of winter has frosted over the fair landscape. And what is left?” the
girl reflected, pausing as she asked the question.
Slowly and solemnly the waves swept in upon the shore, and then,
flinging out a wreath of foam, retreated with a sob.
“The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together,” Grace
murmured.
She was not free from the vice of quoting half-texts of Scripture and
fancifully adapting them to personal impressions, which is the
speciality of young people, but from which persons who are older and
ought to know better are often unable altogether to excuse themselves.
Even the sea seemed to her imagination to be in pain.
“What is the matter with me to-night, I wonder?” she marvelled. It was
not altogether the long, slow sweep of the tide; it was not the
remembrance of an ideal existence still unfulfilled, destined possibly
never to be fulfilled, it was something conceived by regret and
repentance which struggled within her for expression.
The tones of Nettie’s voice, full at times of the bitterness of
suppressed grief, at others of the pathetic tenderness of unshed tears,
of unspoken suffering, had pierced Grace’s heart; and, mingling with the
feelings of impotent regret which she expressed for the sorrow
golden-haired Annette had wrought for herself, came other memories, of a
man who had loved her very dearly, in whose voice she had once heard the
same agony of repressed emotion, who, in the gathering twilight, with
the scent of the flowers floating on the evening air, and the sound of
the waters creeping in upon the shore, had received his final answer,
and said “Good-bye” and “God bless you, Grace!” in the same breath.
Yes, he had loved her; Grace felt Nettie was right in this. Let her
fortune have exercised as large an influence as it might, he must have
entertained perhaps as true an affection for her as she had ever
inspired.
“But he has got over that long, long ago,” she said to herself, with a
faint, cynical smile which the darkness concealed. “How will it be with
them all, though, if his father loses Woodbrook?”
How, indeed! Grace had already traced the outlines of a picture, the
grouped figures in which and the grim accessories whereof filled her
with dismay. She had not evolved it altogether out of the intricacies of
her imagination, for once upon a time she chanced to behold a family
party who might well enough have sat for the Rileys of the possible
future.
This was before Mrs. Hartley left Kingslough, when it struck that lady
duty required a visit to be paid to a certain Mrs. Wallace, of whose
hospitality she and the late Mr. Hartley had partaken when the Wallaces
lived near Glenwellan. With that curious fancy for returning to the
scenes of bygone greatness which is characteristic of those whose
greatness has been of a limited and local description, the family one
summer decided on reuniting and “taking the sea” at Kilcurragh. Thither
Mrs. Hartley invited Grace to accompany her; and Grace, though she hated
a covered car, and that covered car a hired one, with a hatred which can
only be appreciated by those who loathe that species of conveyance,
consented.
Mrs. Hartley, who would neither make use of her friends’ carriages, nor
keep one herself, hired a car for the expedition, and on the way
entertained Grace with the exposition of those practical ideas for which
she was famous.
First, she recited the glories of the Wallace family. She rehearsed the
horses they rode, the carriages they drove, the servants they employed,
the hangers-on they maintained. She described the dinners, where nothing
was lacking save solvency; the open house, which provided everything for
every one save peace of mind for the owners.
Nor were the glories of “The Castle” forgotten; the attire of Mrs.
Wallace when she attended successive parties at the absurd little Dublin
Court, more ridiculous in its way than the courts of petty states abroad
which have only about five pounds a week of revenue to maintain their
magnificence, was duly described. As beads and rum to the Indian squaws
and chiefs, so Dublin Castle to those Irish ladies and gentlemen who
could never hope to enter Buckingham Palace; and the analogy had not
failed to strike so keen and bitter an observer of Hibernian character
as Mrs. Hartley.
“But how did the ruin come about?” asked Grace, wearying of the
detestable sideway motion of the car and her companion’s satire. “What
had these unhappy people done or left undone that they should be poor as
you say?”
“How did the ruin come about?” Mrs. Hartley repeated, putting on her
judicial look and her black cap before pronouncing sentence upon the
sins and shortcomings of those “misguided Irish Wallaces.” “My dear, how
does ruin come about? It comes through folly or misfortune, or
carelessness or thoughtlessness, which are in England synonymous terms
for reckless hospitality, mad dissipation, unwarrantable expenditure,
and utter selfishness. In this country, which may some day be a great
and wonderful country, but not till it is repeopled, re-religioned,
recropped, rebuilt, and remodelled, you have a somewhat coarse proverb
about foolish people who eat the calf out of a cow. Grace, child, in
Ireland everybody is either starving the cow or eating the calf. The
Wallaces ate the calf, as the Somerfords ate theirs, as fifty others I
could name devoured it, feet, head, and tail.”
“And they lost everything,” said Grace sorrowfully.
“They ate the calf, and then the cow, and then the cow’s pasture,” Mrs.
Hartley replied. “They kept open house till after the bailiffs came;
they danced, feasted, dressed, kept up an appearance to the last with a
courage worthy of a better cause; then came the collapse; the girls were
invited to stay ‘with friends;’ the young men ‘got appointments;’ the
father and mother went away for the benefit of Mr. Wallace’s health.
Then the place was sold; Lord Ardmorne bought it; then we knew Mr.
Wallace was living on his wife’s small fortune; then we heard the boys
had gone to the bad, as all such boys do; then we understood the young
ladies were governesses and companions, _voilà tout_.”
“Do you think they will like to see you?” Grace asked, feeling that if
she were in the Wallaces’ position her spirits would not be particularly
elated by the visit.
“I cannot tell whether they will care to see me,” answered Mrs. Hartley,
“but I know they will be glad to say I have called. The
twelve-and-sixpence this expedition must cost me would have been better
in their pockets, no doubt, but there is a difficulty about suggesting
an idea of that kind. The young ladies occasionally send me purses and
useless articles of a similar description to dispose of amongst my
friends, but as I have no friends who would buy them—at least, as I
should be very sorry to ask my friends to do anything of the sort—I send
my own money to the fair sellers and the goods to the next bazaar held
for charitable or religious purposes. It is always a pity for the
children of the last owner in such a case as this; for them all the
harass, all the mortification, all the petty shifts, all the
contemptible meannesses which genteel poverty is forced to practise; for
them no cakes and ale, other people have had all that before they were
thought of.”
