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Lord Kilgobbin

by Charles Lever · English · Gutenberg #8941 · 1,159,698 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Lord Kilgobbin

Author: Charles Lever

Illustrator: Sir Luke Fildes


        
Release date: February 2, 2007 [eBook #8941]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LORD KILGOBBIN ***




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[Illustration: She suffered her hand to remain]

LORD KILGOBBIN

by

Charles Lever



TO THE MEMORY OF ONE
WHOSE COMPANIONSHIP MADE THE HAPPINESS OF A LONG LIFE,
AND WHOSE LOSS HAS LEFT ME HELPLESS,
I DEDICATE THIS WORK,
WRITTEN IN BREAKING HEALTH AND BROKEN SPIRITS.
THE TASK, THAT ONCE WAS MY JOY AND MY PRIDE,
I HAVE LIVED TO FIND ASSOCIATED WITH MY SORROW:
IT IS NOT, THEN, WITHOUT A CAUSE I SAY,
I HOPE THIS EFFORT MAY BE MY LAST.

CHARLES LEVER.

TRIESTE, _January 20, 1872_.




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


‘Lord Kilgobbin’ appeared originally as a serial, (illustrated by Luke
Fildes) in ‘The Cornhill Magazine,’ commencing in the issue for October
1870, and ending in the issue for March 1872. It was first published in
book form in three volumes in 1872, with the following title-page:

LORD KILGOBBIN | A TALE OF IRELAND IN OUR OWN TIME | BY | CHARLES LEVER,
LL.D. | AUTHOR OF | ‘THE BRAMLEIGHS OF BISHOP’S FOLLY,’ ‘THAT BOY OF
NORCOTT’S,’ | ETC., ETC. | IN THREE VOLUMES | [VOL. I.] | LONDON | SMITH,
ELDER, AND CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE | 1872. | [THE RIGHT OF TRANSLATION IS
RESERVED.]




CONTENTS


CHAP.    I. KILGOBBIN CASTLE
        II. THE PRINCE KOSTALERGI
       III. THE CHUMS
        IV. AT ‘TRINITY’
         V. HOME LIFE AT THE CASTLE
        VI. THE ‘BLUE COAT’
       VII. THE COUSINS
      VIII. SHOWING HOW FRIENDS MAY DIFFER
        IX. A DRIVE THROUGH A BOG
         X. THE SEARCH FOR ARMS
        XI. WHAT THE PAPERS SAID OF IT
       XII. THE JOURNEY TO THE COUNTRY
      XIII. A SICK-ROOM
       XIV. AT DINNER
        XV. IN THE GARDEN AT DUSK
       XVI. THE TWO ‘KEARNEYS’
      XVII. DICK’S REVERIE
     XVIII. MATHEW KEARNEY’S ‘STUDY’
       XIX. AN UNWELCOME VISIT
        XX. A DOMESTIC DISCUSSION
       XXI. A SMALL DINNER-PARTY
      XXII. A CONFIDENTIAL TALK
     XXIII. A HAPHAZARD VICEROY
      XXIV. TWO FRIENDS AT BREAKFAST
       XXV. ATLEE’S EMBARRASSMENTS
      XXVI. DICK KEARNEY’S CHAMBERS
     XXVII. A CRAFTY COUNSELLOR
    XXVIII. ‘ON THE LEADS’
      XXIX. ON A VISIT AT KILGOBBIN
       XXX. THE MOATE STATION
      XXXI. HOW THE ‘GOATS’ REVOLTED
     XXXII. AN UNLOOKED-FOR PLEASURE
    XXXIII. PLMNUDDM CASTLE, NORTH WALES
     XXXIV. AT TEA-TIME
      XXXV. A DRIVE AT SUNRISE
     XXXVI. THE EXCURSION
    XXXVII. THE RETURN
   XXXVIII. O’SHEA’S BARN
     XXXIX. AN EARLY GALLOP
        XL. OLD MEMORIES
       XLI. TWO FAMILIAR EPISTLES
      XLII. AN EVENING IN THE DRAWING-ROOM
     XLIII. SOME NIGHT-THOUGHTS
      XLIV. THE HEAD CONSTABLE
       XLV. SOME IRISHRIES
      XLVI. SAGE ADVICE
     XLVII. REPROOF
    XLVIII. HOW MEN IN OFFICE MAKE LOVE
      XLIX. A CUP OF TEA
         L. CROSS-PURPOSES
        LI. AWAKENINGS
       LII. A CHANCE AGREEMENT
      LIII. A SCRAPE
       LIV. HOW IT BEFELL
        LV. TWO J.P.’S
       LVI. BEFORE THE DOOR
      LVII. A DOCTOR
     LVIII. IN TURKEY
       LIX. A LETTER-BAG
        LX. A DEFEAT
       LXI. A CHANGE OF FRONT
      LXII. WITH A PASHA
     LXIII. ATLEE ON HIS TRAVELS
      LXIV. GREEK MEETS GREEK
       LXV. IN TOWN
      LXVI. ATLEB’S MESSAGE
     LXVII. WALPOLE ALONE
    LXVIII. THOUGHTS ON MARRIAGE
      LXIX. AT KILGOBBIN CASTLE
       LXX. ATLEE’S RETURN
      LXXI. THE DRIVE
     LXXII. THE SAUNTER IN TOWN
    LXXIII. A DARKENED ROOM
     LXXIV. AN ANGRY COLLOQUY
      LXXV. MATHEW KEARNEY’S REFLECTIONS
     LXXVI. VERY CONFIDENTIAL CONVERSATION
    LXXVII. TWO YOUNG LADIES ON MATRIMONY
   LXXVIII. A MISERABLE MORNING
     LXXIX. PLEASANT CONGRATULATIONS
      LXXX. A NEW ARRIVAL
     LXXXI. AN UNLOOKED-FOR CORRESPONDENT
    LXXXII. THE BREAKFAST-ROOM
   LXXXIII. THE GARDEN BY MOONLIGHT
    LXXXIV. NEXT MORNING
     LXXXV. THE END



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


SHE SUFFERED HER HAND TO REMAIN

‘WHAT LARK HAVE YOU BEEN ON, MASTER JOE?’

‘ONE MORE SITTING I MUST HAVE, SIR, FOR THE HAIR’

‘HOW THAT SONG MAKES ME WISH WE WERE BACK AGAIN WHERE I HEARD IT FIRST’

HE ENTERED, AND NINA AROSE AS HE CAME FORWARD

‘YOU ARE RIGHT, I SEE IT ALL,’ AND NOW HE SEIZED HER HAND AND KISSED IT

KATE, STILL DRESSED, HAD THROWN HERSELF ON THE BED, AND WAS SOUND ASLEEP

‘IS NOT THAT AS FINE AS YOUR BOASTED CAMPAGNA?’

‘YOU WEAR A RING OF GREAT BEAUTY--MAY I LOOK AT IT?’

‘TRUE, THERE IS NO TENDER LIGHT THERE,’ MUTTERED HE, GAZING AT HER EYES

HE KNELT DOWN ON ONE KNEE BEFORE HER

NINA CAME FORWARD AT THAT MOMENT

NINA KOSTALERGI WAS BUSILY ENGAGED IN PINNING UP THE SKIRT OF HER DRESS

THE BALCONY CREAKED AND TREMBLED, AND AT LAST GAVE WAY

‘JUST LOOK AT THE CROWD THAT IS WATCHING US ALREADY’

‘I SHOULD LIKE TO HAVE BACK MY LETTERS’

WALPOLE LOOKED KEENLY AT THE OTHER’S FACE AS HE READ THE PAPER

‘I DECLARE YOU HAVE LEFT A TEAR UPON MY CHEEK,’ SAID KATE




CHAPTER I

KILGOBBIN CASTLE


Some one has said that almost all that Ireland possesses of picturesque
beauty is to be found on, or in the immediate neighbourhood of, the
seaboard; and if we except some brief patches of river scenery on the Nore
and the Blackwater, and a part of Lough Erne, the assertion is not devoid
of truth. The dreary expanse called the Bog of Allen, which occupies a
tableland in the centre of the island, stretches away for miles--flat,
sad-coloured, and monotonous, fissured in every direction by channels of
dark-tinted water, in which the very fish take the same sad colour. This
tract is almost without trace of habitation, save where, at distant
intervals, utter destitution has raised a mud-hovel, undistinguishable from
the hillocks of turf around it.

Fringing this broad waste, little patches of cultivation are to be seen:
small potato-gardens, as they are called, or a few roods of oats, green
even in the late autumn; but, strangely enough, with nothing to show
where the humble tiller of the soil is living, nor, often, any visible
road to these isolated spots of culture. Gradually, however--but very
gradually--the prospect brightens. Fields with inclosures, and a cabin or
two, are to be met with; a solitary tree, generally an ash, will be seen;
some rude instrument of husbandry, or an ass-cart, will show that we are
emerging from the region of complete destitution and approaching a land of
at least struggling civilisation. At last, and by a transition that is not
always easy to mark, the scene glides into those rich pasture-lands and
well-tilled farms that form the wealth of the midland counties. Gentlemen’s
seats and waving plantations succeed, and we are in a country of comfort
and abundance.

On this border-land between fertility and destitution, and on a tract which
had probably once been part of the Bog itself, there stood--there stands
still--a short, square tower, battlemented at top, and surmounted with a
pointed roof, which seems to grow out of a cluster of farm-buildings, so
surrounded is its base by roofs of thatch and slates. Incongruous, vulgar,
and ugly in every way, the old keep appears to look down on them--time-worn
and battered as it is--as might a reduced gentleman regard the unworthy
associates with which an altered fortune had linked him. This is all that
remains of Kilgobbin Castle.

In the guidebooks we read that it was once a place of strength and
importance, and that Hugh de Lacy--the same bold knight ‘who had won all
Ireland for the English from the Shannon to the sea’--had taken this
castle from a native chieftain called Neal O’Caharney, whose family he had
slain, all save one; and then it adds: ‘Sir Hugh came one day, with three
Englishmen, that he might show them the castle, when there came to him a
youth of the men of Meath--a certain Gilla Naher O’Mahey, foster-brother
of O’Caharney himself--with his battle-axe concealed beneath his cloak,
and while De Lacy was reading the petition he gave him, he dealt him such
a blow that his head flew off many yards away, both head and body being
afterwards buried in the ditch of the castle.’

The annals of Kilronan further relate that the O’Caharneys became adherents
of the English--dropping their Irish designation, and calling themselves
Kearney; and in this way were restored to a part of the lands and the
castle of Kilgobbin--‘by favour of which act of grace,’ says the chronicle,
‘they were bound to raise a becoming monument over the brave knight, Hugh
de Lacy, whom their kinsman had so treacherously slain; but they did no
more of this than one large stone of granite, and no inscription thereon:
thus showing that at all times, and with all men, the O’Caharneys were
false knaves and untrue to their word.’

In later times, again, the Kearneys returned to the old faith of their
fathers and followed the fortunes of King James; one of them, Michael
O’Kearney, having acted as aide-de-camp at the ‘Boyne,’ and conducted the
king to Kilgobbin, where he passed the night after the defeat, and, as the
tradition records, held a court the next morning, at which he thanked the
owner of the castle for his hospitality, and created him on the spot a
viscount by the style and title of Lord Kilgobbin.

It is needless to say that the newly-created noble saw good reason to keep
his elevation to himself. They were somewhat critical times just then for
the adherents of the lost cause, and the followers of King William were
keen at scenting out any disloyalty that might be turned to good account
by a confiscation. The Kearneys, however, were prudent. They entertained
a Dutch officer, Van Straaten, on King William’s staff, and gave such
valuable information besides as to the condition of the country, that no
suspicions of disloyalty attached to them.

To these succeeded more peaceful times, during which the Kearneys were
more engaged in endeavouring to reconstruct the fallen condition of their
fortunes than in political intrigue. Indeed, a very small portion of the
original estate now remained to them, and of what once had produced above
four thousand a year, there was left a property barely worth eight hundred.

The present owner, with whose fortunes we are more Immediately concerned,
was a widower. Mathew Kearney’s family consisted of a son and a daughter:
the former about two-and-twenty, the latter four years younger, though to
all appearance there did not seem a year between them.

Mathew Kearney himself was a man of about fifty-four or fifty-six; hale,
handsome, and powerful; his snow-white hair and bright complexion, with his
full grey eyes and regular teeth giving him an air of genial cordiality at
first sight which was fully confirmed by further acquaintance. So long as
the world went well with him, Mathew seemed to enjoy life thoroughly, and
even its rubs he bore with an easy jocularity that showed what a stout
heart he could oppose to Fortune. A long minority had provided him with a
considerable sum on his coming of age, but he spent it freely, and when it
was exhausted, continued to live on at the same rate as before, till at
last, as creditors grew pressing, and mortgages threatened foreclosure, he
saw himself reduced to something less than one-fifth of his former outlay;
and though he seemed to address himself to the task with a bold spirit and
a resolute mind, the old habits were too deeply rooted to be eradicated,
and the pleasant companionship of his equals, his life at the club in
Dublin, his joyous conviviality, no longer possible, he suffered himself
to descend to an inferior rank, and sought his associates amongst humbler
men, whose flattering reception of him soon reconciled him to his fallen
condition. His companions were now the small farmers of the neighbourhood
and the shopkeepers in the adjoining town of Moate, to whose habits and
modes of thought and expression he gradually conformed, till it became
positively irksome to himself to keep the company of his equals. Whether,
however, it was that age had breached the stronghold of his good spirits,
or that conscience rebuked him for having derogated from his station,
certain it is that all his buoyancy failed him when away from society,
and that in the quietness of his home he was depressed and dispirited to
a degree; and to that genial temper, which once he could count on against
every reverse that befell him, there now succeeded an irritable, peevish
spirit, that led him to attribute every annoyance he met with to some fault
or shortcoming of others.

By his neighbours in the town and by his tenantry he was always addressed
as ‘My lord,’ and treated with all the deference that pertained to such
difference of station. By the gentry, however, when at rare occasions he
met them, he was known as Mr. Kearney; and in the village post-office, the
letters with the name Mathew Kearney, Esq., were perpetual reminders of
what rank was accorded him by that wider section of the world that lived
beyond the shadow of Kilgobbin Castle.

Perhaps the impossible task of serving two masters is never more palpably
displayed than when the attempt attaches to a divided identity--when a man
tries to be himself in two distinct parts in life, without the slightest
misgiving of hypocrisy while doing so. Mathew Kearney not only did not
assume any pretension to nobility amongst his equals, but he would have
felt that any reference to his title from one of them would have been an
impertinence, and an impertinence to be resented; while, at the same time,
had a shopkeeper of Moate, or one of the tenants, addressed him as other
than ‘My lord,’ he would not have deigned him a notice.

Strangely enough, this divided allegiance did not merely prevail with the
outer world, it actually penetrated within his walls. By his son, Richard
Kearney, he was always called ‘My lord’; while Kate as persistently
addressed and spoke of him as papa. Nor was this difference without
signification as to their separate natures and tempers.

Had Mathew Kearney contrived to divide the two parts of his nature, and
bequeathed all his pride, his vanity, and his pretensions to his son,
while he gave his light-heartedness, his buoyancy, and kindliness to his
daughter, the partition could not have been more perfect. Richard Kearney
was full of an insolent pride of birth. Contrasting the position of his
father with that held by his grandfather, he resented the downfall as
the act of a dominant faction, eager to outrage the old race and the old
religion of Ireland. Kate took a very different view of their condition.
She clung, indeed, to the notion of their good blood; but as a thing
that might assuage many of the pangs of adverse fortune, not increase or
embitter them; and ‘if we are ever to emerge,’ thought she, ‘from this
poor state, we shall meet our class without any of the shame of a mushroom
origin. It will be a restoration, and not a new elevation.’ She was a fine,
handsome, fearless girl, whom many said ought to have been a boy; but this
was rather intended as a covert slight on the narrower nature and peevish
temperament of her brother--another way, indeed, of saying that they should
have exchanged conditions.

The listless indolence of her father’s life, and the almost complete
absence from home of her brother, who was pursuing his studies at the
Dublin University, had given over to her charge not only the household, but
no small share of the management of the estate--all, in fact, that an old
land-steward, a certain Peter Gill, would permit her to exercise; for Peter
was a very absolute and despotic Grand-Vizier, and if it had not been that
he could neither read nor write, it would have been utterly impossible to
have wrested from him a particle of power over the property. This happy
defect in his education--happy so far as Kate’s rule was concerned--gave
her the one claim she could prefer to any superiority over him, and his
obstinacy could never be effectually overcome, except by confronting him
with a written document or a column of figures. Before these, indeed, he
would stand crestfallen and abashed. Some strange terror seemed to possess
him as to the peril of opposing himself to such inscrutable testimony--a
fear, be it said, he never felt in contesting an oral witness.

Peter had one resource, however, and I am not sure that a similar
stronghold has not secured the power of greater men and in higher
functions. Peter’s sway was of so varied and complicated a kind; the duties
he discharged were so various, manifold, and conflicting; the measures
he took with the people, whose destinies were committed to him, were
so thoroughly devised, by reference to the peculiar condition of each
man--what he could do, or bear, or submit to--and not by any sense of
justice; that a sort of government grew up over the property full of
hitches, contingencies, and compensations, of which none but the inventor
of the machinery could possibly pretend to the direction. The estate being,
to use his own words, ‘so like the old coach-harness, so full of knots,
splices, and entanglements, there was not another man in Ireland could make
it work, and if another were to try it, it would all come to pieces in his
hands.’

Kate was shrewd enough to see this; and in the same way that she had
admiringly watched Peter as he knotted a trace here and supplemented a
strap there, strengthening a weak point, and providing for casualties even
the least likely, she saw him dealing with the tenantry on the property;
and in the same spirit that he made allowance for sickness here and
misfortune there, he would be as prompt to screw up a lagging tenant to
the last penny, and secure the landlord in the share of any season of
prosperity.

Had the Government Commissioner, sent to report on the state of
land-tenure in Ireland, confined himself to a visit to the estate of Lord
Kilgobbin--for so we like to call him--it is just possible that the Cabinet
would have found the task of legislation even more difficult than they have
already admitted it to be.