“It is very hard for them,” Grace agreed; and she thought it eminently
hard for the Wallaces when she found them “taking holiday” in poor
lodgings, where they could have only one sitting-room, filled at low
water with a fine odour of wholesome tar, and unwholesome sea and land
waif and decaying fish; when she beheld the once burly, reckless squire,
who had ridden after the hounds so long as he could feed a hunter; who
had sung the best song, told the best story, been the most jovial
companion of any man in the county, sitting drearily in an easy-chair by
the window, dressed in old clothes that hung about his body, amusing
himself by looking through a telescope little bigger then a child’s
plaything at the vessels in the offing.
And then there was the mother, careworn and prematurely old, dispensing
tea, the last hospitable offer possible for her to make in their altered
circumstances, too genuine a gentle-woman to apologize for the poverty
of their surroundings, too absolutely a woman not to feel the change of
position bitterly; the girls making the best of things and their
holidays at the same time; talking of the kindness of the friends with
whom they had been “staying,” of the pleasant places they had seen, of
the great people, far enough away from Kilcurragh and their real life
you may be sure—they had met.
But there were gray streaks in Miss Wallace’s hair, though any one, to
have heard her talk, might readily have imagined she had really spent
the years since her father left Glenwellan in travelling about for her
own pleasure, and visiting on equal terms the nobility and gentry of the
United Kingdom; whilst the beauty, the youngest, had lost her looks, and
it was hopeless that even the size and colour of her once celebrated
eyes should yet win her a husband rich enough and foolish enough to try
to reinstate her family in their former rank.
Pitiful—yes, indeed it was—to see the struggle those people waged
between trying to forget the privations of their actual present
and striving to remember the adventitious glories of their
best-to-be-forgotten past.
Terrible! ay, truly, the fight to preserve appearances, to keep up a
semblance of their old position by means of that rank impostor called
genteel poverty; as if poverty could ever be genteel, as though the
moment it tried to be any thing besides respectable, it did not stand a
good chance of becoming disreputable.
All the depth of this reverse Grace had seen with her own eyes, all the
comments which friends, enemies, and acquaintances could make upon it
she had heard with her own ears, and though none of the Rileys,
excepting John and the General, had ever been prime favourites with this
favoured one of fortune, still there was something dreadful in the bare
idea of people who had once held up their heads in the land exchanging
the anxieties of how to keep a fine estate for the worse trouble of
considering how to provide daily bread. John would have to maintain
them; but then, unless he was doing remarkably well, how could he
compass that if he were ever to marry? Perhaps he never would marry,
though that seemed an unlikely solution of the difficulty. Perhaps some
of his sisters might marry, which, considering the state of Ireland and
their fortunes, and the extreme disproportion of marriageable girls and
marrying men, seemed more unlikely still.
Suddenly a fresh idea struck Grace. The girls would go to India. Why had
not they gone before? All girls who had no money and any relations in
India went there, and they all married well, and came home, according to
Mrs. Hartley, lazy and delicate.
But then perhaps John, who had peculiar and straitlaced notions
concerning women, would object to engage with his sisters in a
matrimonial speculation of that description; and indeed Grace felt no
doubt he would. Well, then, so long as he remained single, if the worst
came to the worst, in other words, supposing Woodbrook were lost, he
would be able to contribute to the support of his family; and when he
married, his wife would ask one of the girls to go and live with them.
Then, supposing that one girl married well, she could invite another to
stay with her, and so the whole family would in due time be provided
for.
It was not a nice way, perhaps, of getting over the difficulty; but
still, when people get very poor, and the choice lies between marrying a
stranger and entering a strange family as governess, people generally
choose, when practicable, to marry the strange man.
Grace had seen such cases, and had heard of many others, which set her
wondering whether, in the event of her fortune making wings for itself,
she could bring herself to contemplate a _mariage de convenance_.
No, she decided. She would rather go out as a governess or seek a
situation as companion. Some people may say this showed she knew rather
less of governesses and companions even than of marriage, but I think it
was true for all that.
Spite of her money, her apparent worldliness, her determination to have
no man for lover or husband who should not be able to bring as much in
the way of fortune at least as she, Grace Moffat was really made of that
sort of flesh and blood to whom the idea of being sold, or selling
itself, is utterly and totally repugnant, impossible of achievement. She
could, had reverses come, have earned her living as a governess, for she
was very fond of children, loved them in the abstract, loved them
practically; or she might have tried to humour the whims of sickness,
and lighten the cares and ailments of age, for she had a high sense of
duty, a keen comprehension of an often forgotten truth that when
anything is given much has frequently to be returned, but she could not
have married for a home.
There is not much praise perhaps due to her for this. Marriage and love,
like many other things, are to a great extent matters of feeling. Her
feeling concerning them was strong. For instance, when once she found
Mr. Robert Somerford had been playing at fast and loose with her, not
all the titles in England, not all the money in the Bank of Ireland,
could have reconciled her to his suit.
It was quite on the cards she might make an insane match some day, and
repent it to the last hour of her life; but at all events she would not
make it with her eyes open.
For these and other reasons the notion of John Riley’s sisters going out
to India to establish themselves as he had done, to seek his fortune,
did not recommend itself to her sentiments, but it did to her common
sense. After all, there was nothing so exceptionally refined about the
Misses Riley as to render the idea repugnant to them. Why, then, did
they not, had they not gone? Grace could only solve the problem in one
way. John did not wish them to go—poor John—dear old plain-featured
John? why could he not have been content and liked her as she liked him?
Why had he gone away and left his father in the hands of the
Philistines? Of course she should write to Mrs. Hartley. What could Mrs.
Hartley do, what would she say?
Altogether it was so astounding a thing to contemplate, even the
possibility of Mr. Brady ousting out the Rileys and ensconcing himself
in the Woodbrook nest, that Grace’s mind refused to accept it as a
possibility. Nevertheless she could not help wondering whether, in the
event of the Rileys leaving, the next tenant would paint the entrance
gates and repair the lodge.
“If John were at home, I should ask him to have the trelliswork on the
West Lodge nailed up,” thought Grace; “but of course, as he is not, I
dare not mention the matter to any one.”
People who have plenty of money are able to attend to details which to
people who have only plenty of worry seem maddeningly small.
The latter, under the pressure of great trouble, consider trifles as of
no importance, never thinking that trifles to the world are as straws,
showing which quarter the winds of fortune blow from.
Spite of these incongruities of thought, however, the very idea of Mr.
Brady taking possession of Woodbrook seemed like a hideous nightmare.
That he should step into the Castle Farm was bad enough, but that he
should also annex Woodbrook appeared impossible.
Nevertheless Nettie had assured her such a change of owners was not
merely possible, but probable; and if this were really the case, and
Grace’s common sense saw no reason to doubt the fact, steps ought
immediately to be taken to avert such a calamity.
But how were they to be taken, and by whom? If, next day, Mrs. Hartley
were put in possession of the facts, what would she do? what could she
do if she would?
It was Nettie who had suggested Mrs. Hartley, but the result of Grace’s
musings tended towards consulting her father.
He was a man, and, spite of her anti-matrimonial views, Grace had more
faith in the capabilities of men than of women; of late she and her
father had been much more together than was hitherto the case; her
cousin was gone, and neither Mr. Moffat nor his daughter strove to fill
her place with another companion.
They were happier alone. People said Grace was growing like her father,
and that as she got older she would feel as great a distaste for general
society as he; but this was not quite true; Grace loved long quiet
walks, but the company of her fellows had its charms for her as well.
Still she and her father had dovetailed into companionship. Her
enthusiasm had fitted itself somehow naturally into his indifference.
She was content he should laugh at her. He was more than content perhaps
to tolerate her impetuosity, her indiscriminate charity, her wide
sympathy with, and ready inclination to help, the poor.
If study had taught him as little as it usually does most scholars of
things likely to be useful in daily life, it had at least imbued him
with toleration towards his own daughter.
It enabled him to draw inferences about her which a less educated man
would have arrived at by means of intuition.
Had she been more selfish, less unsophisticated, would she have loved
him so much, herself so little? He had but one trouble about her, she
was a very lonely maiden. Before he went he would like to have seen her
married.
To whom? That was the difficulty. After Robert Somerford’s defection, he
could not, looking around on the various men who aspired to his
daughter’s hand, look upon one of them with favour.
“Well,” he reflected, “single happiness is better than double misery,
nevertheless I could wish to have seen my Grace the wife of some honest
gentleman ere this.”
Honest gentlemen, however, are always a little shy about trying to win
heiresses, and so father and daughter, having been thrown much together
of late, had learned to understand each other better and love each other
more.
For which reason Grace resolved to take Mr. Moffat into her confidence.
If she told him she was not at liberty to name her informant, he would
trouble her with no questions, and his daughter had an instinctive
feeling that, if by any means Woodbrook could be preserved to the
Rileys, he would find that means.
He had been willing to help her in the matter of the Scotts, and only
failed to do so because it was a matter in which no help could be given.
He would be able perhaps to make some useful suggestions, at any rate
she would talk the matter over with him.
CHAPTER X.
WHEN DOCTORS DIFFER.
Decided as to the course she should pursue, Grace quickened her steps,
and proceeded at a more rapid pace along the broad, gravelled walk,
where the branches of the trees and rare shrubs which abounded at
Bayview drooped over the murmuring sea.
In the semi-darkness she could see her home; an oblong substantial
house, with its windows opening on two sides to terraces commanding wide
and beautiful views over land and water.
Some former owner of Bayview, possessed of that taste for landscape
gardening which at one time must have been as distinguishing a trait of
Irish character as it now appears to be of English, had lodged Bayview
in a perfect bowery of all rare and exquisite shrubs; shrubs that,
though they have become common enough since and easy enough of purchase,
are still not so generally to be found planted in the grounds
surrounding houses of moderate pretensions, owned by gentlemen of modest
though sufficient income, as they should. Between the French windows
were trained, on trelliswork against the wall, myrtles that grew
luxuriantly out-of-doors, and were covered year after year with bud and
flower. Peeping here and there through the dark green foliage, and
laying their bright cheeks against the white myrtle blossoms, were
roses, pink and red. Pyracantha, honeysuckles, magnolias, and a creeper
with great leaves, the name of which I never knew, the like of which I
have never seen elsewhere, filled up other spaces and covered the
bed-room windows with a marvellous amount of varied greenery. A hedge of
sweet-briar, along which passionflowers trailed in wild profusion,
growing as freely as briony and convolvulus elsewhere, divided the
southern terrace and pleasure-grounds from the kitchen-gardens, whilst
the western terrace terminated in a flight of stone steps, with heavy
stone balustrades, leading on to the avenue.
Beyond the terrace lay the lawns and shrubberies, the former studded
with artistically-placed groups of trees and evergreens, the latter a
tangled mass of tangled surprises to visitors who found themselves one
moment admiring the golden flowers of the common laburnum and the next
pausing to look at a magnificent Italian broom; who could scarcely
believe the Portuguese laurel could ever bloom with such a lavish wealth
of white cones as they beheld rising tier over tier above their heads;
who rubbed their fingers gently up the stem of the velvety shumach and
ate syringa leaves, that resemble cucumbers in their flavour, and broke
buds off the clustering bunches of yellow roses; while young ladies
twined sprays of that exquisite little plant known to simple people by
no long Latin name, but only as “the bridal wreath,” or permitted long
pendants of the lilac laburnum to float in the breeze with their curls.
A chapter would scarce suffice me to catalogue the names of the shrubs
and trees for the possession of which Bayview was famous; but Grace knew
them all by heart. She knew the dewy mornings and the fine evenings
after rain, when the sweet-briar gave forth its sweetest fragrance. She
knew where the earliest bouquets of lily of the valley were to be
gathered, the sheltered nooks where grew primroses and violets were not
hidden from her. From a child she had been acquainted with the haunt of
the wood anemone, and the sunny spots where lady’s fingers made soft
cushions of yellow and brown and green; and when the little boys and
girls, her tiny friends from Kingslough, came out to spend a day at
Bayview, who could show them so well as she the exact bend in the
shallow stream where “apple-pie” grew sweet and tall amongst reeds and
“sagans,” or that piece of undrained ground where the rushes stood thick
enough to delight the hearts of those who had come trooping out to make
swords and parasols and butterfly cages?