First of all, not a tenant on the estate had any certain knowledge of how
much land he held. There had been no survey of the property for years. ‘It
will be made up to you,’ was Gill’s phrase about everything. ‘What matters
if you have an acre more or an acre less?’ Neither had any one a lease,
nor, indeed, a writing of any kind. Gill settled that on the 25th March and
25th September a certain sum was to be forthcoming, and that was all. When
‘the lord’ wanted them, they were always to give him a hand, which often
meant with their carts and horses, especially in harvest-time. Not that
they were a hard-worked or hard-working population: they took life very
easy, seeing that by no possible exertion could they materially better
themselves; and even when they hunted a neighbour’s cow out of their wheat,
they would execute the eviction with a lazy indolence and sluggishness that
took away from the act all semblance of ungenerousness.

They were very poor, their hovels were wretched, their clothes ragged, and
their food scanty; but, with all that, they were not discontented, and very
far from unhappy. There was no prosperity at hand to contrast with their
poverty. The world was, on the whole, pretty much as they always remembered
it. They would have liked to be ‘better off’ if they knew how, but they did
not know if there were a ‘better off,’ much less how to come at it; and if
there were, Peter Gill certainly did not tell them of it.

If a stray visitor to fair or market brought back the news that there was
an agitation abroad for a new settlement of the land, that popular orators
were proclaiming the poor man’s rights and denouncing the cruelties of
the landlord, if they heard that men were talking of repealing the laws
which secured property to the owner, and only admitted him to a sort of
partnership with the tiller of the soil, old Gill speedily assured them
that these were changes only to be adopted in Ulster, where the tenants
were rack-rented and treated like slaves. ‘Which of you here,’ would he
say, ‘can come forward and say he was ever evicted?’ Now as the term was
one of which none had the very vaguest conception--it might, for aught they
knew, have been an operation in surgery--the appeal was an overwhelming
success. ‘Sorra doubt of it, but ould Peter’s right, and there’s worse
places to live in, and worse landlords to live under, than the lord.’
Not but it taxed Gill’s skill and cleverness to maintain this quarantine
against the outer world; and he often felt like Prince Metternich in a like
strait--that it would only be a question of time, and, in the long run, the
newspaper fellows must win.

From what has been said, therefore, it may be imagined that Kilgobbin was
not a model estate, nor Peter Gill exactly the sort of witness from which
a select committee would have extracted any valuable suggestions for the
construction of a land-code.

Anything short of Kate Kearney’s fine temper and genial disposition would
have broken down by daily dealing with this cross-grained, wrong-headed,
and obstinate old fellow, whose ideas of management all centred in craft
and subtlety--outwitting this man, forestalling that--doing everything by
halves, so that no boon came unassociated with some contingency or other by
which he secured to himself unlimited power and uncontrolled tyranny.

As Gill was in perfect possession of her father’s confidence, to oppose him
in anything was a task of no mean difficulty; and the mere thought that the
old fellow should feel offended and throw up his charge--a threat he had
more than once half hinted--was a terror Kilgobbin could not have faced.
Nor was this her only care. There was Dick continually dunning her for
remittances, and importuning her for means to supply his extravagances. ‘I
suspected how it would be,’ wrote he once, ‘with a lady paymaster. And when
my father told me I was to look to you for my allowance, I accepted the
information as a heavy percentage taken off my beggarly income. What could
you--what could any young girl--know of the requirements of a man going out
into the best society of a capital? To derive any benefit from associating
with these people, I must at least seem to live like them. I am received as
the son of a man of condition and property, and you want to bound my habits
by those of my chum, Joe Atlee, whose father is starving somewhere on the
pay of a Presbyterian minister. Even Joe himself laughs at the notion of
gauging my expenses by his.

‘If this is to go on--I mean if you intend to persist in this plan--be
frank enough to say so at once, and I will either take pupils, or seek a
clerkship, or go off to Australia; and I care precious little which of the
three.

‘I know what a proud thing it is for whoever manages the revenue to come
forward and show a surplus. Chancellors of the Exchequer make great
reputations in that fashion; but there are certain economies that lie close
to revolutions; now don’t risk this, nor don’t be above taking a hint from
one some years older than you, though he neither rules his father’s house
nor metes out his pocket-money.’

Such, and such like, were the epistles she received from time to time, and
though frequency blunted something of their sting, and their injustice gave
her a support against their sarcasm, she read and thought over them in a
spirit of bitter mortification. Of course she showed none of these letters
to her father. He, indeed, only asked if Dick were well, or if he were soon
going up for that scholarship or fellowship--he did not know which, nor
was he to blame--‘which, after all, it was hard on a Kearney to stoop to
accept, only that times were changed with us! and we weren’t what we used
to be’--a reflection so overwhelming that he generally felt unable to dwell
on it.




CHAPTER II

THE PRINCE KOSTALERGI


Mathew Kearney had once a sister whom he dearly loved, and whose sad fate
lay very heavily on his heart, for he was not without self-accusings on
the score of it. Matilda Kearney had been a belle of the Irish Court and a
toast at the club when Mathew was a young fellow in town; and he had been
very proud of her beauty, and tasted a full share of those attentions which
often fall to the lot of brothers of handsome girls.

Then Matty was an heiress, that is, she had twelve thousand pounds in her
own right; and Ireland was not such a California as to make a very pretty
girl with twelve thousand pounds an everyday chance. She had numerous
offers of marriage, and with the usual luck in such cases, there were
commonplace unattractive men with good means, and there were clever and
agreeable fellows without a sixpence, all alike ineligible. Matty had
that infusion of romance in her nature that few, if any, Irish girls are
free from, and which made her desire that the man of her choice should be
something out of the common. She would have liked a soldier who had won
distinction in the field. The idea of military fame was very dear to her
Irish heart, and she fancied with what pride she would hang upon the arm
of one whose gay trappings and gold embroidery emblematised the career
he followed. If not a soldier, she would have liked a great orator, some
leader in debate that men would rush down to hear, and whose glowing words
would be gathered up and repeated as though inspirations; after that a
poet, and perhaps--not a painter--a sculptor, she thought, might do.

With such aspirations as these, it is not surprising that she rejected the
offers of those comfortable fellows in Meath, or Louth, whose military
glories were militia drills, and whose eloquence was confined to the bench
of magistrates.

At three-and-twenty she was in the full blaze of her beauty; at
three-and-thirty she was still unmarried, her looks on the wane, but her
romance stronger than ever, not untinged perhaps with a little bitterness
towards that sex which had not afforded one man of merit enough to woo
and win her. Partly out of pique with a land so barren of all that could
minister to imagination, partly in anger with her brother who had been
urging her to a match she disliked, she went abroad to travel, wandered
about for a year or two, and at last found herself one winter at Naples.

There was at that time, as secretary to the Greek legation, a young fellow
whom repute called the handsomest man in Europe; he was a certain Spiridion
Kostalergi, whose title was Prince of Delos, though whether there was such
a principality, or that he was its representative, society was not fully
agreed upon. At all events, Miss Kearney met him at a Court ball, when
he wore his national costume, looking, it must be owned, so splendidly
handsome that all thought of his princely rank was forgotten in presence of
a face and figure that recalled the highest triumphs of ancient art. It was
Antinous come to life in an embroidered cap and a gold-worked jacket, and
it was Antinous with a voice like Mario, and who waltzed to perfection.
This splendid creature, a modern Alcibiades in gifts of mind and graces,
soon heard, amongst his other triumphs, how a rich and handsome Irish girl
had fallen in love with him at first sight. He had himself been struck by
her good looks and her stylish air, and learning that there could be no
doubt about her fortune, he lost no time in making his advances. Before
the end of the first week of their acquaintance he proposed. She referred
him to her brother before she could consent; and though, when Kostalergi
inquired amongst her English friends, none had ever heard of a Lord
Kilgobbin, the fact of his being Irish explained their ignorance, not to
say that Kearney’s reply, being a positive refusal of consent, so fully
satisfied the Greek that it was ‘a good thing,’ he pressed his suit with
a most passionate ardour: threatened to kill himself if she persisted in
rejecting him, and so worked upon her heart by his devotion, or on her
pride by the thought of his position, that she yielded, and within three
weeks from the day they first met, she became the Princess of Delos.

When a Greek, holding any public employ, marries money, his Government is
usually prudent enough to promote him. It is a recognition of the merit
that others have discovered, and a wise administration marches with the
inventions of the age it lives in. Kostalergi’s chief was consequently
recalled, suffered to fall back upon his previous obscurity--he had been a
commission-agent for a house in the Greek trade--and the Prince of Delos
gazetted as Minister Plenipotentiary of Greece, with the first class of
St. Salvador, in recognition of his services to the state; no one being
indiscreet enough to add that the aforesaid services were comprised
in marrying an Irishwoman with a dowry of--to quote the _Athenian
Hemera_--‘three hundred and fifty thousand drachmas.’

For a while--it was a very brief while--the romantic mind of the Irish girl
was raised to a sort of transport of enjoyment. Here was everything--more
than everything--her most glowing imagination had ever conceived. Love,
ambition, station all gratified, though, to be sure, she had quarrelled
with her brother, who had returned her last letters unopened. Mathew, she
thought, was too good-hearted to bear a long grudge: he would see her
happiness, he would hear what a devoted and good husband her dear Spiridion
had proved himself, and he would forgive her at last.

Though, as was well known, the Greek envoy received but a very moderate
salary from his Government, and even that not paid with a strict
punctuality, the legation was maintained with a splendour that rivalled,
if it did not surpass, those of France, England, or Russia. The Prince of
Delos led the fashion in equipage, as did the Princess in toilet; their
dinners, their balls, their fêtes attracted the curiosity of even the
highest to witness them; and to such a degree of notoriety had the Greek
hospitality attained, that Naples at last admitted that without the Palazzo
Kostalergi there would be nothing to attract strangers to the capital.

Play, so invariably excluded from the habits of an embassy, was carried on
at this legation to such an excess that the clubs were completely deserted,
and all the young men of gambling tastes flocked here each night, sure
to find lansquenet or faro, and for stakes which no public table could
possibly supply. It was not alone that this life of a gambler estranged
Kostalergi from his wife, but that the scandal of his infidelities had
reached her also, just at the time when some vague glimmering suspicions of
his utter worthlessness were breaking on her mind. The birth of a little
girl did not seem in the slightest degree to renew the ties between them;
on the contrary, the embarrassment of a baby, and the cost it must entail,
were the only considerations he would entertain, and it was a constant
question of his--uttered, too, with a tone of sarcasm that cut her to the
heart: ‘Would not her brother--the Lord Irlandais--like to have that baby?
Would she not write and ask him?’ Unpleasant stories had long been rife
about the play at the Greek legation, when a young Russian secretary, of
high family and influence, lost an immense sum under circumstances which
determined him to refuse payment. Kostalergi, who had been the chief
winner, refused everything like inquiry or examination; in fact, he made
investigation impossible, for the cards, which the Russian had declared to
be marked, the Greek gathered up slowly from the table and threw into the
fire, pressing his foot upon them in the flames, and then calmly returning
to where the other stood, he struck him across the face with his open hand,
saying, as he did it: ‘Here is another debt to repudiate, and before the
same witnesses also!’

The outrage did not admit of delay. The arrangements were made in an
instant, and within half an hour--merely time enough to send for a
surgeon--they met at the end of the garden of the legation. The Russian
fired first, and though a consummate pistol-shot, agitation at the insult
so unnerved him that he missed: his ball cut the knot of Kostalergi’s
cravat. The Greek took a calm and deliberate aim, and sent his bullet
through the other’s forehead. He fell without a word, stone dead.

Though the duel had been a fair one, and the _procès-verbal_ drawn up and
agreed on both sides showed that all had been done loyally, the friends
of the young Russian had influence to make the Greek Government not only
recall the envoy, but abolish the mission itself.

For some years the Kostalergis lived in retirement at Palermo, not knowing
nor known to any one. Their means were now so reduced that they had
barely sufficient for daily life, and though the Greek prince--as he was
called--constantly appeared on the public promenade well dressed, and in
all the pride of his handsome figure, it was currently said that his wife
was literally dying of want.

It was only after long and agonising suffering that she ventured to write
to her brother, and appeal to him for advice and assistance. But at last
she did so, and a correspondence grew up which, in a measure, restored the
affection between them. When Kostalergi discovered the source from which
his wretched wife now drew her consolation and her courage, he forbade her
to write more, and himself addressed a letter to Kearney so insulting and
offensive--charging him even with causing the discord of his home, and
showing the letter to his wife before sending it--that the poor woman, long
failing in health and broken down, sank soon after, and died so destitute,
that the very funeral was paid for by a subscription amongst her
countrymen. Kostalergi had left her some days before her death, carrying
the girl along with him, nor was his whereabouts learned for a considerable
time.

When next he emerged into the world it was at Rome, where he gave lessons
in music and modern languages, in many in which he was a proficient. His
splendid appearance, his captivating address, his thorough familiarity with
the modes of society, gave him the entrée to many houses where his talents
amply requited the hospitality he received. He possessed, amongst his other
gifts, an immense amount of plausibility, and people found it, besides,
very difficult to believe ill of that well-bred, somewhat retiring man,
who, in circumstances of the very narrowest fortunes, not only looked and
dressed like a gentleman, but actually brought up a daughter with a degree
of care and an amount of regard to her education that made him appear a
model parent.

Nina Kostalergi was then about seventeen, though she looked at least three
years older. She was a tall, slight, pale girl, with perfectly regular
features--so classic in the mould, and so devoid of any expression, that
she recalled the face one sees on a cameo. Her hair was of wondrous
beauty--that rich gold colour which has _reflets_ through it, as the light
falls full or faint, and of an abundance that taxed her ingenuity to dress
it. They gave her the sobriquet of the Titian Girl at Rome whenever she
appeared abroad.

In the only letter Kearney had received from his brother-in-law after his
sister’s death was an insolent demand for a sum of money, which he alleged
that Kearney was unjustly withholding, and which he now threatened to
enforce by law. ‘I am well aware,’ wrote he, ‘what measure of honour or
honesty I am to expect from a man whose very name and designation are a
deceit. But probably prudence will suggest how much better it would be
on this occasion to simulate rectitude than risk the shame of an open
exposure.’

To this gross insult Kearney never deigned any reply; and now more than two
years passed without any tidings of his disreputable relative, when there
came one morning a letter with the Roman postmark, and addressed, ‘_À
Monsieur le Vicomte de Kilgobbin, à son Château de Kilgobbin, en Irlande._’
To the honour of the officials in the Irish post-office, it was forwarded
to Kilgobbin with the words, ‘Try Mathew Kearney, Esq.,’ in the corner.

A glance at the writing showed it was not in Kostalergi’s hand, and, after
a moment or two of hesitation, Kearney opened it. He turned at once for the
writer’s name, and read the words, ‘Nina Kostalergi’--his sister’s child!
‘Poor Matty,’ was all he could say for some minutes. He remembered the
letter in which she told him of her little girl’s birth, and implored his
forgiveness for herself and his love for her baby.’ I want both, my dear
brother,’ wrote she; ‘for though the bonds we make for ourselves by our
passions--’ And the rest of the sentence was erased--she evidently thinking
she had delineated all that could give a clue to a despondent reflection.

The present letter was written in English, but in that quaint, peculiar
hand Italians often write. It began by asking forgiveness for daring to
write to him, and recalling the details of the relationship between them,
as though he could not have remembered it. ‘I am, then, in my right,’ wrote
she, ‘when I address you as my dear, dear uncle, of whom I have heard so
much, and whose name was in my prayers ere I knew why I knelt to pray.’

Then followed a piteous appeal--it was actually a cry for protection. Her
father, she said, had determined to devote her to the stage, and already
had taken steps to sell her--she said she used the word advisedly--for
so many years to the impresario of the ‘Fenice’ at Venice, her voice and
musical skill being such as to give hope of her becoming a prima donna.
She had, she said, frequently sung at private parties at Rome, but only
knew within the last few days that she had been, not a guest, but a paid
performer. Overwhelmed with the shame and indignity of this false position,
she implored her mother’s brother to compassionate her. ‘If I could not
become a governess, I could be your servant, dearest uncle,’ she wrote. ‘I
only ask a roof to shelter me, and a refuge. May I go to you? I would beg
my way on foot if I only knew that at the last your heart and your door
would be open to me, and as I fell at your feet, knew that I was saved.’

Until a few days ago, she said, she had by her some little trinkets her
mother had left her, and on which she counted as a means of escape, but her
father had discovered them and taken them from her.

‘If you answer this--and oh! let me not doubt you will--write to me to the
care of the Signori Cayani and Battistella, bankers, Rome. Do not delay,
but remember that I am friendless, and but for this chance hopeless.--Your
niece,

‘NINA KOSTALERGI.’

While Kearney gave this letter to his daughter to read, he walked up and
down the room with his head bent and his hands deep in his pockets.

‘I think I know the answer you’ll send to this, papa,’ said the girl,
looking up at him with a glow of pride and affection in her face. ‘I do not
need that you should say it.’

‘It will take fifty--no, not fifty, but five-and-thirty pounds to bring her
over here, and how is she to come all alone?’

Kate made no reply; she knew the danger sometimes of interrupting his own
solution of a difficulty.

‘She’s a big girl, I suppose, by this--fourteen or fifteen?’

‘Over nineteen, papa.’

‘So she is, I was forgetting. That scoundrel, her father, might come after
her; he’d have the right if he wished to enforce it, and what a scandal
he’d bring upon us all!’

‘But would he care to do it? Is he not more likely to be glad to be
disembarrassed of her charge?’

‘Not if he was going to sell her--not if he could convert her into money.’

‘He has never been in England; he may not know how far the law would give
him any power over her.’

‘Don’t trust that, Kate; a blackguard always can find out how much is in
his favour everywhere. If he doesn’t know it now, he’d know it the day
after he landed.’ He paused an instant, and then said: ‘There will be the
devil to pay with old Peter Gill, for he’ll want all the cash I can scrape
together for Loughrea fair. He counts on having eighty sheep down there at
the long crofts, and a cow or two besides. That’s money’s worth, girl!’

Another silence followed, after which he said, ‘And I think worse of the
Greek scoundrel than all the cost.’

‘Somehow, I have no fear that he’ll come here?’

‘You’ll have to talk over Peter, Kitty’--he always said Kitty when he meant
to coax her. ‘He’ll mind you, and at all events, you don’t care about his
grumbling. Tell him it’s a sudden call on me for railroad shares, or’--and
here he winked knowingly--‘say, it’s going to Rome the money is, and for
the Pope!’

‘That’s an excellent thought, papa,’ said she, laughing; ‘I’ll certainly
tell him the money is going to Rome, and you’ll write soon--you see with
what anxiety she expects your answer.’