And scarcely a nook, or dell, or upland, or winding walk, or ripple of
the stream over the stones but was associated somehow or another with
John Riley. Here he had carried her over the stepping-stones when they
seemed too wet and slippery for her childish feet; there he held her
hand tight while she jumped over a little ravine. She could not help
remembering the day when he climbed the pine-tree and shook the firs to
obtain cones to fill her basket, which he subsequently carried home. She
had dragged him out to bonfires in the fields, and insisted on his
roasting potatoes for, and eating them afterwards with, her; which was
not a form of entertainment John Riley relished. She remembered the very
hour, and day, and minute when he put the strings of a tartan velvet
bag, the possession whereof made her exceeding proud, round her neck,
and called it her pannier, and how she slapped his face, and how her
father, coming up at the moment, was exceeding angry, and how John made
all peace between them with a few pleasant words. They had gathered
shells together, and collected sea-weeds, and made arbours of
fir-branches, and paved them with cockleshells. And now she was a child
no longer, no longer a girl, quite a young woman, who but for her
exceeding beauty would already have been called an old maid, and the
pleasant days were over, and John, having made a mistake in loving Grace
Moffat, was in India; and Grace Moffat in Ireland was thinking how, if
she loved Bayview so much, John would endure the idea of losing
Woodbrook, which was not merely a residence, but an estate, a place any
nobleman might have liked to own and beautify!
Of late a word has become fashionable in leaders and novels which
appears to me frequently used without just cause; its constant iteration
at all events sounds unpleasant in my own ears.
Nevertheless, employed with caution, it is an expressive word, and I
must therefore be excused when I say the most dependable sort of pity is
that which is cumulative. I mean that in which one layer of compassion
is added to another till a compact and dependable whole is erected upon
a sufficient foundation.
This pity Grace Moffat now experienced for the Rileys. At first it had
rather vexed her to think she should be called upon to sympathize in or
interfere with the troubles of people who were so much less than nothing
to her, that towards some members of the family at all events she felt
almost antagonistic. But a little reflection, and perhaps the warning,
sorrowful, sobbing of the waves softened her heart. She thought of
Nettie, once so dear to her, who of her own act had alienated all old
friends, who would have nothing now to do with old friends, let them beg
never so hard for her intimacy. She thought of the Glendares and the
Somerfords, whose liking for her had been transient as spring sunshine.
She thought of Mrs. Hartley, who, long before, must, like a sensible
woman, have formed fresh acquaintances, and taken them (and their
English accent) more cordially to her bosom than she had ever done any
one of the inhabitants of Kingslough or its vicinity. She thought of
Amos Scott, who would have none of her help unless it could be given in
his own way. She thought of her pensioners, who, if she died the next
day, would, spite of their Presbyterian and predestinarian ideas, say
from the mere force of habit contracted by long intercourse with Roman
Catholics, “God rest her; it’s herself was a good lady!” and greet a
charitable successor with, “God bless her; it’s herself that’s a kind
lady!” and then she thought of the love she had once thought of
comparatively little account—that of her father. She had him, she had
her home, but what had John Riley?
He might have made friends, no doubt, but friends are no enduring
possession. He might have formed a fresh attachment, but in India it was
unlikely the object of that attachment would be a lady largely endowed
with this world’s goods. He might have won golden opinions, but
something more than these is needful to make a man prosperous and happy.
He had his family, but supposing the members composing it were reduced
to poverty, what should they profit him? At his father’s death,
Woodbrook, encumbered, beautiful Woodbrook, must come to him, if it were
saved from Mr. Brady; but in either case, what a future presented
itself! Woodbrook his, with its mortgages, and burdened by the
maintenance of his mothers and sisters; Woodbrook not his, and both
parents and his sister to provide for.
Poor John, whom she could remember lighthearted John, it was a hard lot
to contemplate! Each generation had remained true to the traditions of
the family, and made the Riley position worse, Would John make it worse,
even if Mr. Brady did not? Would he marry some girl without a shilling,
and perpetuate the poverty that had for generations been as certain an
inheritance as Woodbrook?
It all seemed very dark to Grace, very dark and pitiful. Even to those
who have tasted of its bitterness, the draught of misfortune does not
appear so unendurable a potion to swallow as to those who have had
nothing but sweets presented to them.
Grace dreaded poverty, the rich generally do, and as she thought of her
own fair home, a great pity for John Riley, a pity different from
anything she had ever previously felt for any one, welled up in her
heart. It seemed only like yesterday that she had given him his
dismissal, and never an honester suitor had asked her hand since then.
She would go straight to her father and tell him what she had heard, and
with this intention Grace passed into the house through one of the
windows opening on to the terrace.
The room she entered was yet unlighted, and she was about to ring for
candles, when, recollecting that she still wore her shawl and bonnet,
she crossed the apartment with the intention of changing her dress
before summoning a servant.
Though there was nothing unusual in the fact of her rambling about the
grounds after dusk, on the present occasion the feeling that she had
something to conceal induced her to seek concealment; and she was
hastening to her dressing-room, when in the hall the cook, with white,
startled face, confronted her,—
“We’ve been looking for you everywhere, Miss Grace. The master—”
Grace laid her hand on the back of a chair to steady herself.
“What is the matter?” she asked; “what has happened? where is my
father?”
“He is in his own room, Miss Grace, and the doctors with him. He was
took—”
But Grace waited to hear no more, she ran up the staircase, and along
the corridor to a room at the extreme end, the door of which stood open.
She could hear a man speaking in a voice hushed yet excited, evidently
insisting upon some course antagonistic to his auditor, and as she
paused for one second in her progress, that auditor replied in cool,
clear tones,—
“We will wait till Miss Moffat comes; she shall decide between us.”
“But I tell you I must do it. Would you have me see the man die before
my eyes?”
“I tell you it shall not be done,” the other answered, adding
immediately, “Here is Miss Moffat.”
Grace did not greet either of them; she went straight over to the bed
where lay her father, apparently lifeless.
His head rested on the pillow, his grey hair fell tangled about his
face, his eyes were closed, his arms hung powerless beside his body, and
his hands, white, wan, and nerveless, were as the hands of a corpse.
She had courage, there was no question about that; she had received the
most fearful shock a human being can sustain, and yet she neither wept,
shrieked, nor exclaimed. Had she been alone with him, there is little
doubt she would have flung herself beside the bed and sobbed and cried
like any other woman; but before the strangers present, strangers at the
moment, though they were only Doctor Girvan and Mr. Hanlon, and some of
the servants, she could not lay bare her heart; and involuntarily all in
the room were silenced for the moment by her silence, calmed by her
calmness.
“What is it?” she asked, speaking to Doctor Girvan, but including Mr.
Hanlon in her question by a look.
“Apoplexy,” said the Doctor unhesitatingly.