‘I’ll write to-night when the house is quiet, and there’s no racket
nor disturbance about me.’ Now though Kearney said this with a perfect
conviction of its truth and reasonableness, it would have been very
difficult for any one to say in what that racket he spoke of consisted, or
wherein the quietude of even midnight was greater than that which prevailed
there at noonday. Never, perhaps, were lives more completely still or
monotonous than theirs. People who derive no interests from the outer
world, who know nothing of what goes on in life, gradually subside into a
condition in which reflection takes the place of conversation, and lose all
zest and all necessity for that small talk which serves, like the changes
of a game, to while away time, and by the aid of which, if we do no more,
we often delude the cares and worries of existence.

A kind good-morning when they met, and a few words during the day--some
mention of this or that event of the farm or the labourers, and rare enough
too--some little incident that happened amongst the tenants, made all the
materials of their intercourse, and filled up lives which either would very
freely have owned were far from unhappy.

Dick, indeed, when he came home and was weather-bound for a day, did lament
his sad destiny, and mutter half-intelligible nonsense of what he would
not rather do than descend to such a melancholy existence; but in all
his complainings he never made Kate discontented with her lot, or desire
anything beyond it.

‘It’s all very well,’ he would say, ‘till you know something better.’

‘But I want no better.’

‘Do you mean you’d like to go through life in this fashion?’

‘I can’t pretend to say what I may feel as I grow older; but if I could be
sure to be as I am now, I could ask nothing better.’

‘I must say, it’s a very inglorious life?’ said he, with a sneer.

‘So it is, but how many, may I ask, are there who lead glorious lives? Is
there any glory in dining out, in dancing, visiting, and picnicking? Where
is the great glory of the billiard-table, or the croquet-lawn? No, no, my
dear Dick, the only glory that falls to the share of such humble folks as
we are, is to have something to do, and to do it.’

Such were the sort of passages which would now and then occur between them,
little contests, be it said, in which she usually came off the conqueror.

If she were to have a wish gratified, it would have been a few more
books--something besides those odd volumes of Scott’s novels, _Zeluco_ by
Doctor Moore, and _Florence McCarthy_, which comprised her whole library,
and which she read over and over unceasingly. She was now in her usual
place--a deep window-seat--intently occupied with Amy Robsart’s sorrows,
when her father came to read what he had written in answer to Nina. If it
was very brief it was very affectionate. It told her in a few words that
she had no need to recall the ties of their relationship; that his heart
never ceased to remind him of them; that his home was a very dull one, but
that her cousin Kate would try and make it a happy one to her; entreated
her to confer with the banker, to whom he remitted forty pounds, in what
way she could make the journey, since he was too broken in health himself
to go and fetch her. ‘It is a bold step I am counselling you to take. It is
no light thing to quit a father’s home, and I have my misgivings how far I
am a wise adviser in recommending it. There is, however, a present peril,
and I must try, if I can, to save you from it. Perhaps, in my old-world
notions, I attach to the thought of the stage ideas that you would
only smile at; but none of our race, so far as I know, fell to that
condition--nor must you while I have a roof to shelter you. If you would
write and say about what time I might expect you, I will try to meet you
on your landing in England at Dover. Kate sends you her warmest love, and
longs to see you.’

This was the whole of it. But a brief line to the bankers said that any
expense they judged needful to her safe convoy across Europe would be
gratefully repaid by him.

‘Is it all right, dear? Have I forgotten anything?’ asked he, as Kate read
it over.

‘It’s everything, papa--everything. And I _do_ long to see her.’

‘I hope she’s like Matty--if she’s only like her poor mother, it will make
my heart young again to look at her.’




CHAPTER III

THE CHUMS


In that old square of Trinity College, Dublin, one side of which fronts
the Park, and in chambers on the ground-floor, an oak door bore the
names of ‘Kearney and Atlee.’ Kearney was the son of Lord Kilgobbin;
Atlee, his chum, the son of a Presbyterian minister in the north of
Ireland, had been four years in the university, but was still in his
freshman period, not from any deficiency of scholarlike ability to push
on, but that, as the poet of the _Seasons_ lay in bed, because he ‘had
no motive for rising,’ Joe Atlee felt that there need be no urgency
about taking a degree which, when he had got, he should be sorely
puzzled to know what to do with. He was a clever, ready-witted, but
capricious fellow, fond of pleasure, and self-indulgent to a degree that
ill suited his very smallest of fortunes, for his father was a poor man,
with a large family, and had already embarrassed himself heavily by the
cost of sending his eldest son to the university. Joe’s changes of
purpose--for he had in succession abandoned law for medicine, medicine
for theology, and theology for civil engineering, and, finally, gave
them all up--had so outraged his father that he declared he would not
continue any allowance to him beyond the present year; to which Joe
replied by the same post, sending back the twenty pounds inclosed him,
and saying: ‘The only amendment I would make to your motion is--as to
the date--let it begin from to-day. I suppose I shall have to swim
without corks some time. I may as well try now as later on.’

[Illustration: ‘What lark have you been on, Master Joe?’]

The first experience of his ‘swimming without corks’ was to lie in bed two
days and smoke; the next was to rise at daybreak and set out on a long
walk into the country, from which he returned late at night, wearied and
exhausted, having eaten but once during the day.

Kearney, dressed for an evening party, resplendent with jewellery, essenced
and curled, was about to issue forth when Atlee, dusty and wayworn, entered
and threw himself into a chair.

‘What lark have you been on, Master Joe?’ he said. ‘I have not seen you for
three days, if not four!’

‘No; I’ve begun to train,’ said he gravely. ‘I want to see how long a
fellow could hold on to life on three pipes of Cavendish per diem. I take
it that the absorbents won’t be more cruel than a man’s creditors, and will
not issue a distraint where there are no assets, so that probably by the
time I shall have brought myself down to, let us say, seven stone weight, I
shall have reached the goal.’

This speech he delivered slowly and calmly, as though enunciating a very
grave proposition.

‘What new nonsense is this? Don’t you think health worth something?’

‘Next to life, unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive,
and I don’t see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a
quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher,
but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him
in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in
the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There
are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one
hundred and fifty out of it. That’s the way they neglect arithmetic in our
modern schools!’

‘Has he reduced your allowance?’

‘He has done more, he has extinguished it.’

‘Have you provoked him to this?’

‘I have provoked him to it.’

‘But is it not possible to accommodate matters? It should not be very
difficult, surely, to show him that once you are launched in life--’

‘And when will that be, Dick?’ broke in the other. ‘I have been on the
stocks these four years, and that launching process you talk of looks just
as remote as ever. No, no; let us be fair; he has all the right on his
side, all the wrong is on mine. Indeed, so far as conscience goes, I have
always felt it so, but one’s conscience, like one’s boots, gets so pliant
from wear, that it ceases to give pain. Still, on my honour, I never
hip-hurraed to a toast that I did not feel: there goes broken boots to one
of the boys, or, worse again, the cost of a cotton dress for one of the
sisters. Whenever I took a sherry-cobbler I thought of suicide after it.
Self-indulgence and self-reproach got linked in my nature so inseparably,
it was hopeless to summon one without the other, till at last I grew to
believe it was very heroic in me to deny myself nothing, seeing how sorry I
should be for it afterwards. But come, old fellow, don’t lose your evening;
we’ll have time enough to talk over these things--where are you going?’

‘To the Clancys’.’

‘To be sure; what a fellow I am to forget it was Letty’s birthday, and I
was to have brought her a bouquet! Dick, be a good fellow and tell her
some lie or other--that I was sick in bed, or away to see an aunt or a
grandmother, and that I had a splendid bouquet for her, but wouldn’t let
it reach her through other hands than my own, but to-morrow--to-morrow she
shall have it.’

‘You know well enough you don’t mean anything of the sort.’

‘On my honour, I’ll keep my promise. I’ve an old silver watch yonder--I
think it knows the way to the pawn-office by itself. There, now be off, for
if I begin to think of all the fun you’re going to, I shall just dress and
join you.’

‘No, I’d not do that,’ said Dick gravely, ‘nor shall I stay long myself.
Don’t go to bed, Joe, till I come back. Good-bye.’

‘Say all good and sweet things to Letty for me. Tell her--’ Kearney did not
wait for his message, but hurried down the steps and drove off.

Joe sat down at the fire, filled his pipe, looked steadily at it, and then
laid it on the mantel-piece. ‘No, no, Master Joe. You must be thrifty now.
You have smoked twice since--I can afford to say--since dinner-time, for
you haven’t dined. It is strange, now that the sense of hunger has passed
off, what a sense of excitement I feel. Two hours back I could have been a
cannibal. I believe I could have eaten the vice-provost--though I should
have liked him strongly devilled--and now I feel stimulated. Hence it is,
perhaps, that so little wine is enough to affect the heads of starving
people--almost maddening them. Perhaps Dick suspected something of this,
for he did not care that I should go along with him. Who knows but he may
have thought the sight of a supper might have overcome me. If he knew but
all. I’m much more disposed to make love to Letty Clancy than to go in for
galantine and champagne. By the way, I wonder if the physiologists are
aware of that? It is, perhaps, what constitutes the ethereal condition of
love. I’ll write an essay on that, or, better still, I’ll write a review of
an imaginary French essay. Frenchmen are permitted to say so much more than
we are, and I’ll be rebukeful on the score of his excesses. The bitter way
in which a Frenchman always visits his various incapacities--whether it be
to know something, or to do something, or to be something--on the species
he belongs to; the way in which he suggests that, had he been consulted on
the matter, humanity had been a much more perfect organisation, and able
to sustain a great deal more of wickedness without disturbance, is great
fun. I’ll certainly invent a Frenchman, and make him an author, and then
demolish him. What if I make him die of hunger, having tasted nothing for
eight days but the proof-sheets of his great work--the work I am then
reviewing? For four days--but stay--if I starve him to death, I cannot tear
his work to pieces. No; he shall be alive, living in splendour and honour,
a frequenter of the Tuileries, a favoured guest at Compiègne.’

Without perceiving it, he had now taken his pipe, lighted it, and was
smoking away. ‘By the way, how those same Imperialists have played the
game!--the two or three middle-aged men that Kinglake says, “put their
heads together to plan for a livelihood.” I wish they had taken me into the
partnership. It’s the sort of thing I’d have liked well; ay, and I could
have done it, too! I wonder,’ said he aloud--‘I wonder if I were an emperor
should I marry Letty Clancy? I suspect not. Letty would have been flippant
as an empress, and her cousins would have made atrocious princes of the
imperial family, though, for the matter of that--Hullo! Here have I been
smoking without knowing it! Can any one tell us whether the sins we do
inadvertently count as sins, or do we square them off by our inadvertent
good actions? I trust I shall not be called on to catalogue mine. There,
my courage is out!’ As he said this he emptied the ashes of his pipe, and
gazed sorrowfully at the empty bowl.

‘Now, if I were the son of some good house, with a high-sounding name, and
well-to-do relations, I’d soon bring them to terms if they dared to cast me
off. I’d turn milk or muffin man, and serve the street they lived in. I’d
sweep the crossing in front of their windows, or I’d commit a small theft,
and call on my high connections for a character--but being who and what I
am, I might do any or all o these, and shock nobody.

‘Next to take stock of my effects. Let me see what my assets will bring
when reduced to cash, for this time it shall be a sale.’ And he turned to a
table where paper and pens were lying, and proceeded to write. ‘Personal,
sworn under, let us say, ten thousand pounds. Literature first. To divers
worn copies of _Virgil_, _Tacitus_, _Juvenal_, and _Ovid_, Cæsar’s
_Commentaries_, and _Catullus_; to ditto ditto of _Homer_, _Lucian_,
_Aristophanes_, _Balzac_, _Anacreon_, Bacon’s _Essays_, and Moore’s
_Melodies_; to Dwight’s _Theology_--uncut copy, Heine’s _Poems_--very much
thumbed, _Saint Simon_--very ragged, two volumes of _Les Causes Célèbres_,
Tone’s _Memoirs_, and Beranger’s _Songs_; to Cuvier’s _Comparative
Anatomy_, Shroeder on _Shakespeare_, Newman’s _Apology_, Archbold’s
_Criminal Law_ and _Songs of the Nation_; to Colenso, East’s _Cases for
the Crown_, Carte’s _Ormonde_, and _Pickwick_. But why go on? Let us call
it the small but well-selected library of a distressed gentleman, whose
cultivated mind is reflected in the marginal notes with which these volumes
abound. Will any gentleman say, “£10 for the lot”? Why the very criticisms
are worth--I mean to a man of literary tastes--five times the amount. No
offer at £10? Who is it that says “five”? I trust my ears have deceived me.
You repeat the insulting proposal? Well, sir, on your own head be it! Mr.
Atlee’s library--or the Atlee collection is better--was yesterday disposed
of to a well-known collector of rare books, and, if we are rightly
informed, for a mere fraction of its value. Never mind, sir, I bear you no
ill-will! I was irritable, and to show you my honest animus in the matter,
I beg to present you in addition with this, a handsomely-bound and gilt
copy of a sermon by the Reverend Isaac Atlee, on the opening of the new
meeting-house in Coleraine--a discourse that cost my father some sleepless
nights, though I have heard the effect on the congregation was dissimilar.

‘The pictures are few. Cardinal Cullen, I believe, is Kearney’s; at all
events, he is the worse for being made a target for pistol firing, and the
archiepiscopal nose has been sorely damaged. Two views of Killarney in
the weather of the period--that means July, and raining in torrents--and
consequently the scene, for aught discoverable, might be the Gaboon.
Portrait of Joe Atlee, _ætatis_ four years, with a villainous squint, and
something that looks like a plug in the left jaw. A Skye terrier, painted,
it is supposed, by himself; not to recite unframed prints of various
celebrities of the ballet, in accustomed attitudes, with the Reverend Paul
Bloxham blessing some children--though from the gesture and the expression
of the juveniles it might seem cuffing them--on the inauguration of the
Sunday school at Kilmurry Macmacmahon.

‘Lot three, interesting to anatomical lecturers and others, especially
those engaged in palæontology. The articulated skeleton of an Irish giant,
representing a man who must have stood in his no-stockings eight feet four
inches. This, I may add, will be warranted as authentic, in so far that I
made him myself out of at least eighteen or twenty big specimens, with a
few slight “divergencies” I may call them, such as putting in eight more
dorsal vertebrae than the regulation, and that the right femur is two
inches longer than the left. The inferior maxillary, too, was stolen from a
“Pithacus Satyrus” in the Cork Museum by an old friend, since transported
for Fenianism. These blemishes apart, he is an admirable giant, and fully
as ornamental and useful as the species generally.

‘As to my wardrobe, it is less costly than curious; an alpaca paletot of a
neutral tint, which I have much affected of late, having indisposed me to
other wear. For dinner and evening duty I usually wear Kearney’s, though
too tight across the chest, and short in the sleeves. These, with a silver
watch which no pawnbroker--and I have tried eight--will ever advance
more on than seven-and-six. I once got the figure up to nine shillings
by supplementing an umbrella, which was Dick’s, and which still remains,
“unclaimed and unredeemed.”

‘Two o’clock, by all that is supperless! evidently Kearney is enjoying
himself. Ah, youth, youth! I wish I could remember some of the spiteful
things that are said of you--not but on the whole, I take it, you have the
right end of the stick. Is it possible there is nothing to eat in this
inhospitable mansion?’ He arose and opened a sort of cupboard in the wall,
scrutinising it closely with the candle. ‘“Give me but the superfluities of
life,” says Gavarni, “and I’ll not trouble you for its necessaries.” What
would he say, however, to a fellow famishing with hunger in presence of
nothing but pickled mushrooms and Worcester sauce! Oh, here is a crust!
“Bread is the staff of life.” On my oath, I believe so; for this eats
devilish like a walking-stick.

‘Hullo! back already?’ cried he, as Kearney flung wide the door and
entered. ‘I suppose you hurried away back to join me at supper.’

‘Thanks; but I have supped already, and at a more tempting banquet than
this I see before you.’

‘Was it pleasant? was it jolly? Were the girls looking lovely? Was the
champagne-cup well iced? Was everybody charming? Tell me all about it. Let
me have second-hand pleasure, since I can’t afford the new article.’

‘It was pretty much like every other small ball here, where the garrison
get all the prettiest girls for partners, and take the mammas down to
supper after.’

‘Cunning dogs, who secure flirtation above stairs and food below! And what
is stirring in the world? What are the gaieties in prospect? Are any of my
old flames about to get married?’

‘I didn’t know you had any.’

‘Have I not! I believe half the parish of St. Peter’s might proceed against
me for breach of promise; and if the law allowed me as many wives as
Brigham Young, I’d be still disappointing a large and interesting section
of society in the suburbs.’

‘They have made a seizure on the office of the _Pike_, carried off the
press and the whole issue, and are in eager pursuit after Madden, the
editor.’

‘What for? What is it all about?’

‘A new ballad he has published; but which, for the matter of that, they
were singing at every corner as I came along.’

‘Was it good? Did you buy a copy?’

‘Buy a copy? I should think not.’

‘Couldn’t your patriotism stand the test of a penny?’

‘It might if I wanted the production, which I certainly did not; besides,
there is a run upon this, and they were selling it at sixpence.’

‘Hurrah! There’s hope for Ireland after all! Shall I sing it for you, old
fellow? Not that you deserve it. English corruption has damped the little
Irish ardour that old rebellion once kindled in your heart; and if you
could get rid of your brogue, you’re ready to be loyal. You shall hear it,
however, all the same.’ And taking up a very damaged-looking guitar, he
struck a few bold chords, and began:--

  ‘Is there anything more we can fight or can hate for?
    The “drop” and the famine have made our ranks thin.
  In the name of endurance, then, what do we wait for?
    Will nobody give us the word to begin?

  ‘Some brothers have left us in sadness and sorrow,
    In despair of the cause they had sworn to win;
  They owned they were sick of that cry of “to-morrow”;
    Not a man would believe that we meant to begin.

  ‘We’ve been ready for months--is there one can deny it?
    Is there any one here thinks rebellion a sin?
  We counted the cost--and we did not decry it,
    And we asked for no more than the word to begin?

  ‘At Vinegar Hill, when our fathers were fighters,
    With numbers against them, they cared not a pin;
  They needed no orders from newspaper writers,
    To tell them the day it was time to begin.

  ‘To sit here in sadness and silence to bear it,
    Is harder to face than the battle’s loud din;
  ‘Tis the shame that will kill me--I vow it, I swear it?
    Now or never’s the time, if we mean to begin.’

There was a wild rapture in the way he struck the last chords, that, if it
did not evince ecstasy, seemed to counterfeit enthusiasm.

‘Very poor doggerel, with all your bravura,’ said Kearney sneeringly.

‘What would you have? I only got three-and-six for it.’

‘You! Is that thing yours?’

‘Yes, sir; that thing is mine. And the Castle people think somewhat more
gravely about it than you do.’

‘At which you are pleased, doubtless?’

‘Not pleased, but proud, Master Dick, let me tell you. It’s a very
stimulating reflection to the man who dines on an onion, that he can spoil
the digestion of another fellow who has been eating turtle.’

‘But you may have to go to prison for this.’

‘Not if you don’t peach on me, for you are the only one who knows the
authorship. You see, Dick, these things are done cautiously. They are
dropped into a letter-box with an initial letter, and a clerk hands the
payment to some of those itinerant hags that sing the melody, and who
can be trusted with the secret as implicitly as the briber at a borough
election.’

‘I wish you had a better livelihood, Joe.’

‘So do I, or that my present one paid better. The fact is, Dick, patriotism
never was worth much as a career till one got to the top of the profession.
But if you mean to sleep at all, old fellow, “it’s time to begin,”’ and he
chanted out the last words in a clear and ringing tone, as he banged the
door behind him.




CHAPTER IV

AT ‘TRINITY’


It was while the two young men were seated at breakfast that the post
arrived, bringing a number of country newspapers, for which, in one shape
or other, Joe Atlee wrote something. Indeed, he was an ‘own correspondent,’
dating from London, or Paris, or occasionally from Rome, with an easy
freshness and a local colour that vouched for authenticity. These journals
were of a very political tint, from emerald green to the deepest orange;
and, indeed, between two of them--the _Tipperary Pike_ and the _Boyne
Water_, hailing from Carrickfergus--there was a controversy of such
violence and intemperance of language, that it was a curiosity to see the
two papers on the same table: the fact being capable of explanation, that
they were both written by Joe Atlee--a secret, however, that he had not
confided even to his friend Kearney.

‘Will that fellow that signs himself Terry O’Toole in the _Pike_ stand
this?’ cried Kearney, reading aloud from the _Boyne Water_:--

‘“We know the man who corresponds with you under the signature of Terry
O’Toole, and it is but one of the aliases under which he has lived since
he came out of the Richmond Bridewell, filcher, forger, and false witness.
There is yet one thing he has never tried, which is to behave with a little
courage. If he should, however, be able to persuade himself, by the aid
of his accustomed stimulants, to accept the responsibility of what he has
written, we bind ourselves to pay his expenses to any part of France or
Belgium, where he will meet us, and we shall also bind ourselves to give
him what his life little entitles him to, a Christian burial afterwards.

‘“No SURRENDER.”’

‘I am just reading the answer,’ said Joe. ‘It is very brief: here it is:--

“‘If ‘No Surrender’--who has been a newsvender in your establishment since
you yourself rose from that employ to the editor’s chair--will call at this
office any morning after distributing his eight copies of your daily issue,
we promise to give him such a kicking as he has never experienced during
his literary career. TERRY O’TOOLE.’”

‘And these are the amenities of journalism,’ cried Kearney.

‘For the matter of that, you might exclaim at the quack doctor of a fair,
and ask, Is this the dignity of medicine?’ said Joe. ‘There’s a head and a
tail to every walk in life: even the law has a Chief-Justice at one end and
a Jack Ketch at the other.’

‘Well, I sincerely wish that those blackguards would first kick and then
shoot each other.’

‘They’ll do nothing of the kind! It’s just as likely that they wrote the
whole correspondence at the same table and with the same jug of punch
between them.’

‘If so, I don’t envy you your career or your comrades.’

‘It’s a lottery with big prizes in the wheel all the same! I could tell you
the names of great swells, Master Dick, who have made very proud places for
themselves in England by what you call “journalism.” In France it is the
one road to eminence. Cannot you imagine, besides, what capital fun it is
to be able to talk to scores of people you were never introduced to? to
tell them an infinity of things on public matters, or now and then about
themselves; and in so many moods as you have tempers, to warn them, scold,
compassionate, correct, console, or abuse them? to tell them not to be
over-confident or bumptious, or purse-proud--’

‘And who are _you_, may I ask, who presume to do all this?’

‘That’s as it may be. We are occasionally Guizot, Thiers, Prévot Paradol,
Lytton, Disraeli, or Joe Atlee.’

‘Modest, at all events.’

‘And why not say what I feel--not what I have done, but what is in me to
do? Can’t you understand this: it would never occur to me that I could
vault over a five-bar gate if I had been born a cripple? but the conscious
possession of a little pliant muscularity might well tempt me to try it.’

‘And get a cropper for your pains.’

‘Be it so. Better the cropper than pass one’s life looking over the top
rail and envying the fellow that had cleared it; but what’s this? here’s a
letter here: it got in amongst the newspapers. I say, Dick, do you stand
this sort of thing?’ said he, as he read the address.

‘Stand what sort of thing?’ asked the other, half angrily.

‘Why, to be addressed in this fashion? The Honourable Richard Kearney,
Trinity College, Dublin.’

‘It is from my sister,’ said Kearney, as he took the letter impatiently
from his hand; ‘and I can only tell you, if she had addressed me otherwise,
I’d not have opened her letter.’

‘But come now, old fellow, don’t lose temper about it. You have a right to
this designation, or you have not--’

‘I’ll spare all your eloquence by simply saying, that I do not look on
you as a Committee of Privilege, and I’m not going to plead before you.
Besides,’ added he, ‘it’s only a few minutes ago you asked me to credit you
for something you have not shown yourself to be, but that you intended and
felt that the world should see you were, one of these days.’

‘So, then, you really mean to bring your claim before the Lords?’

Kearney, if he heard, did not heed this question, but went on to read his
letter. ‘Here’s a surprise!’ cried he. ‘I was telling you, the other day,
about a certain cousin of mine we were expecting from Italy.’

‘The daughter of that swindler, the mock prince?’

‘The man’s character I’ll not stand up for, but his rank and title are
alike indisputable,’ said Kearney haughtily.

‘With all my heart. We have soared into a high atmosphere all this day, and
I hope my respiration will get used to it in time. Read away!’

It was not till after a considerable interval that Kearney had recovered
composure enough to read, and when he did so it was with a brow furrowed
with irritation:--

‘KILGOBBIN.

‘My dear Dick,--We had just sat down to tea last night, and papa was
fidgeting about the length of time his letter to Italy had remained
unacknowledged, when a sharp ring at the house-door startled us. We had
been hearing a good deal of searches for arms lately in the neighbourhood,
and we looked very blankly at each other for a moment. We neither of us
said so, but I feel sure our thoughts were on the same track, and that we
believed Captain Rock, or the head-centre, or whatever be his latest title,
had honoured us with a call. Old Mathew seemed of the same mind too, for
he appeared at the door with that venerable blunderbuss we have so often
played with, and which, if it had any evil thoughts in its head, I must
have been tried for a murder years ago, for I know it was loaded since I
was a child, but that the lock has for the same space of time not been
on speaking terms with the barrel. While, then, thus confirmed in our
suspicions of mischief by Mat’s warlike aspect, we both rose from the
table, the door opened, and a young girl rushed in, and fell--actually
threw herself into papa’s arms. It was Nina herself, who had come all the
way from Rome alone, that is, without any one she knew, and made her way to
us here, without any other guidance than her own good wits.

‘I cannot tell you how delighted we are with her. She is the loveliest
girl I ever saw, so gentle, so nicely mannered, so soft-voiced, and so
winning--I feel myself like a peasant beside her. The least thing she
says--her laugh, her slightest gesture, the way she moves about the room,
with a sort of swinging grace, which I thought affected at first, but now I
see is quite natural--is only another of her many fascinations.

‘I fancied for a while that her features were almost too beautifully
regular for expression, and that even when she smiled and showed her lovely
teeth, her eyes got no increase of brightness; but, as I talked more with
her, and learned to know her better, I saw that those eyes have meanings of
softness and depths in them of wonderful power, and, stranger than all, an
archness that shows she has plenty of humour.

‘Her English is charming, but slightly foreign; and when she is at a loss
for a word, there is just that much of difficulty in finding it which gives
a heightened expression to her beautifully calm face, and makes it lovely.
You may see how she has fascinated me, for I could go on raving about her
for hours.

‘She is very anxious to see you, and asks me over and over again, Shall you
like her? I was almost candid enough to say “too well.” I mean that you
could not help falling in love with her, my dear Dick, and she is so much
above us in style, in habit, and doubtless in ambition, that such would
be only madness. When she saw your photo she smiled, and said, “Is he not
superb?--I mean proud?” I owned you were, and then she added, “I hope he
will like me.” I am not perhaps discreet if I tell you she does not like
the portrait of your chum, Atlee. She says “he is very good-looking, very
clever, very witty, but isn’t he false?” and this she says over and over
again. I told her I believed not; that I had never seen him myself, but
that I knew that you liked him greatly, and felt to him as a brother. She
only shook her head, and said, “_Badate bene a quel che dico_. I mean,”
 said she, “_I’m right,_ but he’s very nice for all that!” If I tell you
this, Dick, it is just because I cannot get it out of my head, and I will
keep saying over and over to myself--“If Joe Atlee be what she suspects,
why does she call him very nice for all that?” I said you intended to ask
him down here next vacation, and she gave the drollest little laugh in
the world--and does she not look lovely when she shows those small pearly
teeth? Heaven help you, poor Dick, when you see her! but, if I were you,
I should leave Master Joe behind me, for she smiles as she looks at his
likeness in a way that would certainly make me jealous, if I were only
Joe’s friend, and not himself.

‘We sat up in Nina’s room till nigh morning, and to-day I have scarcely
seen her, for she wants to be let sleep, after that long and tiresome
journey, and I take the opportunity to write you this very rambling
epistle; for you may feel sure I shall be less of a correspondent now than
when I was without companionship, and I counsel you to be very grateful if
you hear from me soon again.

‘Papa wants to take Duggan’s farm from him, and Lanty Moore’s meadows,
and throw them into the lawn; but I hope he won’t persist in the plan;
not alone because it is a mere extravagance, but that the county is very
unsettled just now about land-tenure, and the people are hoping all
sorts of things from Parliament, and any interference with them at
this time would be ill taken. Father Cody was here yesterday, and told
me confidentially to prevent papa--not so easy a thing as he thinks,
particularly if he should come to suspect that any intimidation was
intended--and Miss O’Shea unfortunately said something the other day that
papa cannot get out of his head, and keeps on repeating. “So, then, it’s
our turn now,” the fellows say; “the landlords have had five hundred years
of it; it’s time we should come in.” And this he says over and over with a
little laugh, and I wish to my heart Miss Betty had kept it to herself. By
the way, her nephew is to come on leave, and pass two months with her; and
she says she hopes you will be here at the same time, to keep him company;
but I have a notion that another playfellow may prove a dangerous rival to
the Hungarian hussar; perhaps, however, you would hand over Joe Atlee to
him.

‘Be sure you bring us some new books, and some music, when you come, or
send them, if you don’t come soon. I am terrified lest Nina should think
the place dreary, and I don’t know how she is to live here if she does not
take to the vulgar drudgeries that fill my own life. When she abruptly
asked me, “What do you do here?” I was sorely puzzled to know what to
answer, and then she added quickly: “For my own part, it’s no great matter,
for I can always dream. I’m a great dreamer!” Is it not lucky for her,
Dick? She’ll have ample time for it here.

‘I suppose I never wrote so long a letter as this in my life; indeed I
never had a subject that had such a fascination for myself. Do you know,
Dick, that though I promised to let her sleep on till nigh dinner-time, I
find myself every now and then creeping up gently to her door, and only
bethink me of my pledge when my hand is on the lock; and sometimes I even
doubt if she is here at all, and I am half crazy at fearing it may be all a
dream.

‘One word for yourself, and I have done. Why have you not told us of the
examination? It was to have been on the 10th, and we are now at the 18th.
Have you got--whatever it was? the prize, or the medal, or--the reward, in
short, we were so anxiously hoping for? It would be such cheery tidings
for poor papa, who is very low and depressed of late, and I see him always
reading with such attention any notice of the college he can find in the
newspaper. My dear, dear brother, how you would work hard if you only knew
what a prize success in life might give you. Little as I have seen of her,
I could guess that she will never bestow a thought on an undistinguished
man. Come down for one day, and tell me if ever, in all your ambition, you
had such a goal before you as this?

‘The hoggets I sent in to Tullamore fair were not sold; but I believe Miss
Betty’s steward will take them; and, if so, I will send you ten pounds next
week. I never knew the market so dull, and the English dealers now are only
eager about horses, and I’m sure I couldn’t part with any if I had them.
With all my love, I am your ever affectionate sister,

‘KATE KEARNEY.’

‘I have just stepped into Nina’s room and stolen the photo I send you. I
suppose the dress must have been for some fancy ball; but she is a hundred
million times more beautiful. I don’t know if I shall have the courage to
confess my theft to her.’

‘Is that your sister, Dick?’ said Joe Atlee, as young Kearney withdrew the
carte from the letter, and placed it face downwards on the breakfast-table.

‘No,’ replied he bluntly, and continued to read on; while the other, in the
spirit of that freedom that prevailed between them, stretched out his hand
and took up the portrait.

‘Who is this?’ cried he, after some seconds. ‘She’s an actress. That’s
something like what the girl wears in _Don Cæsar de Bazan_. To be sure, she
is Maritana. She’s stunningly beautiful. Do you mean to tell me, Dick, that
there’s a girl like that on your provincial boards?’

‘I never said so, any more than I gave you leave to examine the contents of
my letters,’ said the other haughtily.

‘Egad, I’d have smashed the seal any day to have caught a glimpse of such
a face as that. I’ll wager her eyes are blue grey. Will you have a bet on
it?’

‘When you have done with your raptures, I’ll thank you to hand the likeness
to me.’

‘But who is she? what is she? where is she? Is she the Greek?’

‘When a fellow can help himself so coolly to his information as you do, I
scarcely think he deserves much aid from others; but, I may tell you, she
is not Maritana, nor a provincial actress, nor any actress at all, but a
young lady of good blood and birth, and my own first cousin.’

‘On my oath, it’s the best thing I ever knew of you.’

Kearney laughed out at this moment at something in the letter, and did not
hear the other’s remark.

‘It seems, Master Joe, that the young lady did not reciprocate the
rapturous delight you feel, at sight of _your_ picture. My sister
says--I’ll read you her very words--“she does not like the portrait of your
friend Atlee; he may be clever and amusing, she says, but he is undeniably
false.” Mind that--undeniably false.’

‘That’s all the fault of the artist. The stupid dog would place me in so
strong a light that I kept blinking.’

‘No, no. She reads you like a book,’ said the other.

‘I wish to Heaven she would, if she would hold me like one.’

‘And the nice way she qualifies your cleverness, by calling you amusing.’

‘She could certainly spare that reproach to her cousin Dick,’ said he,
laughing; ‘but no more of this sparring. When do you mean to take me down
to the country with you? The term will be up on Tuesday.’

‘That will demand a little consideration now. In the fall of the year,
perhaps. When the sun is less powerful the light will be more favourable to
your features.’

‘My poor Dick, I cram you with good advice every day; but one counsel I
never cease repeating, “Never try to be witty.” A dull fellow only cuts his
finger with a joke; he never catches it by the handle. Hand me over that
letter of your sister’s; I like the way she writes. All that about the pigs
and the poultry is as good as the _Farmer’s Chronicle_.’

The other made no other reply than by coolly folding up the letter and
placing it in his pocket; and then, after a pause, he said--

‘I shall tell Miss Kearney the favourable impression her epistolary powers
have produced on my very clever and accomplished chum, Mr. Atlee.’

‘Do so; and say, if she’d take me for a correspondent instead of you, she’d
be “exchanging with a difference.” On my oath,’ said he seriously, ‘I
believe a most finished education might be effected in letter-writing. I’d
engage to take a clever girl through a whole course of Latin and Greek,
and a fair share of mathematics and logic, in a series of letters, and her
replies would be the fairest test of her acquirement.’

‘Shall I propose this to my sister?’

‘Do so, or to your cousin. I suspect Maritana would be an apter pupil.’

‘The bell has stopped. We shall be late in the hall,’ said Kearney,
throwing on his gown hurriedly and hastening away; while Atlee, taking some
proof-sheets from the chimney-piece, proceeded to correct them, a slight
flicker of a smile still lingering over his dark but handsome face.

Though such little jarring passages as those we have recorded were nothing
uncommon between these two young men, they were very good friends on the
whole, the very dissimilarity that provoked their squabbles saving them
from any more serious rivalry. In reality, no two people could be less
alike: Kearney being a slow, plodding, self-satisfied, dull man, of
very ordinary faculties; while the other was an indolent, discursive,
sharp-witted fellow, mastering whatever he addressed himself to with ease,
but so enamoured of novelty that he rarely went beyond a smattering of
anything. He carried away college honours apparently at will, and might,
many thought, have won a fellowship with little effort; but his passion
was for change. Whatever bore upon the rogueries of letters, the frauds of
literature, had an irresistible charm for him; and he once declared that he
would almost rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his
delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of
plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate
had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most
ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch
of Baron Beust that actually deceived the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and
caused quite a panic at the Tuileries. He had established such relations
with foreign journals that he could at any moment command insertion for
a paper, now in the _Mémorial Diplomatique_, now in the _Golos_ of St.
Petersburg, or the _Allgemeine Zeitung_; while the comment, written also
by himself, would appear in the _Kreuz Zeitung_ or the _Times_; and the
mystification became such that the shrewdest and keenest heads were
constantly misled, to which side to incline in a controversy where all the
wires were pulled by one hand. Many a discussion on the authenticity of a
document, or the veracity of a conversation, would take place between the
two young men; Kearney not having the vaguest suspicion that the author of
the point in debate was then sitting opposite to him, sometimes seeming to
share the very doubts and difficulties that were then puzzling himself.

While Atlee knew Kearney in every fold and fibre of his nature, Kearney had
not the very vaguest conception of him with whom he sat every day at meals,
and communed through almost every hour of his life. He treated Joe, indeed,
with a sort of proud protection, thinking him a sharp, clever, idle fellow,
who would never come to anything higher than a bookseller’s hack or an
‘occasional correspondent.’ He liked his ready speech, and his fun, but he
would not consent to see in either evidences of anything beyond the amusing
qualities of a very light intelligence. On the whole, he looked down upon
him, as very properly the slow and ponderous people in life do look down
upon their more volatile brethren, and vote them triflers. Long may it be
so! There would be more sunstrokes in the world, if it were not that the
shadows of dull men made such nice cool places for the others to walk in!