“It is no such thing,” declared Mr. Hanlon stoutly.
“And he should be bled instantly,” continued Dr. Girvan, ignoring his
opponent’s remark, and fingering his lancet lovingly.
“Miss Moffat, so certainly as your father is bled he is a dead man,”
exclaimed Mr. Hanlon earnestly. “If Dr. Girvan persists in bleeding, I
must decline to be associated with him in the treatment of the case.”
“And if I don’t bleed him,” said Dr. Girvan, “there will be no case to
treat.”
Grace looked at the motionless figure, then at the old doctor trembling
with anger, striving to repress the fury he felt it would be unseemly to
show, and again at the handsome confident face of the younger man.
She had known Dr. Girvan since she had known anything; he was their
regular attendant; in all her childish ailments he had given her kind
words and smiles, and sent her detestable medicines; when in her later
years she caught cold and was troubled with cough, sore throat, or any
other malady, he and none other had treated her. For well-nigh half a
century he had cured or killed the gentry of Kingslough and its
neighbourhood, and there was comfort in that reflection. To be sure he
knew nothing, and professed to know nothing, of new-fangled ways; but
then the fashion of living and dying is one which knows little
alteration. Being born, being buried, are matters susceptible of so
little change that Grace might well be excused if in her extremity she
fastened her gaze more confidently on the old light than on the new. Mr.
Hanlon might be very clever, but after all he could not have Dr.
Girvan’s experience.
Encouraged by her manifest leaning to his view of the case, the latter
said eagerly,—
“Each instant is precious, Miss Grace. Had I alone been summoned, I
should have let blood the moment I came.”
“As I objected to your doing so, our patient has still a chance of
living,” observed Mr. Hanlon, without the least sign of excitement; “but
now, if Miss Moffat wishes, I will at once retire from the room and the
case.”
“No—no, pray stay!” she entreated!
“I cannot remain unless I am allowed to pursue my own course of
treatment,” said Doctor Girvan.
“I said we would leave it for Miss Moffat to decide,” remarked Mr.
Hanlon, with exasperating civility, but with an anxious look in his face
nevertheless. “Doctor Girvan says this attack is apoplectic, and should
be treated by bleeding. I say it is not apoplectic, and that bleeding
may be a fatal error.”
“I tell you I have seen a score of cases of apoplectic seizures for one
that can have come across you,” said Doctor Girvan, advancing to the
patient. “And I have attended Mr. Moffat and Mr. Moffat’s family—”
“Let his daughter speak,” interrupted Mr. Hanlon, speaking sternly and
peremptorily. “Miss Moffat, the decision rests with you.”
“It is cruel of you to force such a responsibility upon me,” said Grace
hoarsely. “You understand medicine, I do not; save him,” she added,
pointing towards her father, “that is all I can tell you.”
“But, Miss Moffat,” began Mr. Hanlon.
“Ah! stand back, can’t you?” exclaimed Doctor Girvan brusquely; “we’re
wasting precious time in child’s talk. And indeed you are right, Miss
Grace, and it was cruel to try to lay such a burden on you; but never
mind, I’ll take all the responsibility upon myself. Now if you’ll just
walk out of the room for a minute or two—”
“A moment,” interrupted Mr. Hanlon. “Miss Moffat, what I am doing may be
unprofessional. Nevertheless I remonstrate against Doctor Girvan’s
proposed course of treatment, and implore you not to countenance it.”
“To hear you, anybody might think I was not ten years of age,” remarked
the Doctor.
“Miss Moffat, speak for mercy’s sake!” implored Mr. Hanlon; “I pledge my
reputation this is no apoplectic fit.”
“As if you should know!” muttered Doctor Girvan contemptuously.
“Though I was sent for, I feel I am an intruder here,” continued Mr.
Hanlon, unheeding the interruption.
“That is true at any rate. Indeed and you are,” commented Doctor Girvan.
“But I cannot—being here—see a man bled to death without entering my
protest against such a proceeding.”
“Will you be quiet?” requested Doctor Girvan; “can’t you see you are
wringing his daughter’s heart?”
“Miss Moffat, will you trust your father to me?” asked Mr. Hanlon.
“Sure the doctor must know best,” whispered a housemaid, on whom the new
comer’s youth and good looks had made no impression.
“Indeed, and Miss Grace,” ventured the butler, who had always been
accustomed to volunteer his advice and opinions, as is the not
unpleasing habit of all Irish servants, from the highest to the lowest,
the highest perhaps the most frequently. “Indeed, an’ Miss Grace, I
think if the masther himself could speak, which send he may soon, he
would say, lave it to the docthor, and let him bleed me freely.”
“Miss Moffat, won’t you speak?” said Mr. Hanlon, glancing at the two
last speakers looks that went through them, so they subsequently
averred, like flashes of lightning.
“We have lost too much time already,” said Dr. Girvan, with an air of
busy importance, for he saw Grace, though divided, felt inclined to walk
in the old footsteps.
“Mr. Hanlon,” she said, “I do not trust you less because I trust Doctor
Girvan more;” then she stooped and kissed brow, and lip, and cheek of
the man lying there motionless, and after saying, “Doctor, you would not
deceive me, you will save my father,” left the room.
Mr. Hanlon followed her. She did not go downstairs, but stood in the
corridor, leaning against the wall. He went into one of the rooms close
at hand, and fetched her a chair, then he retreated a few steps, and
remained with head bent and hands plunged in his pockets, looking
gloomily at the pattern of the carpet.
There was silence for a minute, which he broke by saying,—
“I can do nothing more here, so I will bid you good-night, Miss Moffat.
May I send any of the servants up to you?”
She put out her hand, which he took and held. “Do not go; oh, pray, pray
stay!”
“But I assure you—”
“Never mind assuring me; stay.”
“Doctor Girvan does not wish it.”
“I wish it.”
It was very hard to hold out, but still Mr. Hanlon made a feint of doing
so.
“In my private capacity, Miss Moffat, I would do anything on earth to
oblige you, but in my professional—”
“Forget your professional pride for a little while,” she entreated. “You
told me to decide; and how could I decide otherwise, when we had known
him so long, when my father trusted him so much?”
“I do not see how you could.”
“Then you will stay?”
“If I stay, will you do something for me in return?”
“Tell me what it is?”
“Send to Kilcurragh for Doctor Murney, and to Glenwellan for Doctor
Connelley; send without a moment’s delay.”