CHAPTER V

HOME LIFE AT THE CASTLE


The life of that quaint old country-house was something very strange and
odd to Nina Kostalergi. It was not merely its quiet monotony, its unbroken
sameness of topics as of events, and its small economies, always appearing
on the surface; but that a young girl like Kate, full of life and spirits,
gay, handsome, and high-hearted--that she should go her mill-round of these
tiresome daily cares, listening to the same complaints, remedying the same
evils, meeting the same difficulties, and yet never seem to resent an
existence so ignoble and unworthy! This was, indeed, scarcely credible.

As for Nina herself--like one saved from shipwreck--her first sense of
security was full of gratitude. It was only as this wore off that she began
to see the desolation of the rock on which she had clambered. Not that
her former life had been rose-tinted. It had been of all things the most
harassing and wearing--a life of dreary necessitude--a perpetual struggle
with debt. Except play, her father had scarcely any resource for a
livelihood. He affected, indeed, to give lessons in Italian and French to
young Englishmen; but he was so fastidious as to the rank and condition of
his pupils, so unaccommodating as to his hours and so unpunctual, that it
was evident that the whole was a mere pretence of industry, to avoid the
reproach of being utterly dependent on the play-table; besides this, in
his capacity as a teacher he obtained access to houses and acceptance
with families where he would have found entrance impossible under other
circumstances.

He was polished and good-looking. All his habits bespoke familiarity with
society; and he knew to the nicest fraction the amount of intimacy he might
venture on with any one. Some did not like him--the man of a questionable
position, the reduced gentleman, has terrible prejudices to combat. He
must always be suspected--Heaven knows of what, but of some covert design
against the religion or the pocket, or the influence of those who admit
him. Some thought him dangerous because his manners were insinuating, and
his address studiously directed to captivate. Others did not fancy his
passion for mixing in the world, and frequenting society to which his
straitened means appeared to deny him rightful access; but when he had
succeeded in introducing his daughter to the world, and people began to
say, ‘See how admirably M. Kostalergi has brought up that girl! how nicely
mannered she is, how ladylike, how well bred, what a linguist, what a
musician!’ a complete revulsion took place in public opinion, and many
who had but half trusted, or less than liked him before, became now his
stanchest friends and adherents. Nina had been a great success in society,
and she reaped the full benefit of it. Sufficiently well born to be
admitted, without any special condescension, into good houses, she was in
manner and style the equal of any; and though her dress was ever of the
cheapest and plainest, her fresh toilet was often commented on with praise
by those who did not fully remember what added grace and elegance the
wearer had lent it.

From the wealthy nobles to whom her musical genius had strongly recommended
her, numerous and sometimes costly presents were sent in acknowledgment of
her charming gifts; and these, as invariably, were converted into money
by her father, who, after a while, gave it to be understood that the
recompense would be always more welcome in that form.

Nina, however, for a long time knew nothing of this; she saw herself sought
after and flattered in society, selected for peculiar attention wherever
she went, complimented on her acquirements, and made much of to an extent
that not unfrequently excited the envy and jealousy of girls much more
favourably placed by fortune than herself. If her long mornings and
afternoons were passed amidst solitude and poverty, vulgar cares, and
harassing importunities, when night came, she emerged into the blaze of
lighted lustres and gilded salons, to move in an atmosphere of splendour
and sweet sounds, with all that could captivate the senses and exalt
imagination. This twofold life of meanness and magnificence so wrought upon
her nature as to develop almost two individualities. The one hard, stern,
realistic, even to grudgingness; the other gay, buoyant, enthusiastic, and
ardent; and they who only saw her of an evening in all the exultation of
her flattered beauty, followed about by a train of admiring worshippers,
addressed in all that exaggeration of language Italy sanctions, pampered by
caresses, and honoured by homage on every side, little knew by what dreary
torpor of heart and mind that joyous ecstasy they witnessed had been
preceded, nor by what a bound her emotions had sprung from the depths of
brooding melancholy to this paroxysm of delight; nor could the worn-out and
wearied followers of pleasure comprehend the intense enjoyment produced
by sights and sounds which in their case no fancy idealised, no soaring
imagination had lifted to the heaven of bliss.

Kostalergi seemed for a while to content himself with the secret resources
of his daughter’s successes, but at length he launched out into heavy play
once more, and lost largely. It was in this strait that he bethought him of
negotiating with a theatrical manager for Nina’s appearance on the stage.
These contracts take the precise form of a sale, where the victim, in
consideration of being educated, and maintained, and paid a certain amount,
is bound, legally bound, to devote her services to a master for a given
time. The impresario of the ‘Fenice’ had often heard from travellers of
that wonderful mezzo-soprano voice which was captivating all Rome, where
the beauty and grace of the singer were extolled not less loudly. The great
skill of these astute providers for the world’s pleasure is evidenced in
nothing more remarkably than the instinctive quickness with which they
pounce upon the indications of dramatic genius, and hasten away--half
across the globe if need be--to secure it. Signor Lanari was not slow to
procure a letter of introduction to Kostalergi, and very soon acquainted
him with his object.

Under the pretence that he was an old friend and former schoolfellow,
Kostalergi asked him to share their humble dinner, and there, in that
meanly-furnished room, and with the accompaniment of a wretched and
jangling instrument, Nina so astonished and charmed him by her performance,
that all the habitual reserve of the cautious bargainer gave way, and he
burst out into exclamations of enthusiastic delight, ending with--‘She is
mine! she is mine! I tell you, since Persiani, there has been nothing like
her!’

Nothing remained now but to reveal the plan to herself, and though
certainly neither the Greek nor his guest were deficient in descriptive
power, or failed to paint in glowing colours the gorgeous processions of
triumphs that await stage success, she listened with little pleasure to it
all. She had already walked the boards of what she thought a higher arena.
She had tasted flatteries unalloyed with any sense of decided inferiority;
she had moved amongst dukes and duchesses with a recognised station, and
received their compliments with ease and dignity. Was all this reality of
condition to be exchanged for a mock splendour, and a feigned greatness?
was she to be subjected to the licensed stare and criticism and coarse
comment, it may be, of hundreds she never knew, nor would stoop to know?
and was the adulation she now lived in to be bartered for the vulgar
applause of those who, if dissatisfied, could testify the feeling as openly
and unsparingly? She said very little of what she felt in her heart, but no
sooner alone in her room at night, than she wrote that letter to her uncle
entreating his protection.

It had been arranged with Lanari that she should make one appearance at a
small provincial theatre so soon as she could master any easy part, and
Kostalergi, having some acquaintance with the manager at Orvieto, hastened
off there to obtain his permission for her appearance. It was of this brief
absence she profited to fly from Rome, the banker conveying her as far as
Civita Vecchia, whence she sailed direct for Marseilles. And now we see
her, as she found herself in the dreary old Irish mansion, sad, silent, and
neglected, wondering whether the past was all a dream, or if the unbroken
calm in which she now lived was not a sleep.

Conceding her perfect liberty to pass her time how she liked, they exacted
from her no appearance at meals, nor any conformity with the ways of
others, and she never came to breakfast, and only entered the drawing-room
a short time before dinner. Kate, who had counted on her companionship and
society, and hoped to see her sharing with her the little cares and duties
of her life, and taking interest in her pursuits, was sorely grieved at
her estrangement, but continued to believe it would wear off with time
and familiarity with the place. Kearney himself, in secret, resented
the freedom with which she disregarded the discipline of his house, and
grumbled at times over foreign ways and habits that he had no fancy to
see under his roof. When she did appear, however, her winning manners,
her grace, and a certain half-caressing coquetry she could practise to
perfection, so soothed and amused him that he soon forgot any momentary
displeasure, and more than once gave up his evening visit to the club at
Moate to listen to her as she sang, or hear her sketch off some trait of
that Roman society in which British pretension and eccentricity often
figured so amusingly.

Like a faithful son of the Church, too, he never wearied hearing of the
Pope and of the Cardinals, of glorious ceremonials of the Church, and
festivals observed with all the pomp and state that pealing organs,
and incense, and gorgeous vestments could confer. The contrast between
the sufferance under which his Church existed at home and the honours
and homage rendered to it abroad, were a fruitful stimulant to that
disaffection he felt towards England, and would not unfrequently lead him
away to long diatribes about penal laws and the many disabilities which had
enslaved Ireland, and reduced himself, the descendant of a princely race,
to the condition of a ruined gentleman.

To Kate these complainings were ever distasteful; she had but one
philosophy, which was ‘to bear up well,’ and when, not that, ‘as well as
you could.’ She saw scores of things around her to be remedied, or, at
least, bettered, by a little exertion, and not one which could be helped
by a vain regret. For the loss of that old barbaric splendour and profuse
luxury which her father mourned over, she had no regrets. She knew that
these wasteful and profligate livers had done nothing for the people either
in act or in example; that they were a selfish, worthless, self-indulgent
race, caring for nothing but their pleasures, and making all their
patriotism consist in a hate towards England.

These were not Nina’s thoughts. She liked all these stories of a time of
power and might, when the Kearneys were great chieftains, and the old
castle the scene of revelry and feasting.

She drew prettily, and it amused her to illustrate the curious tales the
old man told her of rays and forays, the wild old life of savage chieftains
and the scarcely less savage conquerors. On one of these--she called it
‘The Return of O’Caharney’--she bestowed such labour and study, that her
uncle would sit for hours watching the work, not knowing if his heart
were more stirred by the claim of his ancestor’s greatness, or by the
marvellous skill that realised the whole scene before him. The head of the
young chieftain was to be filled in when Dick came home. Meanwhile great
persuasions were being used to induce Peter Gill to sit for a kern who had
shared the exile of his masters, but had afterwards betrayed them to the
English; and whether Gill had heard some dropping word of the part he was
meant to fill, or that his own suspicion had taken alarm from certain
directions the young lady gave as to the expression he was to assume,
certain is it nothing could induce him to comply, and go down to posterity
with the immortality of crime.

The little long-neglected drawing-room where Nina had set up her easel
became now the usual morning lounge of the old man, who loved to sit and
watch her as she worked, and, what amused him even more, listen while she
talked. It seemed to him like a revival of the past to hear of the world,
that gay world of feasting and enjoyment, of which for so many years he
had known nothing; and here he was back in it again, and with grander
company and higher names than he ever remembered. ‘Why was not Kate like
her?’ would he mutter over and over to himself. Kate was a good girl,
fine-tempered and happy-hearted, but she had no accomplishments, none of
those refinements of the other. If he wanted to present her at ‘the Castle’
one of these days, he did not know if she would have tact enough for the
ordeal; but Nina!--Nina was sure to make an actual sensation, as much by
her grace and her style as by her beauty. Kearney never came into the
room where she was without being struck by the elegance of her demeanour,
the way she would rise to receive him, her step, her carriage, the very
disposal of her drapery as she sat; the modulated tone of her voice, and a
sort of purring satisfaction as she took his hand and heard his praises
of her, spread like a charm over him, so that he never knew how the time
slipped by as he sat beside her.

Have you ever written to your father since you came here?’ asked he one day
as they talked together.

‘Yes, sir; and yesterday I got a letter from him. Such a nice letter,
sir--no complainings, no reproaches for my running away; but all sorts of
good wishes for my happiness. He owns he was sorry to have ever thought
of the stage for me; but he says this lawsuit he is engaged in about his
grandfather’s will may last for years, and that he knew I was so certain
of a great success, and that a great success means more than mere money,
he fancied that in my triumph he would reap the recompense for his own
disasters. He is now, however, far happier that I have found a home, a real
home, and says, “Tell my lord I am heartily ashamed of all my rudeness with
regard to him, and would willingly make a pilgrimage to the end of Europe
to ask his pardon”; and say besides that “when I shall be restored to
the fortune and rank of my ancestors”--you know,’ added she, ‘he is a
prince--“my first act will be to throw myself at his feet, and beg to be
forgiven by him.”’

‘What is the property? is it land?’ asked he, with the half-suspectfulness
of one not fully assured of what he was listening to.

‘Yes, sir; the estate is in Delos. I have seen the plan of the grounds and
gardens of the palace, which are princely. Here, on this seal,’ said she,
showing the envelope of her letter, ‘you can see the arms; papa never omits
to use it, though on his card he is written only “of the princes”--a form
observed with us.’

‘And what chance has he of getting it all back again?’

‘That is more than I can tell you; he himself is sometimes very confident,
and talks as if there could not be a doubt of it.’

‘Used your poor mother to believe it?’ asked he, half-tremulously.

‘I can scarcely say, sir; I can barely remember her; but I have heard papa
blame her for not interesting her high connections in England in his suit;
he often thought that a word to the ambassador at Athens would have almost
decided the case.’

‘High connections, indeed!’ burst he forth. ‘By my conscience, they’re
pretty much out at elbows, like himself; and if we were trying to recover
our own right to-morrow, the look-out would be bleak enough!’

‘Papa is not easily cast down, sir; he has a very sanguine spirit.’

‘Maybe you think it’s what is wanting in my case, eh, Nina? Say it out,
girl; tell me, I’d be the better for a little of your father’s hopefulness,
eh?’

‘You could not change to anything I could like better than what you are,’
said she, taking his hand and kissing it.

‘Ah, you ‘re a rare one to say coaxing things,’ said he, looking fondly on
her. ‘I believe you’d be the best advocate for either of us if the courts
would let you plead for us.’

‘I wish they would, sir,’ said she proudly.

‘What is that?’ cried he suddenly; ‘sure it’s not putting myself you are in
the picture!’

‘Of course I am, sir. Was not the O’Caharney your ancestor? Is it likely
that an old race had not traits of feature and lineament that ages of
descent could not efface? I’d swear that strong brow and frank look must be
an heirloom.’

‘’Faith, then, almost the only one!’ said he, sighing. ‘Who’s making that
noise out there?’ said he, rising and going to the window. ‘Oh, it’s Kate
with her dogs. I often tell her she ‘d keep a pair of ponies for less than
those troublesome brutes cost her.’

‘They are great company to her, she says, and she lives so much in the open
air.’

‘I know she does,’ said he, dropping his head and sitting like one whose
thoughts had taken a brooding, despondent turn.

‘One more sitting I must have, sir, for the hair. You had it beautifully
yesterday: it fell over on one side with a most perfect light on a large
lock here. Will you give me half an hour to-morrow, say?’

[Illustration: ‘One more sitting I must have, sir, for the hair’]

‘I can’t promise you, my dear. Peter Gill has been urging me to go over to
Loughrea for the fair; and if we go, we ought to be there by Saturday, and
have a quiet look at the stock before the sales begin.’

‘And are you going to be long away?’ said she poutingly, as she leaned over
the back of his chair, and suffered her curls to fall half across his face.

‘I’ll be right glad to be back again,’ said he, pressing her head down till
he could kiss her cheek, ‘right glad!’




CHAPTER VI

THE ‘BLUE GOAT’


The ‘Blue Goat’ in the small town of Moate is scarcely a model hostel.
The entrance-hall is too much encumbered by tramps and beggars of various
orders and ages, who not only resort there to take their meals and play at
cards, but to divide the spoils and settle the accounts of their several
‘industries,’ and occasionally to clear off other scores which demand
police interference. On the left is the bar; the right-hand being used as
the office of a land-agent, is besieged by crowds of country-people, in
whom, if language is to be trusted, the grievous wrongs of land-tenure
are painfully portrayed--nothing but complaint, dogged determination,
and resistance being heard on every side. Behind the bar is a long
low-ceilinged apartment, the parlour _par excellence_, only used by
distinguished visitors, and reserved on one especial evening of the
week for the meeting of the ‘Goats,’ as the members of a club call
themselves--the chief, indeed the founder, being our friend Mathew Kearney,
whose title of sovereignty was ‘Buck-Goat,’ and whose portrait, painted
by a native artist and presented by the society, figured over the
mantel-piece. The village Van Dyck would seem to have invested largely in
carmine, and though far from parsimonious of it on the cheeks and the nose
of his sitter, he was driven to work off some of his superabundant stock
on the cravat, and even the hands, which, though amicably crossed in front
of the white-waistcoated stomach, are fearfully suggestive of some recent
deed of blood. The pleasant geniality of the countenance is, however,
reassuring. Nor--except a decided squint, by which the artist had
ambitiously attempted to convey a humoristic drollery to the expression--is
there anything sinister in the portrait.

An inscription on the frame announces that this picture of their respected
founder was presented, on his fiftieth birthday, ‘To Mathew Kearney, sixth
Viscount Kilgobbin’; various devices of ‘caprine’ significance, heads,
horns, and hoofs, profusely decorating the frame. If the antiquary should
lose himself in researches for the origin of this society, it is as well
to admit at once that the landlord’s sign of the ‘Blue Goat’ gave the
initiative to the name, and that the worthy associates derived nothing
from classical authority, and never assumed to be descendants of fauns or
satyrs, but respectable shopkeepers of Moate, and unexceptional judges of
‘poteen.’ A large jug of this insinuating liquor figured on the table, and
was called ‘Goat’s-milk’; and if these humoristic traits are so carefully
enumerated, it is because they comprised all that was specially droll
or quaint in these social gatherings, the members of which were a very
commonplace set of men, who discussed their little local topics in very
ordinary fashion, slightly elevated, perhaps, in self-esteem, by thinking
how little the outer world knew of their dulness and dreariness.

As the meetings were usually determined on by the will of the president,
who announced at the hour of separation when they were to reassemble, and
as, since his niece’s arrival, Kearney had almost totally forgotten his old
associates, the club-room ceased to be regarded as the holy of holies, and
was occasionally used by the landlord for the reception of such visitors as
he deemed worthy of peculiar honour.

It was on a very wet night of that especially rainy month in the Irish
calendar, July, that two travellers sat over a turf fire in this sacred
chamber, various articles of their attire being spread out to dry before
the blaze, the owners of which actually steamed with the effects of the
heat upon their damp habiliments. Some fishing-tackle and two knapsacks,
which lay in a corner, showed they were pedestrians, and their looks,
voice, and manner proclaimed them still more unmistakably to be gentlemen.

One was a tall, sunburnt, soldierlike man of six or seven-and-thirty,
powerfully built, and with that solidity of gesture and firmness of tread
sometimes so marked with strong men. A mere glance at him showed he was a
cold, silent, somewhat haughty man, not given to hasty resolves or in any
way impulsive, and it is just possible that a long acquaintance with him
would not have revealed a great deal more. He had served in a half-dozen
regiments, and although all declared that Henry Lockwood was an honourable
fellow, a good soldier, and thoroughly ‘safe’--very meaning epithet--there
were no very deep regrets when he ‘exchanged,’ nor was there, perhaps,
one man who felt he had lost his ‘pal’ by his going. He was now in the
Carbineers, and serving as an extra aide-de-camp to the Viceroy.

Not a little unlike him in most respects was the man who sat opposite
him--a pale, finely-featured, almost effeminate-looking young fellow,
with a small line of dark moustache, and a beard _en Henri Quatre_, to
the effect of which a collar cut in Van Dyck fashion gave an especial
significance. Cecil Walpole was disposed to be pictorial in his get-up,
and the purple dye of his knickerbocker stockings, the slouching plumage
of his Tyrol hat, and the graceful hang of his jacket, had excited envy
in quarters where envy was fame. He too was on the viceregal staff, being
private secretary to his relative the Lord-Lieutenant, during whose absence
in England they had undertaken a ramble to the Westmeath lakes, not very
positive whether their object was to angle for trout or to fish for that
‘knowledge of Ireland’ so popularly sought after in our day, and which
displays itself so profusely in platform speeches and letters to the Times.
Lockwood, not impossibly, would have said it was ‘to do a bit of walking’
he had come. He had gained eight pounds by that indolent Phoenix-Park life
he was leading, and he had no fancy to go back to Leicestershire too heavy
for his cattle. He was not--few hunting men are--an ardent fisherman; and
as for the vexed question of Irish politics, he did not see why he was
to trouble his head to unravel the puzzles that were too much for Mr.
Gladstone; not to say, that he felt to meddle with these matters was like
interfering with another man’s department. ‘I don’t suspect,’ he would
say, ‘I should fancy John Bright coming down to “stables” and dictating
to me how my Irish horses should be shod, or what was the best bit for
a “borer.”’ He saw, besides, that the game of politics was a game of
compromises: something was deemed admirable now that had been hitherto
almost execrable; and that which was utterly impossible to-day, if done
last year would have been a triumphant success, and consequently he
pronounced the whole thing an ‘imposition and a humbug.’ ‘I can understand
a right and a wrong as well as any man,’ he would say, ‘but I know nothing
about things that are neither or both, according to who’s in or who’s out
of the Cabinet. Give me the command of twelve thousand men, let me divide
them into three flying columns, and if I don’t keep Ireland quiet, draft
me into a West Indian regiment, that’s all.’ And as to the idea of issuing
special commissions, passing new Acts of Parliament, or suspending old
ones, to do what he or any other intelligent soldier could do without any
knavery or any corruption, ‘John Bright might tell us,’ but he couldn’t.
And here it may be well to observe that it was a favourite form of speech
with him to refer to this illustrious public man in this familiar manner;
but always to show what a condition of muddle and confusion must ensue if
we followed the counsels that name emblematised; nor did he know a more
cutting sarcasm to reply to an adversary than when he had said, ‘Oh, John
Bright would agree with you,’ or, ‘I don’t think John Bright could go
further.’

Of a very different stamp was his companion. He was a young gentleman whom
we cannot more easily characterise than by calling him, in the cant of the
day, ‘of the period.’ He was essentially the most recent product of the age
we live in. Manly enough in some things, he was fastidious in others to
the very verge of effeminacy; an aristocrat by birth and by predilection,
he made a parade of democratic opinions. He affected a sort of Crichtonism
in the variety of his gifts, and as linguist, musician, artist, poet, and
philosopher, loved to display the scores of things he might be, instead of
that mild, very ordinary young gentleman that he was. He had done a little
of almost everything: he had been in the Guards, in diplomacy, in the House
for a brief session, had made an African tour, written a pleasant little
book about the Nile, with the illustrations by his own hand. Still he was
greater in promise than performance. There was an opera of his partly
finished; a five-act comedy almost ready for the stage; a half-executed
group he had left in some studio in Rome, showed what he might have done
in sculpture. When his distinguished relative the Marquis of Danesbury
recalled him from his post as secretary of legation in Italy, to join him
at his Irish seat of government, the phrase in which he invited him to
return is not without its significance, and we give it as it occurred in
the context: ‘I have no fancy for the post they have assigned me, nor is
it what I had hoped for. They say, however, I shall succeed here. _Nous
verrons_. Meanwhile, I remember your often remarking, “There is a great
game to be played in Ireland.” Come over at once, then, and let me have a
talk with you over it. I shall manage the question of your leave by making
you private secretary for the moment. We shall have many difficulties, but
Ireland will be the worst of them. Do not delay, therefore, for I shall
only go over to be sworn in, etc., and return for the third reading of the
Church Bill, and I should like to see you in Dublin (and leave you there)
when I go.’

Except that they were both members of the viceregal household, and English
by birth, there was scarcely a tie between these very dissimilar natures;
but somehow the accidents of daily life, stronger than the traits of
disposition, threw them into intimacy, and they agreed it would be a good
thing ‘to see something of Ireland’; and with this wise resolve they had
set out on that half-fishing excursion, which, having taken them over
the Westmeath lakes, now was directing them to the Shannon, but with an
infirmity of purpose to which lack of sport and disastrous weather were
contributing powerfully at the moment we have presented them to our reader.

To employ the phrase which it is possible each might have used, they ‘liked
each other well enough’--that is, each found something in the other he
‘could get on with’; but there was no stronger tie of regard or friendship
between them, and each thought he perceived some flaw of pretension, or
affected wisdom, or selfishness, or vanity, in the other, and actually
believed he amused himself by its display. In natures, tastes, and
dispositions, they were miles asunder, and disagreement between them would
have been unceasing on every subject, had they not been gentlemen. It was
this alone--this gentleman element--made their companionship possible, and,
in the long run, not unpleasant. So much more has good-breeding to do in
the common working of daily life than the more valuable qualities of mind
and temperament.

Though much younger than his companion, Walpole took the lead in all the
arrangements of the journey, determined where and how long they should
halt, and decided on the route next to be taken; the other showing a real
or affected indifference on all these matters, and making of his town-bred
apathy a very serviceable quality in the midst of Irish barbarism
and desolation. On politics, too--if that be the name for such light
convictions as they entertained--they differed: the soldier’s ideas being
formed on what he fancied would be the late Duke of Wellington’s opinion,
and consisted in what he called ‘putting down.’ Walpole was a promising
Whig; that is, one who coquets with Radical notions, but fastidiously
avoids contact with the mob; and who, fervently believing that all popular
concessions are spurious if not stamped with Whig approval, would like to
treat the democratic leaders as forgers and knaves.

If, then, there was not much of similarity between these two men to attach
them to each other, there was what served for a bond of union: they
belonged to the same class in life, and used pretty nigh the same forms
for their expression of like and dislike; and as in traffic it contributes
wonderfully to the facilities of business to use the same money, so in the
common intercourse of life will the habit to estimate things at the same
value conduce to very easy relations, and something almost like friendship.

While they sat over the fire awaiting their supper, each had lighted a
cigar, busying himself from time to time in endeavouring to dry some
drenched article of dress, or extracting from damp and dripping pockets
their several contents.

‘This, then,’ said the younger man--‘this is the picturesque Ireland
our tourist writers tell us of; and the land where the _Times_ says
the traveller will find more to interest him than in the Tyrol or the
Oberland.’

‘What about the climate?’ said the other, in a deep bass voice.

‘Mild and moist, I believe, are the epithets; that is, it makes you damp,
and it keeps you so.’

‘And the inns?’

‘The inns, it is admitted, might be better; but the traveller is admonished
against fastidiousness, and told that the prompt spirit of obligeance,
the genial cordiality, he will meet with, are more than enough to repay
him for the want of more polished habits and mere details of comfort and
convenience.’

‘Rotten humbug! _I_ don’t want cordiality from my innkeeper.’

‘I should think not! As, for instance, a bit of carpet in this room would
be worth more than all the courtesy that showed us in.’

‘What was that lake called--the first place I mean?’ asked Lockwood.

‘Lough Brin. I shouldn’t say but with better weather it might be pretty.’

A half-grunt of dissent was all the reply, and Walpole went on--

It’s no use painting a landscape when it is to be smudged all over with
Indian ink. There are no tints in mountains swathed in mist, no colour in
trees swamped with moisture; everything seems so imbued with damp, one
fancies it would take two years in the tropics to dry Ireland.’

‘I asked that fellow who showed us the way here, why he didn’t pitch off
those wet rags he wore, and walk away in all the dignity of nakedness.’

A large dish of rashers and eggs, and a mess of Irish stew, which the
landlord now placed on the table, with a foaming jug of malt, seemed to
rally them out of their ill-temper; and for some time they talked away in a
more cheerful tone.

‘Better than I hoped for,’ said Walpole.

‘Fair!’

‘And that ale, too--I suppose it is called ale--is very tolerable.’

‘It’s downright good. Let us have some more of it.’ And he shouted,
‘Master!’ at the top of his voice. ‘More of this,’ said Lockwood, touching
the measure. ‘Beer or ale, which is it?’

‘Castle Bellingham, sir,’ replied the landlord; ‘beats all the Bass and
Allsopp that ever was brewed.’

‘You think so, eh?’

‘I’m sure of it, sir. The club that sits here had a debate on it one night,
and put it to the vote, and there wasn’t one man for the English liquor. My
lord there,’ said he, pointing to the portrait, ‘sent an account of it all
to _Saunders_’ newspaper.’

While he left the room to fetch the ale, the travellers both fixed
their eyes on the picture, and Walpole, rising, read out the
inscription--‘Viscount Kilgobbin.’

‘There’s no such title,’ said the other bluntly.

‘Lord Kilgobbin--Kilgobbin? Where did I hear that name before?’

‘In a dream, perhaps.’

‘No, no. I _have_ heard it, if I could only remember where and how! I say,
landlord, where does his lordship live?’ and he pointed to the portrait.

‘Beyond, at the castle, sir. You can see it from the door without when the
weather’s fine.’

‘That must mean on a very rare occasion!’ said Lockwood gravely.

‘No indeed, sir. It didn’t begin to rain on Tuesday last till after three
o’clock.’

‘Magnificent climate!’ exclaimed Walpole enthusiastically.

‘It is indeed, sir. Glory be to God!’ said the landlord, with an honest
gravity that set them both off laughing.

‘How about this club--does it meet often?’

‘It used, sir, to meet every Thursday evening, and my lord never missed
a night, but quite lately he took it in his head not to come out in the
evenings. Some say it was the rheumatism, and more says it’s the unsettled
state of the country; though, the Lord be praised for it, there wasn’t a
man fired at in the neighbourhood since Easter, and _he_ was a peeler.’

‘One of the constabulary?’

‘Yes, sir; a dirty, mean chap, that was looking after a poor boy that set
fire to Mr. Hagin’s ricks, and that was over a year ago.’

‘And naturally forgotten by this time?’

‘By coorse it was forgotten. Ould Mat Hagin got a presentment for the
damage out of the grand-jury, and nobody was the worse for it at all.’

‘And so the club is smashed, eh?’

‘As good as smashed, sir; for whenever any of them comes now of an evening,
he just goes into the bar and takes his glass there.’

He sighed heavily as he said this, and seemed overcome with sadness.

‘I’m trying to remember why the name is so familiar to me. I know I have
heard of Lord Kilgobbin before,’ said Walpole.

‘Maybe so,’ said the landlord respectfully. ‘You may have read in books
how it was at Kilgobbin Castle King James came to stop after the Boyne;
that he held a “coort” there in the big drawing-room--they call it the
“throne-room” ever since--and slept two nights at the castle afterwards?’

‘That’s something to see, Walpole,’ said Lockwood.

‘So it is. How is that to be managed, landlord? Does his lordship permit
strangers to visit the castle?’

‘Nothing easier than that, sir,’ said the host, who gladly embraced a
project that should detain his guests at the inn. ‘My lord went through the
town this morning on his way to Loughrea fair; but the young ladies is at
home; and you’ve only to send over a message, and say you’d like to see the
place, and they’ll be proud to show it to you.’

‘Let us send our cards, with a line in pencil,’ said Walpole, in a whisper
to his friend.

‘And there are young ladies there?’ asked Lockwood.

‘Two born beauties; it’s hard to say which is handsomest,’ replied the
host, overjoyed at the attraction his neighbourhood possessed.

‘I suppose that will do?’ said Walpole, showing what he had written on his
card.

‘Yes, perfectly.’

‘Despatch this at once. I mean early to-morrow; and let your messenger ask
if there be an answer. How far is it off?’

‘A little over twelve miles, sir; but I’ve a mare in the stable will
“rowle” ye over in an hour and a quarter.’

‘All right. We’ll settle on everything after breakfast to-morrow.’ And the
landlord withdrew, leaving them once more alone.

‘This means,’ said Lockwood drearily, ‘we shall have to pass a day in this
wretched place.’

‘It will take a day to dry our wet clothes; and, all things considered, one
might be worse off than here. Besides, I shall want to look over my notes.
I have done next to nothing, up to this time, about the Land Question.’

‘I thought that the old fellow with the cow, the fellow I gave a cigar to,
had made you up in your tenant-right affair,’ said Lockwood.

‘He gave me a great deal of very valuable information; he exposed some of
the evils of tenancy at will as ably as I ever heard them treated, but he
was occasionally hard on the landlord.’

‘I suppose one word of truth never came out of his mouth!’

‘On the contrary, real knowledge of Ireland is not to be acquired from
newspapers; a man must see Ireland for himself--_see_ it,’ repeated he,
with strong emphasis.

‘And then?’

‘And then, if he be a capable man, a reflecting man, a man in whom the
perceptive power is joined to the social faculty--’

‘Look here, Cecil, one hearer won’t make a House: don’t try it on
speechifying to me. It’s all humbug coming over to look at Ireland. You may
pick up a little brogue, but it’s all you’ll pick up for your journey.’
After this, for him, unusually long speech, he finished his glass, lighted
his bedroom candle, and nodding a good-night, strolled away.

‘I’d give a crown to know where I heard of you before!’ said Walpole, as he
stared up at the portrait.




CHAPTER VII

THE COUSINS


‘Only think of it!’ cried Kate to her cousin, as she received Walpole’s
note. ‘Can you fancy, Nina, any one having the curiosity to imagine this
old house worth a visit? Here is a polite request from two tourists to be
allowed to see the--what is it?--the interesting interior of Kilgobbin
Castle!’

‘Which I hope and trust you will refuse. The people who are so eager for
these things are invariably tiresome old bores, grubbing for antiquities,
or intently bent on adding a chapter to their story of travel. You’ll say
No, dearest, won’t you?’

‘Certainly, if you wish it. I am not acquainted with Captain Lockwood, nor
his friend Mr. Cecil Walpole.’

‘Did you say Cecil Walpole?’ cried the other, almost snatching the card
from her fingers. ‘Of all the strange chances in life, this is the very
strangest! What could have brought Cecil Walpole here?’

‘You know him, then?’

‘I should think I do! What duets have we not sung together? What waltzes
have we not had? What rides over the Campagna? Oh dear! how I should like
to talk over these old times again! Pray tell him he may come, Kate, or let
me do it.’

‘And papa away!’

‘It is the castle, dearest, he wants to see, not papa! You don’t know
what manner of creature this is! He is one of your refined and supremely
cultivated English--mad about archæology and mediæval trumpery. He’ll know
all your ancestors intended by every insane piece of architecture, and
every puzzling detail of this old house; and he’ll light up every corner of
it with some gleam of bright tradition.’

‘I thought these sort of people were bores, dear?’ said Kate, with a sly
malice in her look.

‘Of course not. When they are well-bred and well-mannered---’

‘And perhaps well-looking?’ chimed in Kate.

‘Yes, and so he is--a little of the _petit-maître_, perhaps. He’s much of
that school which fiction-writers describe as having “finely-pencilled
eyebrows, and chins of almost womanlike roundness”; but people in Rome
always called him handsome, that is if he be my Cecil Walpole.’

‘Well, then, will you tell YOUR Cecil Walpole, in such polite terms as
you know how to coin, that there is really nothing of the very slightest
pretension to interest in this old place; that we should be ashamed at
having lent ourselves to the delusion that might have led him here; and
lastly, that the owner is from home?’

‘What! and is this the Irish hospitality I have heard so much of--the
cordial welcome the stranger may reckon on as a certainty, and make all his
plans with the full confidence of meeting?’

‘There is such a thing as discretion, also, to be remembered, Nina,’ said
Kate gravely.

‘And then there’s the room where the king slept, and the chair that--no,
not Oliver Cromwell, but somebody else sat in at supper, and there’s the
great patch painted on the floor where your ancestor knelt to be knighted.’

‘He was created a viscount, not a knight!’ said Kate, blushing. ‘And there
is a difference, I assure you.’

‘So there is, dearest, and even my foreign ignorance should know that much,
and you have the parchment that attests it--a most curious document, that
Walpole would be delighted to see. I almost fancy him examining the curious
old seal with his microscope, and hear him unfolding all sorts of details
one never so much as suspected.’

‘Papa might not like it,’ said Kate, bridling up. ‘Even were he at home,
I am far from certain he would receive these gentlemen. It is little
more than a year ago there came here a certain book-writing tourist, and
presented himself without introduction. We received him hospitably, and he
stayed part of a week here. He was fond of antiquarianism, but more eager
still about the condition of the people--what kind of husbandry they
practised, what wages they had, and what food. Papa took him over the whole
estate, and answered all his questions freely and openly. And this man made
a chapter of his book upon us, and headed it, “Rack-renting and riotous
living,” distorting all he heard and sneering at all he saw.’

‘These are gentlemen, dearest Kate,’ said Nina, holding out the card. ‘Come
now, do tell me that I may say you will be happy to see them?’

‘If you must have it so--if you really insist--’

‘I do! I do!’ cried she, half wildly. ‘I should go distracted if you denied
me. O Kate! I must own it. It will out. I do cling devotedly, terribly, to
that old life of the past. I am very happy here, and you are all good, and
kind, and loving to me; but that wayward, haphazard existence, with all its
trials and miseries, had got little glimpses of such bliss at times that
rose to actual ecstasy.’

‘I was afraid of this,’ said Kate, in a low but firm voice. ‘I thought what
a change it would be for you from that life of brightness and festivity to
this existence of dull and unbroken dreariness.’