“You think he is in such danger?”
He turned his face away; he could not bear she should see the answer he
knew was written there.
“Do as you like!” she said feebly. “I leave it all to you. I—I must go
to him now,” and she rose and walked a step or two towards the room
where her father lay, then paused, wavered, and would have fallen, but
that Mr. Hanlon, anticipating this result, caught her in his arms.
He carried her into the room whence he had brought the chair, and,
laying her on a sofa, left her, without making even an effort to restore
her to consciousness, but, hastening downstairs, found the cook, whom he
sent to her mistress, saying,—
“She has fainted, but don’t try to bring her to. I shall see her again
in a few minutes.”
“Which are the best pair of horses you have in the stables, Mick?” he
asked, addressing the groom, who was in the kitchen, waiting to hear if
he was likely to be wanted.
“How is the masther, yer honour?”
“Badly enough, and likely to be worse,” was the answer; “but about the
horses?”
“Miss Grace’s mare is the fastest, but the bay the masther, preserve
him, bought last month, has a power of outcome in him.”
“Who is there here you can trust to take one of them to Glenwellan with
a note for Doctor Connelley?”
“Sure and I can ride there myself.”
“No, I want you to go to Kilcurragh and bring back Doctor Murney. You
had best take the tax-cart.”
“Save us, Doctor; is he that bad?”
“Yes, quite as bad as that,” Mr. Hanlon answered. “Some of you help Mick
with the harness. I will have the notes ready by the time you are.”
Mightily astonished was the mare at having a saddle slipped on her at
that time of night; pettishly she champed the bit and struck her off
forefoot against the rough pavement of the yard, whilst Mick tightened
her girths by the simple expedient of planting his knee in her stomach,
pulling at the same time buckles and straps as far home as he could get
them.
“Ride like the devil, Jerry,” were Mick’s parting instructions, and,
nothing loth to follow such a congenial example, Jerry, after the first
mile and a half, which he took “modtherately,” for fear of breaking the
mare’s wind, did the rest of the distance at a hard gallop.
“And the beauty niver turned a hair,” said Jerry, when reciting
subsequently the marvels of that wild ride. Perhaps if the mare’s story
told to her equine companions could have been heard, her account of the
state of affairs would have differed slightly from that of her rider.
As for the bay, never before had that animal’s powers of outcome been so
severely tested. Up hill and down dale it was all one to Mick. With a
whoop and a “now lad” he lifted him into a stretching canter up the
inclines, with a tight rein and a cut of the whip he warned him to take
no false step whilst spinning down declivities steep enough to appal the
understandings of ordinary people.
Horses and men did their best, as Irish horses and Irish men will in
moments of excitement and time of need, and that best was, as is ever
the case in that land of strange contrasts, something super-excellent;
but it was all labour in vain.
Had they flown on the wind, had the horses been birds, had they been
able to cleave the air with wings, the help they brought must still have
proved too late.
With the first drop of blood, the chances of life began to flutter: when
the last was drawn, and Dr. Girvan heaved a sigh of satisfaction, hope,
so far as this world was concerned, had fled for Mr. Moffat.
“He will do now,” said Dr. Girvan, complacently addressing Mr. Hanlon.
But that gentleman shook his head,—
“We shall see,” he answered: and they did see.
CHAPTER XI.
NO CHANGE.
When Grace recovered consciousness, she looked around the room and her
eyes rested with an expression of mute appeal on Dr. Girvan, who stood
near.
“All is going on well,” he answered. With a murmured thanksgiving she
laid her head back against the sofa pillows, when her glance chanced to
fall on Mr. Hanlon.
“You do not think all is well?” she said.
“I have not seen the patient,” he replied. “He is, of course, solely in
Dr. Girvan’s hands until the physicians for whom you have sent arrive.”
“You have sent for further advice, Miss Grace?” remarked Dr. Girvan
inquiringly. “Could you not trust me?”
“I can trust you,” she answered; “but he is my father. I must go to him
now,” and without asking another question she went.
“This is your doing,” said Dr. Girvan to Mr. Hanlon as the door of the
sick chamber closed behind her.
“Don’t let us quarrel, Doctor,” replied the younger man sadly, and not
without a certain dignity. “Before very long, I am afraid you will find
something is _your_ doing, which you will regret till the last hour of
your life.”
“Do you think, Sir, I do not understand my business?”
“I think you have misunderstood this case. Mr. Moffat is as good as a
dead man, and you have killed him.”
After delivering himself of which pleasant utterance, Mr. Hanlon walked
out of the room, down the stairs, and out into the night.
He did not go home; not a thought of deserting Grace Moffat in her
extremity occurred to this man, who if he was foolish was chivalrous. He
passed through the still unlighted apartments, and made his way on to
the terrace. There he paced up and down, inhaling the fragrance of the
flowers and shrubs; listening to the wind rustling among the trees, and
the murmur of the sea washing in upon the shore; thinking of the man
stricken so suddenly; thinking of the woman so grand in her sorrow, so
quiet in her grief, and of something else also which if now told would
reveal whatever plot this poor story holds.
There are times when the mind seems a mere mirror, when it can only
receive the impression of that immediately presented before it. In all
times of sudden and agonized trouble, I think this is the case. When a
fearful accident occurs, it is to the latest telegram we all
instinctively direct our eyes, whether the accident concerns us
personally or not; and in like manner when some calamity comes to pass,
which involves us and those dear to us, we dwell on the result, never
troubling ourselves to inquire into details, until we have recovered
from the effect of the first swift and stunning blow.
It was thus with Grace Moffat at all events. She did not know, she did
not ask to know, how the seizure occurred. She had never been with
sickness, was utterly ignorant of the fact that a woman ought to know
almost as much of illness as a doctor.
Afterwards she understood that when the butler, supposing his master had
long left the dining-room, entered that apartment he found Mr. Moffat
lying face downwards on the floor; that he, having despatched
“Jamesey”—an odd boy who loafed about the kitchen and had no settled
position or employment, unless it might be to bear the blame of all
faults committed, and perform all work left undone by every one else—for
the doctor, the lad rushing down the road was encountered by two
retainers of the house of Moffat, who, hearing the news, started off,
one with Jamesey to Dr. Girvan, the other by himself to Mr. Hanlon.