‘No, no, no! Don’t say that! Do not fancy that I am not happier than I
ever was or ever believed I could be. It was the castle-building of that
time that I was regretting. I imagined so many things, I invented such
situations, such incidents, which, with this sad-coloured landscape here
and that leaden sky, I have no force to conjure up. It is as though the
atmosphere is too weighty for fancy to mount in it. You, my dearest Kate,’
said she, drawing her arm round her, and pressing her towards her, ‘do not
know these things, nor need ever know them. Your life is assured and safe.
You cannot, indeed, be secure from the passing accidents of life, but they
will meet you in a spirit able to confront them. As for me, I was always
gambling for existence, and gambling without means to pay my losses if
Fortune should turn against me. Do you understand me, child?’

‘Only in part, if even that,’ said she slowly.

‘Let us keep this theme, then, for another time. Now for _ces messieurs_. I
am to invite them?’

‘If there was time to ask Miss O’Shea to come over--’

‘Do you not fancy, Kate, that in your father’s house, surrounded with
your father’s servants, you are sufficiently the mistress to do without a
chaperon? Only preserve that grand austere look you have listened to me
with these last ten minutes, and I should like to see the youthful audacity
that could brave it. There, I shall go and write my note. You shall see how
discreetly and properly I shall word it.’

Kate walked thoughtfully towards a window and looked out, while Nina
skipped gaily down the room, and opened her writing-desk, humming an opera
air as she wrote:--

‘KILGOBBIN CASTLE.

‘DEAR MR. WALPOLE,--I can scarcely tell you the pleasure I feel at the
prospect of seeing a dear friend, or a friend from dear Italy, whichever
be the most proper to say. My uncle is from home, and will not return till
the day after to-morrow at dinner; but my cousin, Miss Kearney, charges
me to say how happy she will be to receive you and your fellow-traveller
at luncheon to-morrow. Pray not to trouble yourself with an answer, but
believe me very sincerely yours, ‘NINA KOSTALERGI.’

‘I was right in saying luncheon, Kate, and not dinner--was I not? It is
less formal.’

‘I suppose so; that is, if it was right to invite them at all, of which I
have very great misgivings.’

‘I wonder what brought Cecil Walpole down here?’ said Nina, glad to turn
the discussion into another channel. ‘Could he have heard that I was here?
Probably not. It was a mere chance, I suppose. Strange things these same
chances are, that do so much more in our lives than all our plottings!’

‘Tell me something of your friend, perhaps I ought to say your admirer,
Nina!’

‘Yes, very much my admirer; not seriously, you know, but in that charming
sort of adoration we cultivate abroad, that means anything or nothing. He
was not titled, and I am afraid he was not rich, and this last misfortune
used to make his attention to me somewhat painful--to _him_ I mean, not to
_me_; for, of course, as to anything serious, I looked much higher than a
poor Secretary of Legation.’

‘Did you?’ asked Kate, with an air of quiet simplicity.

‘I should hope I did,’ said she haughtily; and she threw a glance at
herself in a large mirror, and smiled proudly at the bright image that
confronted her. ‘Yes, darling, say it out,’ cried she, turning to Kate.
‘Your eyes have uttered the words already.’

‘What words?’

‘Something about insufferable vanity and conceit, and I own to both! Oh,
why is it that my high spirits have so run away with me this morning that
I have forgotten all reserve and all shame? But the truth is, I feel half
wild with joy, and joy in _my_ nature is another name for recklessness.’

‘I sincerely hope not,’ said Kate gravely. ‘At any rate, you give me
another reason for wishing to have Miss O’Shea here.’

‘I will not have her--no, not for worlds, Kate, that odious old woman, with
her stiff and antiquated propriety. Cecil would quiz her.’

‘I am very certain he would not; at least, if he be such a perfect
gentleman as you tell me.’

‘Ah, but you’d never know he did it. The fine tact of these consummate men
of the world derives a humoristic enjoyment in eccentricity of character,
which never shows itself in any outward sign beyond the heightened pleasure
they feel in what other folks might call dulness or mere oddity.’

‘I would not suffer an old friend to be made the subject of even such
latent amusement.’

‘Nor her nephew, either, perhaps?’

‘The nephew could take care of himself, Nina; but I am not aware that he
will be called on to do so. He is not in Ireland, I believe.’

‘He was to arrive this week. You told me so.’

‘Perhaps he did; I had forgotten it!’ and Kate flushed as she spoke, though
whether from shame or anger it was not easy to say. As though impatient
with herself at any display of temper, she added hurriedly, ‘Was it not
a piece of good fortune, Nina? Papa has left us the key of the cellar, a
thing he never did before, and only now because you were here!’

‘What an honoured guest I am!’ said the other, smiling.

‘That you are! I don’t believe papa has gone once to the club since you
came here.’

‘Now, if I were to own that I was vain of this, you’d rebuke me, would not
you?’

‘_Our_ love could scarcely prompt to vanity.’

‘How shall I ever learn to be humble enough in a family of such humility?’
said Nina pettishly. Then quickly correcting herself, she said, ‘I’ll go
and despatch my note, and then I’ll come back and ask your pardon for all
my wilfulness, and tell you how much I thank you for all your goodness to
me.’

And as she spoke she bent down and kissed Kate’s hand twice or thrice
fervently.

‘Oh, dearest Nina, not this--not this!’ said Kate, trying to clasp her in
her arms; but the other had slipped from her grasp, and was gone.

‘Strange girl,’ muttered Kate, looking after her. ‘I wonder shall I ever
understand you, or shall we ever understand each other?’




CHAPTER VIII

SHOWING HOW FRIENDS MAY DIFFER


The morning broke drearily for our friends, the two pedestrians, at the
‘Blue Goat.’ A day of dull aspect and soft rain in midsummer has the added
depression that it seems an anachronism. One is in a measure prepared for
being weather-bound in winter. You accept imprisonment as the natural
fortune of the season, or you brave the elements prepared to let them do
their worst, while, if confined to house, you have that solace of snugness,
that comfortable chimney-corner which somehow realises an immense amount
of the joys we concentrate in the word ‘Home.’ It is in the want of this
rallying-point, this little domestic altar, where all gather together in a
common worship, that lies the dreary discomfort of being weather-bound in
summer, and when the prison is some small village inn, noisy, disorderly,
and dirty, the misery is complete.

‘Grand old pig that!’ said Lockwood, as he gazed out upon the filthy yard,
where a fat old sow contemplated the weather from the threshold of her
dwelling.

‘I wish she’d come out. I want to make a sketch of her,’ said the other.

‘Even one’s tobacco grows too damp to smoke in this blessed climate,’ said
Lockwood, as he pitched his cigar away. ‘Heigh-ho! We ‘re too late for the
train to town, I see.’

‘You’d not go back, would you?’

‘I should think I would! That old den in the upper castle-yard is not very
cheery or very nice, but there is a chair to sit on, and a review and a
newspaper to read. A tour in a country and with a climate like this is a
mistake.’

‘I suspect it is,’ said Walpole drearily.

‘There is nothing to see, no one to talk to, nowhere to stop at!’

‘All true,’ muttered the other. ‘By the way, haven’t we some plan or
project for to-day--something about an old castle or an abbey to see?’

‘Yes, and the waiter brought me a letter. I think it was addressed to you,
and I left it on my dressing-table. I had forgotten all about it. I’ll go
and fetch it.’

Short as his absence was, it gave Walpole time enough to recur to his
late judgment on his tour, and once more call it a ‘mistake, a complete
mistake.’ The Ireland of wits, dramatists, and romance-writers was a
conventional thing, and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the rain-soaked,
dreary-looking, depressed reality. ‘These Irish, they are odd without being
droll, just as they are poor without being picturesque; but of all the
delusions we nourish about them, there is not one so thoroughly absurd as
to call them dangerous.’

He had just arrived at this mature opinion, when his friend re-entered and
handed him the note.

‘Here is a piece of luck. _Per Bacco_!’ cried Walpole, as he ran over the
lines. ‘This beats all I could have hoped for. Listen to this--“Dear Mr.
Walpole,--I cannot tell you the delight I feel in the prospect of seeing a
dear friend, or a friend from dear Italy, which is it? “’

‘Who writes this?’

‘A certain Mademoiselle Kostalergi, whom I knew at Rome; one of the
prettiest, cleverest, and nicest girls I ever met in my life.’

‘Not the daughter of that precious Count Kostalergi you have told me such
stories of?’

‘The same, but most unlike him in every way. She is here, apparently
with an uncle, who is now from home, and she and her cousin invite us to
luncheon to-day.’

‘What a lark!’ said the other dryly.

‘We’ll go, of course?’

‘In weather like this?’

‘Why not? Shall we be better off staying here? I now begin to remember how
the name of this place was so familiar to me. She was always asking me if
I knew or heard of her mother’s brother, the Lord Kilgobbin, and, to tell
truth, I fancied some one had been hoaxing her with the name, and never
believed that there was even a place with such a designation.’

‘Kilgobbin does not sound like a lordly title. How about Mademoiselle--what
is the name?’

‘Kostalergi; they call themselves princes.’

‘With all my heart. I was only going to say, as you’ve got a sort of knack
of entanglement--is there, or has there been, anything of that sort here?’

‘Flirtation--a little of what is called “spooning”--but no more. But why do
you ask?’

‘First of all, you are an engaged man.’

‘All true, and I mean to keep my engagement. I can’t marry, however, till I
get a mission, or something at home as good as a mission. Lady Maude
knows that; her friends know it, but none of us imagine that we are to be
miserable in the meantime.’

‘I’m not talking of misery. I’d only say, don’t get yourself into any mess.
These foreign girls are very wide-awake.’

‘Don’t believe that, Harry; one of our home-bred damsels would give them
a distance and beat them in the race for a husband. It’s only in England
girls are trained to angle for marriage, take my word for it.’

‘Be it so--I only warn you that if you get into any scrape I’ll accept none
of the consequences. Lord Danesbury is ready enough to say that, because I
am some ten years older than you, I should have kept you out of mischief. I
never contracted for such a bear-leadership; though I certainly told Lady
Maude I’d turn Queen’s evidence against you if you became a traitor.’

‘I wonder you never told me that before,’ said Walpole, with some
irritation of manner.

‘I only wonder that I told it now!’ replied the other gruffly.

‘Then I am to take it, that in your office of guardian, you’d rather we’d
decline this invitation, eh?’

‘I don’t care a rush for it either way, but, looking to the sort of day it
is out there, I incline to keep the house.’

‘I don’t mind bad weather, and I’ll go,’ said Walpole, in a way that showed
temper was involved in the resolution.

Lockwood made no other reply than heaping a quantity of turf on the fire,
and seating himself beside it.

When a man tells his fellow-traveller that he means to go his own
road--that companionship has no tie upon him--he virtually declares the
partnership dissolved; and while Lockwood sat reflecting over this, he
was also canvassing with himself how far he might have been to blame in
provoking this hasty resolution.

‘Perhaps he was irritated at my counsels, perhaps the notion of anything
like guidance offended him; perhaps it was the phrase, “bear-leadership,”
 and the half-threat of betraying him, has done the mischief.’ Now the
gallant soldier was a slow thinker; it took him a deal of time to arrange
the details of any matter in his mind, and when he tried to muster his
ideas there were many which would not answer the call, and of those
which came, there were not a few which seemed to present themselves in a
refractory and unwilling spirit, so that he had almost to suppress a mutiny
before he proceeded to his inspection.

Nor did the strong cheroots, which he smoked to clear his faculties and
develop his mental resources, always contribute to this end, though their
soothing influence certainly helped to make him more satisfied with his
judgments.

‘Now, look here, Walpole,’ said he, determining that he would save himself
all unnecessary labour of thought by throwing the burden of the case on the
respondent--‘Look here; take a calm view of this thing, and see if it’s
quite wise in you to go back into trammels it cost you some trouble to
escape from. You call it spooning, but you won’t deny you went very far
with that young woman--farther, I suspect, than you’ve told me yet. Eh! is
that true or not?’

He waited a reasonable time for a reply, but none coming, he went on--‘I
don’t want a forced confidence. You may say it’s no business of mine, and
there I agree with you, and probably if you put _me_ to the question in
the same fashion, I’d give you a very short answer. Remember one thing,
however, old fellow--I’ve seen a precious deal more of life and the world
than you have! From sixteen years of age, when _you_ were hammering away at
Greek verbs and some such balderdash at Oxford, I was up at Rangoon with
the very fastest set of men--ay, of women too--I ever lived with in all my
life. Half of our fellows were killed off by it. Of course people will say
climate, climate! but if I were to give you the history of one day--just
twenty-four hours of our life up there--you’d say that the wonder is
there’s any one alive to tell it.’

He turned around at this, to enjoy the expression of horror and surprise
he hoped to have called up, and perceived for the first time that he was
alone. He rang the bell, and asked the waiter where the other gentleman
had gone, and learned that he had ordered a car, and set out for Kilgobbin
Castle more than half an hour before.

‘All right,’ said he fiercely. ‘I wash my hands of it altogether! I’m
heartily glad I told him so before he went.’ He smoked on very vigorously
for half an hour, the burden of his thoughts being perhaps revealed by
the summing-up, as he said, ‘And when you are “in for it,” Master Cecil,
and some precious scrape it will be, if I move hand or foot to pull you
through it, call me a Major of Marines, that’s all--just call me a Major of
Marines!’ The ineffable horror of such an imputation served as matter for
reverie for hours.




CHAPTER IX

A DRIVE THROUGH A BOG


While Lockwood continued thus to doubt and debate with himself, Walpole was
already some miles on his way to Kilgobbin. Not, indeed, that he had made
any remarkable progress, for the ‘mare that was to rowle his honour over in
an hour and a quarter,’ had to be taken from the field where she had been
ploughing since daybreak, while ‘the boy’ that should drive her, was a
little old man who had to be aroused from a condition of drunkenness in a
hayloft, and installed in his office.

Nor were these the only difficulties. The roads that led through the bog
were so numerous and so completely alike that it only needed the dense
atmosphere of a rainy day to make it matter of great difficulty to discover
the right track. More than once were they obliged to retrace their steps
after a considerable distance, and the driver’s impatience always took the
shape of a reproach to Walpole, who, having nothing else to do, should
surely have minded where they were going. Now, not only was the traveller
utterly ignorant of the geography of the land he journeyed in, but his
thoughts were far and away from the scenes around him. Very scattered
and desultory thoughts were they, at one time over the Alps and with
‘long-agoes’: nights at Rome clashing with mornings on the Campagna; vast
salons crowded with people of many nations, all more or less busy with that
great traffic which, whether it take the form of religion, or politics, or
social intrigue, hate, love, or rivalry, makes up what we call ‘the world’;
or there were sunsets dying away rapidly--as they will do--over that great
plain outside the city, whereon solitude and silence are as much masters as
on a vast prairie of the West; and he thought of times when he rode back at
nightfall beside Nina Kostalergi, when little flashes would cross them of
that romance that very worldly folk now and then taste of, and delight in,
with a zest all the greater that the sensation is so new and strange to
them. Then there was the revulsion from the blaze of waxlights and the
glitter of diamonds, the crash of orchestras and the din of conversation,
the intoxication of the flattery that champagne only seems to ‘accentuate,’
to the unbroken stillness of the hour, when even the footfall of the horse
is unheard, and a dreamy doubt that this quietude, this soothing sense of
calm, is higher happiness than all the glitter and all the splendour of the
ball-room, and that in the dropping words we now exchange, and in the stray
glances, there is a significance and an exquisite delight we never felt
till now; for, glorious as is the thought of a returned affection, full
of ecstasy the sense of a heart all, all our own, there is, in the first
half-doubtful, distrustful feeling of falling in love, with all its chances
of success or failure, something that has its moments of bliss nothing of
earthly delight can ever equal. To the verge of that possibility Walpole
had reached--but gone no further--with Nina Kostalergi. The young men of
the age are an eminently calculating and prudent class, and they count the
cost of an action with a marvellous amount of accuracy. Is it the turf and
its teachings to which this crafty and cold-blooded spirit is owing? Have
they learned to ‘square their book’ on life by the lessons of Ascot and
Newmarket, and seen that, no matter how probably they ‘stand to win’ on
this, they must provide for that, and that no caution or foresight is
enough that will not embrace every casualty of any venture?

There is no need to tell a younger son of the period that he must not marry
a pretty girl of doubtful family and no fortune. He may have his doubts on
scores of subjects: he may not be quite sure whether he ought to remain a
Whig with Lord Russell, or go in for Odgerism and the ballot; he may be
uncertain about Colenso, and have his misgivings about the Pentateuch;
he may not be easy in his mind about the Russians in the East, or the
Americans in the West; uncomfortable suspicions may cross him that the
Volunteers are not as quick in evolution as the Zouaves, or that England
generally does not sing ‘Rule Britannia’ so lustily as she used to do. All
these are possible misgivings, but that he should take such a plunge as
matrimony, on other grounds than the perfect prudence and profit of the
investment, could never occur to him.

As to the sinfulness of tampering with a girl’s affections by what in slang
is called ‘spooning,’ it was purely absurd to think of it. You might as
well say that playing sixpenny whist made a man a gambler. And then, as
to the spooning, it was _partie égale_, the lady was no worse off than
the gentleman. If there were by any hazard--and this he was disposed to
doubt--‘affections’ at stake, the man ‘stood to lose’ as much as the woman.
But this was not the aspect in which the case presented itself, flirtation
being, in his idea, to marriage what the preliminary canter is to the
race--something to indicate the future, but so dimly and doubtfully as not
to decide the hesitation of the waverer.

If, then, Walpole was never for a moment what mothers call serious in his
attentions to Mademoiselle Kostalergi, he was not the less fond of her
society; he frequented the places where she was likely to be met with, and
paid her that degree of ‘court’ that only stopped short of being particular
by his natural caution. There was the more need for the exercise of this
quality at Rome, since there were many there who knew of his engagement
with his cousin, Lady Maude, and who would not have hesitated to report on
any breach of fidelity. Now, however, all these restraints were withdrawn.
They were not in Italy, where London, by a change of venue, takes its
‘records’ to be tried in the dull days of winter. They were in Ireland,
and in a remote spot of Ireland, where there were no gossips, no clubs, no
afternoon-tea committees, to sit on reputations, and was it not pleasant
now to see this nice girl again in perfect freedom? These were, loosely
stated, the thoughts which occupied him as he went along, very little
disposed to mind how often the puzzled driver halted to decide the road, or
how frequently he retraced miles of distance. Men of the world, especially
when young in life, and more realistic than they will be twenty years
later, proud of the incredulity they can feel on the score of everything
and everybody, are often fond of making themselves heroes to their own
hearts of some little romance, which shall not cost them dearly to indulge
in, and merely engage some loose-lying sympathies without in any way
prejudicing their road in life. They accept of these sentimentalities as
the vicar’s wife did the sheep in the picture, pleased to ‘have as many as
the painter would put in for nothing.’