There were factions at Bayview, as in every other establishment in
Ireland; some of the servants inclining to old ways and people including
Dr. Girvan, and others leaning to the new school of which in Kingslough
Mr. Hanlon was the exponent.
There were those in the town who could not have died happily had the
young surgeon tried to cure them; there were others who would scarcely
have accepted life at the hands of Dr. Girvan: and thus it came to pass
that both men were sent for, and both arrived within a few minutes of
each other.
Then commenced the disagreement terminated by Grace.
“I am no better than a coward,” thought Mr. Hanlon, as he walked up and
down through the night. “Why did I ever leave the matter for him to
decide? When he is gone she will continually be reproaching herself. I
ought to have insisted on sending for Murney at once; I ought to have
kept that doting idiot off his prey by force if necessary.”
At that moment a hand was laid on his arm. It belonged to Grace, who had
come so softly along the terrace that he failed to hear her footsteps.
“Mr. Hanlon,” she began.
“Yes, Miss Moffat?”
“I want you to tell me the truth,” she said. “Never mind medical
etiquette. Forget you are a doctor, that I am _his_ daughter; speak to
me as you might to a stranger. What do you think of him?”
“I think he is in the hands of God,” answered Mr. Hanlon. The demagogues
of those days had one advantage over the demagogues of this; they did
acknowledge a power higher than themselves, and were occasionally awed
by the remembrance of its existence.
“But what can man do?” she asked, her sweet voice shrill with the
anguish of her soul.
“We shall know when the other doctors come.”
She understood he had no hope; and she stood for a moment silent,
listening all unconsciously to the sobbing of the sea, to the sighing of
the night wind through the trees, to the voices of silence that keep
whispering and ever muttering through the darkness.
Already the lonely, awful journey seemed begun; over the waters
something blacker than night hovered. The mighty angel with the slow
wings brooded over the place. The scent of the flowers appeared to her
heavy and sickly, the slight breeze as it touched her cheek failed to
refresh her.
“Let us go in,” she said, “the darkness frightens me,” and she drew him
into the drawing-room.
“Come upstairs,” she pleaded. “See if something cannot be done. Come and
look at him. Forget you are a doctor; think of yourself only as a
friend. Don’t stand upon your dignity. Help me, I am so lonely. He is
all I have in the world.”
“Miss Moffat, if by dying this night I could save your father, I would
do it. These are not idle words. There is no one who would miss me much
after the first. Some one would take up my work where I laid it down and
finish it.”
And there he suddenly stopped, and she instinctively withdrew her hand;
and then with the impulse of a higher and nobler womanhood, which raised
Grace on a loftier pedestal than women of her age generally occupy, she
laid it again on his arm and said,—
“Do not talk in that way; I cannot bear to hear such words from you.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because you have your life to live,” she answered simply, “and it is
not good to begin a long journey with a weary heart.”
A prophetic sentence, one which both recalled when the crisis of his
existence arrived.
Side by side they ascended the staircase, and stepped lightly along the
corridor, and entered the room where Mr. Moffat lay.
Already Dr. Girvan’s confidence in the correctness of his diagnosis was
shaken. There was something in the look of the man who lay there, still
insensible, which he had never seen in the face of one who came back
from the borders of the Valley of the Shadow. According to his
anticipations, the patient should already have been exhibiting some sign
of recovery, some token, however slight, of returning animation; but
there was no change as yet, none, unless it might be that the colour was
of a more leaden pallor, that the hand he touched lay more like that of
a dead man, that it became difficult to hear the breath, that in a word
no symptom he had calculated upon showed itself, that on the contrary
all the symptoms were unlike those he had mentally predicted must
appear.
Now, as Dr. Girvan himself would have said, he had not lived his life
for nothing; old-fashioned he could fairly be called, bigoted he might
be; ignorant of the latest discoveries, behind the age in many things he
undoubtedly was, but by no means a fool in his profession. He did not
know what was the matter with Mr. Moffat, but he was almost certain now
that he had mistaken his ailment, and if so—
“What do you think of him?” he whispered to Mr. Hanlon, after another
doubtful look at his patient.
Mr. Hanlon shook his head.
“Can you think of anything?” A clammy perspiration was standing on his
forehead and his hands were shaking with nervous dread as he asked the
question.
“The others may. As things are I should be afraid to try.”
“Don’t be afraid, man. If there is anything can be done let us try it. I
will take the blame if blame there be. Only don’t let us see him die
before our eyes without lifting a hand to save him.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace asked at this juncture, crossing to
where they stood.
“We are consulting, Miss Moffat,” answered Mr. Hanlon; then turning to
Dr. Girvan, he said, “I should try a stimulant.”
“A stimulant in apoplexy!” exclaimed the older man in an accent of
horror.
“It is not apoplexy, and if it were, in this case, I should try it
still.”
“I do not know what to say I am sure,” remarked Dr. Girvan. But Mr.
Hanlon cut short the discussion by himself going for what he wanted, and
administering it to their patient.
After a short while a little tremor could be observed, and a slight
decrease in the ghastly whiteness of the sick man’s face.
“That has done him good,” said Dr. Girvan in a tone of relief. “What
should you think of trying a little more?”
“If you like,” answered Mr. Hanlon; then added, “Now we will let him
rest till Murney and Connelley come.”
And they sat down; Dr. Girvan close beside the bed, Mr. Hanlon beside
one of the windows looking towards the east, where the first streaks of
dawn were already appearing.
Grace came to him as he sat there. “What do you think of my father now?”
she asked, and he saw that her large eyes were heavy with the weight of
unshed tears.
“I can only repeat that he is in the hands of God,” answered Mr. Hanlon,
rising and offering her his seat. “Man could tell you no more than that,
till some change occur for better or for worse.”
She took his chair, and drawing another to the window, Mr. Hanlon seated
himself near her, and whilst both their eyes involuntarily sought the
east, their thoughts wandered silently and sadly on their separate ways.
“They are here!” Grace at length exclaimed. Her strained ear had been
the first to catch the sound of wheels. That beauty the mare was not
back before the horse with the “power of outcome in him;” but ere
another half-hour, Dr. Connelley, who had ridden Mr. Moffat’s latest
purchase, leaving Jerry to follow with his own hack, was also in the
house.
“You had better go down to him,” said Mr. Hanlon to Dr. Girvan; he did
not wish to influence Dr. Murney’s opinion by any statement of his own;
and as the old man left the room, he added, speaking to Grace,—
“I think you had better not stay here. I will come to you presently.”
“And tell me exactly what they say?”
He hesitated for a moment, then answered, “Yes, Miss Moffat, I promise.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Murney was ascending the staircase. In Kilcurragh, a
large and important town, he held high rank in his profession. Had his
lot been cast in Dublin, he might have come to more honour; but he had
been a very successful man, and made money enough to enable him to keep
pace with the times, to visit London and Paris and “rub,” as he said
“the provincial rust off his mind,” and to enable him to entertain men
great in science, surgery, and medicine, who from time to time crossed
the Channel, and took Kilcurragh _en route_ from Dublin to Donegal and
the Giant’s Causeway.
Dr. Girvan and he had often before met in consultation, and Mr. Hanlon
also was not quite a stranger to him. His opinions at all events were
not; but whilst he detested them, he was obliged to confess the young
man had brains, and might have done well would he only have stuck to
physic and left politics alone.
Mr. Moffat was known to him as a matter of course; and whilst he walked
along the corridor rubbing his hands, for the night breeze and the sea
air had conjointly proved chilly, he kept up a series of running
sentences, “Sad, sad, very sad; dear, dear, and a man no older than
myself; a man who took care of himself also; temperate in his habits,
careful in his diet, really these sudden attacks seem to set all our
rules at nought. Had I been asked to name the last person I knew likely
to be attacked by apoplectic seizure, I should have named my valued
friend Moffat.”
From which it will be seen that Dr. Girvan had not summoned up
sufficient courage to disabuse the mind of his colleague of the
impression conveyed to it by Mick.
The wretched man still hoped against hope that he had not been mistaken,
and he mentally prayed, as, probably, he had never prayed before for
anything, that Dr. Murney would confirm his first opinion. If he did,
Dr. Girvan, in his extremity, felt as if he himself could die happily
the next moment.
Dr. Murney entered the room silently, shook hands with Mr. Hanlon,
walked over to the bed, looked at Mr. Moffat, felt his pulse; then,
stepping across the apartment, he took a candle from a little table on
which lights had been placed, and returning to the bedside, leant over
the patient and studied his appearance attentively.
With a gloomy face Mr. Hanlon watched these proceedings, holding his
breath in a very agony of suspense; Dr. Girvan watched them too.
“Here!” said the new-comer at length, thrusting the candle towards Mr.
Hanlon, who took it as indicated; then Dr. Murney bared the sick man’s
breast, and laid his ear against his heart.
After that he carefully, tenderly almost, replaced the bedclothes, and
stood silent for a moment, waiting, apparently, for the others to speak;
but neither of them uttering a syllable, he said,—“This is not
apoplexy.”
“Lord forgive me,” murmured Dr. Girvan; and he sat down on the nearest
chair, covering his face with his hands.
“What can be done now?” asked Mr. Hanlon, his voice hoarse with emotion
he was trying do master.
“Nothing,” replied Dr. Murney, and he walked to the window and looked
out, and came back again to where Dr. Girvan sat.
“Don’t take on so,” he said, speaking kindly to the old man, and laying
a compassionate hand on his shoulder. “If a mistake has been made,
better men than any of us have made mistakes before now. I am sure you
and Mr. Hanlon have acted in this matter to the very best of your
judgment.”
Mr. Hanlon never opened his lips; Kingslough had not appreciated him,
and Dr. Girvan, from the first, was his enemy, but he could not remember
that now. In this hour of bitter humiliation, of maddening remorse, he
felt he should have been less than human to add to the old man’s
self-reproach by recalling how persistently he had refused to listen to
his remonstrances, how obstinately he had insisted on taking his own
course.
No; if there were blame to be borne, they might bear it together. All
the explanations on earth could not undo the past, could not mend the
future.
But Dr. Girvan, whilst touched by his generosity; was labouring under an
agony of repentance which refused to keep silence.
“Why don’t you speak?” he said, lifting his haggard face and looking at
Mr. Hanlon. “Why don’t you tell him how the thing was?”
“I have nothing to tell,” answered Mr. Hanlon. “If, as Dr. Murney says,
a mistake was made, it is too late to undo it now. I know I did my best
in the case, and I am sure you did yours. I don’t think there is
anything more to be said in the matter.”
“Doctor, it was me.” No form of expression, let it have been more
grammatically accurate than the speaker ever conceived, could have gone
so straight home to the hearts of his listeners as that containing those
four words,—“Doctor, it was me.” “If the man dies the blame lies at my
door. He”—pointing to Mr. Hanlon—“told me how it would be, and I took no
heed; I hadn’t a doubt in my own mind. I believed I was doing right, and
I did wrong, and now I wish I was lying there in his stead. I do,” and
he broke down and cried like a child.
“I think you said Connelley had been sent for also?” remarked Dr. Murney
after standing silent for a moment.
“Yes, I sent for him in case you should not be at home,” answered Mr.
Hanlon. “He will be here directly, I should think.”
“I am glad he is likely to come,” said the other; “he may be able to
make some suggestion. Meanwhile, Dr. Girvan and I will go downstairs and
have a little talk together.” And taking the old man’s arm he led him
towards the door.
Then Dr. Girvan turned,—
“Mind,” he almost sobbed, “I am to tell this to her myself; I don’t want
anybody to speak about it but me. Ah, Grace, little I thought the hour I
helped to bring you into the world, that I would one day help to break
your heart.”
“She need never know,” exclaimed Mr. Hanlon eagerly.
“Know! sure you told her yourself. Didn’t you say, standing where you
are now, you wouldn’t see a man bled to death?”
“I did, and more shame for me to have spoken such words before his
daughter; but we can surely soften it to her, she need not be told
exactly how the case stands.”
“She shall be told the truth; maybe then she’ll forgive me some time,
though I can never forgive myself.”
“Well, you needn’t tell her now at any rate,” interrupted Doctor Murney;
“come with me. There’s many a mistake of this sort made that is never
found out either by doctors themselves or the friends of those they have
been attending.”
“A pleasant confession,” thought Mr. Hanlon as he once again seated
himself by the window and resumed his watch for dawn.
Slowly the streaks of light became broader, day gently pushed aside the
curtains of night from the sea, darkness lifted itself gradually, the
clouds became suffused with crimson, then the sun appeared above the
horizon, and once again the ever-recurring miracle of a new day had been
wrought upon the earth.
END OF VOL. II.
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