Now, Cecil Walpole never intended that this little Irish episode--and
episode he determined it should be--should in any degree affect the
serious fortunes of his life. He was engaged to his cousin, Lady Maude
Bickerstaffe, and they would be married some day. Not that either was very
impatient to exchange present comfort--and, on her side, affluence--for a
marriage on small means, and no great prospects beyond that. They were not
much in love. Walpole knew that the Lady Maude’s fortune was small, but the
man who married her must ‘be taken care of,’ and by either side, for there
were as many Tories as Whigs in the family, and Lady Maude knew that
half-a-dozen years ago, she would certainly not have accepted Walpole; but
that with every year her chances of a better _parti_ were diminishing; and,
worse than all this, each was well aware of the inducements by which the
other was influenced. Nor did the knowledge in any way detract from their
self-complacence or satisfaction with the match.

Lady Maude was to accompany her uncle to Ireland, and do the honours of his
court, for he was a bachelor, and pleaded hard with his party on that score
to be let off accepting the viceroyalty.

Lady Maude, however, had not yet arrived, and even if she had, how should
she ever hear of an adventure in the Bog of Allen!

But was there to be an adventure? and, if so, what sort of adventure?
Irishmen, Walpole had heard, had all the jealousy about their women that
characterises savage races, and were ready to resent what, in civilised
people, no one would dream of regarding as matter for umbrage. Well, then,
it was only to be more cautious--more on one’s guard--besides the tact,
too, which a knowledge of life should give--

‘Eh, what’s this? Why are you stopping here?’

This was addressed now to the driver, who had descended from his box, and
was standing in advance of the horse.

‘Why don’t I drive on, is it?’ asked he, in a voice of despair. ‘Sure,
there’s no road.’

‘And does it stop here?’ cried Walpole in horror, for he now perceived that
the road really came to an abrupt ending in the midst of the bog.

‘Begorra, it’s just what it does. Ye see, your honour,’ added he, in a
confidential tone, ‘it’s one of them tricks the English played us in
the year of the famine. They got two millions of money to make roads in
Ireland, but they were so afraid it would make us prosperous and richer
than themselves, that they set about making roads that go nowhere.
Sometimes to the top of a mountain, or down to the sea, where there was no
harbour, and sometimes, like this one, into the heart of a bog.’

‘That was very spiteful and very mean, too,’ said Walpole.

‘Wasn’t it just mean, and nothing else! and it’s five miles we’ll have to
go back now to the cross-roads. Begorra, your honour, it’s a good dhrink
ye’ll have to give me for this day’s work.’

‘You forget, my friend, that but for your own confounded stupidity, I
should have been at Kilgobbin Castle by this time.’

‘And ye’ll be there yet, with God’s help!’ said he, turning the horse’s
head. ‘Bad luck to them for the road-making, and it’s a pity, after all, it
goes nowhere, for it’s the nicest bit to travel in the whole country.’

‘Come now, jump up, old fellow, and make your beast step out. I don’t want
to pass the night here.’

‘You wouldn’t have a dhrop of whisky with your honour?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Nor even brandy?’

‘No, not even brandy.’

‘Musha, I’m thinking you must be English,’ muttered he, half sulkily.

‘And if I were, is there any great harm in that?’

‘By coorse not; how could ye help it? I suppose we’d all of us be better
if we could. Sit a bit more forward, your honour; the belly band does be
lifting her, and as you’re doing nothing, just give her a welt of that
stick in your hand, now and then, for I lost the lash off my whip, and I’ve
nothing but this!’ And he displayed the short handle of what had once been
a whip, with a thong of leather dangling at the end.

‘I must say I wasn’t aware that I was to have worked my passage,’ said
Walpole, with something between drollery and irritation.

‘She doesn’t care for bating--stick her with the end of it. That’s the way.
We’ll get on elegant now. I suppose you was never here before?’

‘No; and I think I can promise you I’ll not come again.’

‘I hope you will, then, and many a time too. This is the Bog of Allen
you’re travelling now, and they tell there’s not the like of it in the
three kingdoms.’

‘I trust there’s not!’

‘The English, they say, has no bogs. Nothing but coal.’

‘Quite true.’

‘Erin, _ma bouchal_ you are! first gem of the say! that’s what Dan
O’Connell always called you. Are you gettin’ tired with the stick?’

‘I’m tired of your wretched old beast, and your car, and yourself, too,’
said Walpole; ‘and if I were sure that was the castle yonder, I’d make my
way straight to it on foot.’

‘And why wouldn’t you, if your honour liked it best? Why would ye be
beholden to a car if you’d rather walk. Only mind the bog-holes: for
there’s twenty feet of water in some of them, and the sides is so straight,
you’ll never get out if you fall in.’

‘Drive on, then. I’ll remain where I am; but don’t bother me with your
talk; and no more questioning.’

‘By coorse I won’t--why would I? Isn’t your honour a gentleman, and haven’t
you a right to say what you plaze; and what am I but a poor boy, earning
his bread. Just the way it is all through the world; some has everything
they want and more besides, and others hasn’t a stitch to their backs, or
maybe a pinch of tobacco to put in a pipe.’

This appeal was timed by seeing that Walpole had just lighted a fresh
cigar, whose fragrant fumes were wafted across the speaker’s nose.

Firm to his determination to maintain silence, Walpole paid no attention
to the speech, nor uttered a word of any kind; and as a light drizzling
rain had now begun to fall, and obliged him to shelter himself under an
umbrella, he was at length saved from his companion’s loquacity. Baffled,
but not beaten, the old fellow began to sing, at first in a low, droning
tone; but growing louder as the fire of patriotism warmed him, he shouted,
to a very wild and somewhat irregular tune, a ballad, of which Walpole
could not but hear the words occasionally, while the tramping of the
fellow’s feet on the foot-board kept time to his song:--

  ‘’Tis our fun they can’t forgive us,
    Nor our wit so sharp and keen;
  But there’s nothing that provokes them
    Like our wearin’ of the green.
  They thought Poverty would bate us,
    But we’d sell our last “boneen”
   And we’ll live on cowld paytatees,
    All for wearin’ of the green.
    Oh, the wearin’ of the green--the wearin’ of the green!
    ‘Tis the colour best becomes us
    Is the wearin’ of the green!’

‘Here’s a cigar for you, old fellow, and stop that infernal chant.’

‘There’s only five verses more, and I’ll sing them for your honour before I
light the baccy.’

‘If you do, then, you shall never light baccy of mine. Can’t you see that
your confounded song is driving me mad?’

‘Faix, ye’re the first I ever see disliked music,’ muttered he, in a tone
almost compassionate.

And now as Walpole raised the collar of his coat to defend his ears, and
prepared, as well as he might, to resist the weather, he muttered, ‘And
this is the beautiful land of scenery; and this the climate; and this the
amusing and witty peasant we read of. I have half a mind to tell the world
how it has been humbugged!’ And thus musing, he jogged on the weary road,
nor raised his head till the heavy clash of an iron gate aroused him, and
he saw that they were driving along an approach, with some clumps of pretty
but young timber on either side.

‘Here we are, your honour, safe and sound,’ cried the driver, as proudly
as if he had not been five hours over what should have been done in one
and a half. ‘This is Kilgobbin. All the ould trees was cut down by Oliver
Cromwell, they say, but there will be a fine wood here yet. That’s the
castle you see yonder, over them trees; but there’s no flag flying. The
lord’s away. I suppose I’ll have to wait for your honour? You’ll be coming
back with me?’

‘Yes, you’ll have to wait.’ And Walpole looked at his watch, and saw it was
already past five o’clock.




CHAPTER X

THE SEARCH FOR ARMS


When the hour of luncheon came, and no guests made their appearance, the
young girls at the castle began to discuss what they should best do. ‘I
know nothing of fine people and their ways,’ said Kate--‘you must take the
whole direction here, Nina.’

‘It is only a question of time, and a cold luncheon can wait without
difficulty.’

And so they waited till three, then till four, and now it was five o’clock;
when Kate, who had been over the kitchen-garden, and the calves’ paddock,
and inspecting a small tract laid out for a nursery, came back to the house
very tired, and, as she said, also very hungry. ‘You know, Nina,’ said she,
entering the room, ‘I ordered no dinner to-day. I speculated on our making
our dinner when your friends lunched; and as they have not lunched, we
have not dined; and I vote we sit down now. I’m afraid I shall not be as
pleasant company as that Mr.--do tell me his name--Walpole--but I pledge
myself to have as good a appetite.’

Nina made no answer. She stood at the open window; her gaze steadily bent
on the strip of narrow road that traversed the wide moor before her.

‘Ain’t you hungry? I mean, ain’t you famished, child?’ asked Kate.

‘No, I don’t think so. I could eat, but I believe I could go without eating
just as well.’

‘Well, I must dine; and if you were not looking so nice and fresh, with a
rose-bud in your hair and your white dress so daintily looped up, I’d ask
leave not to dress.’

‘If you were to smooth your hair, and, perhaps, change your boots--’

‘Oh I know, and become in every respect a little civilised. My poor dear
cousin, what a mission you have undertaken among the savages. Own it
honestly, you never guessed the task that was before you when you came
here.’

‘Oh, it’s very nice savagery, all the same,’ said the other, smiling
pleasantly.

‘There now!’ cried Kate, as she threw her hat to one side, and stood
arranging her hair before the glass. ‘I make this toilet under protest, for
we are going in to luncheon, not dinner, and all the world knows, and all
the illustrated newspapers show, that people do not dress for lunch. And,
by the way, that is something you have not got in Italy. All the women
gathering together in their garden-bonnets and their morning-muslins, and
the men in their knickerbockers and their coarse tweed coats.’

‘I declare I think you are in better spirits since you see these people are
not coming.’

‘It is true. You have guessed it, dearest. The thought of anything
grand--as a visitor; anything that would for a moment suggest the
unpleasant question, Is this right? or, Is that usual? makes me downright
irritable. Come, are you ready? May I offer you my arm?’

And now they were at table, Kate rattling away in unwonted gaiety, and
trying to rally Nina out of her disappointment.

‘I declare Nina, everything is so pretty I am ashamed to eat. Those
chickens near you are the least ornamental things I see. Cut me off a wing.
Oh, I forgot, you never acquired the barbarous art of carving.’

‘I can cut this,’ said Nina, drawing a dish of tongue towards her.

‘What! that marvellous production like a parterre of flowers? It would be
downright profanation to destroy it.’

‘Then shall I give you some of this, Kate?’

‘Why, child, that is strawberry-cream. But I cannot eat all alone; do help
yourself.’

‘I shall take something by-and-by.’

‘What do young ladies in Italy eat when they are--no, I don’t mean in
love--I shall call it--in despair?’

‘Give me some of that white wine beside you. There! don’t you hear a noise?
I’m certain I heard the sound of wheels.’

‘Most sincerely I trust not. I wouldn’t for anything these people should
break in upon us now. If my brother Dick should drop in I’d welcome him,
and he would make our little party perfect. Do you know, Nina, Dick can be
so jolly. What’s that? there are voices there without.’

As she spoke the door was opened, and Walpole entered. The young girls
had but time to rise from their seats, when--they never could exactly say
how--they found themselves shaking hands with him in great cordiality.

‘And your friend--where is he?’

‘Nursing a sore throat, or a sprained ankle, or a something or other. Shall
I confess it--as only a suspicion on my part, however--that I do believe
he was too much shocked at the outrageous liberty I took in asking to be
admitted here to accept any partnership in the impertinence?’

‘We expected you at two or three o’clock,’ said Nina.

‘And shall I tell you why I was not here before? Perhaps you’ll scarcely
credit me when I say I have been five hours on the road.’

‘Five hours! How did you manage that?’

‘In this way. I started a few minutes after twelve from the inn--I on
foot, the car to overtake me.’ And he went on to give a narrative of his
wanderings over the bog, imitating, as well as he could, the driver’s
conversations with him, and the reproaches he vented on his inattention to
the road. Kate enjoyed the story with all the humoristic fun of one who
knew thoroughly how the peasant had been playing with the gentleman, just
for the indulgence of that strange, sarcastic temper that underlies the
Irish nature; and she could fancy how much more droll it would have been to
have heard the narrative as told by the driver of the car.

‘And don’t you like his song, Mr. Walpole!’

‘What, “The Wearing of the Green”? It was the dreariest dirge I ever
listened to.’

‘Come, you shall not say so. When we go into the drawing-room, Nina shall
sing it for you, and I’ll wager you recant your opinion.’

‘And do you sing rebel canticles, Mademoiselle Kostalergi?’

‘Yes, I do all my cousin bids me. I wear a red cloak. How is it called?’

‘Connemara?’

Nina nodded.

‘That’s the name, but I’m not going to say it; and when we go abroad--that
is, on the bog there, for a walk--we dress in green petticoats and wear
very thick shoes.’

‘And, in a word, are very generally barbarous.’

‘Well, if you be really barbarians,’ said Walpole, filling his glass, ‘I
wonder what I would not give to be allowed to join the tribe.’

‘Oh, you’d want to be a sachem, or a chief, or a mystery-man at least; and
we couldn’t permit that,’ cried Kate.

‘No; I crave admission as the humblest of your followers.’

‘Shall we put him to the test, Nina?’

‘How do you mean?’ cried the other.

‘Make him take a Ribbon oath, or the pledge of a United Irishman. I’ve
copies of both in papa’s study.’

‘I should like to see these immensely,’ said Walpole.

‘I’ll see if I can’t find them,’ cried Kate, rising and hastening away.

For some seconds after she left the room there was perfect silence. Walpole
tried to catch Nina’s eye before he spoke, but she continued steadily to
look down, and did not once raise her lids.

‘Is she not very nice--is she not very beautiful?’ asked she, in a low
voice.

‘It is of _you_ I want to speak.’

And he drew his chair closer to her, and tried to take her hand, but she
withdrew it quickly, and moved slightly away.

‘If you knew the delight it is to me to see you again, Nina--well,
Mademoiselle Kostalergi. Must it be Mademoiselle?’

‘I don’t remember it was ever “Nina,”’ said she coldly.

‘Perhaps only in my thoughts. To my heart, I can swear, you were Nina. But
tell me how you came here, and when, and for how long, for I want to know
all. Speak to me, I beseech you. She’ll be back in a moment, and when shall
I have another instant alone with you like this? Tell me how you came
amongst them, and are they really all rebels?’

Kate entered at the instant, saying, ‘I can’t find it, but I’ll have a good
search to-morrow, for I know it’s there.’

‘Do, by all means, Kate, for Mr. Walpole is very anxious to learn if he be
admitted legitimately into this brotherhood--whatever it be; he has just
asked me if we were really all rebels here.’

‘I trust he does not suppose I would deceive him,’ said Kate gravely. ‘And
when he hears you sing “The blackened hearth--the fallen roof,” he’ll not
question _you_, Nina.--Do you know that song, Mr. Walpole?’

He smiled as he said ‘No.’

‘Won’t it be so nice,’ said she, ‘to catch a fresh ingenuous Saxon
wandering innocently over the Bog of Allen, and send him back to his
friends a Fenian!’

‘Make me what you please, but don’t send me away.’

‘Tell me, really, what would you do if we made you take the oath?’

‘Betray you, of course, the moment I got up to Dublin.’

Nina’s eyes flashed angrily, as though such jesting was an offence.

‘No, no, the shame of such treason would be intolerable; but you’d go your
way and behave as though you never saw us.’

‘Oh, he could do that without the inducement of a perjury,’ said Nina, in
Italian; and then added aloud, ‘Let’s go and make some music. Mr. Walpole
sings charmingly, Kate, and is very obliging about it--at least he used to
be.’

[Illustration: ‘How that song makes me wish we were back again where I
heard it first’]

‘I am all that I used to be--towards that,’ whispered he, as she passed him
to take Kate’s arm and walk away.

‘You don’t mean to have a thick neighbourhood about you,’ said Walpole.
‘Have you any people living near?’

‘Yes, we have a dear old friend--a Miss O’Shea, a maiden lady, who lives a
few miles off. By the way, there’s something to show you--an old maid who
hunts her own harriers.’

‘What! are you in earnest?’

‘On my word, it is true! Nina can’t endure her; but Nina doesn’t care for
hare-hunting, and, I’m afraid to say, never saw a badger drawn in her
life.’

‘And have you?’ asked he, almost with horror in his tone.

‘I’ll show you three regular little turnspit dogs to-morrow that will
answer that question.’

‘How I wish Lockwood had come out here with me,’ said Walpole, almost
uttering a thought.

‘That is, you wish he had seen a bit of barbarous Ireland he’d scarcely
credit from mere description. But perhaps I’d have been better behaved
before him. I’m treating you with all the freedom of an old friend of my
cousin’s.’

Nina had meanwhile opened the piano, and was letting her hands stray over
the instrument in occasional chords; and then in a low voice, that barely
blended its tones with the accompaniment, she sang one of those little
popular songs of Italy, called ‘Stornelli’---wild, fanciful melodies, with
that blended gaiety and sadness which the songs of a people are so often
marked by.

‘That is a very old favourite of mine,’ said Walpole, approaching the piano
as noiselessly as though he feared to disturb the singer; and now he stole
into a chair at her side. ‘How that song makes me wish we were back again,
where I heard it first,’ whispered he gently.

‘I forget where that was,’ said she carelessly.

‘No, Nina, you do not,’ said he eagerly; ‘it was at Albano, the day we all
went to Pallavicini’s villa.’

‘And I sang a little French song, “_Si vous n’avez rien à me dire_,” which
you were vain enough to imagine was a question addressed to yourself; and
you made me a sort of declaration; do you remember all that?’

‘Every word of it.’

‘Why don’t you go and speak to my cousin; she has opened the window and
gone out upon the terrace, and I trust you understand that she expects you
to follow her.’ There was a studied calm in the way she spoke that showed
she was exerting considerable self-control.

‘No, no, Nina, it is with you I desire to speak; to see you that I have
come here.’

‘And so you do remember that you made me a declaration? It made me laugh
afterwards as I thought it over.’

‘Made you laugh!’

‘Yes, I laughed to myself at the ingenious way in which you conveyed to me
what an imprudence it was in you to fall in love with a girl who had no
fortune, and the shock it would give your friends when they should hear she
was a Greek.’

‘How can you say such painful things, Nina? how can you be so pitiless as
this?’

‘It was you who had no pity, sir; I felt a deal of pity; I will not deny it
was for myself. I don’t pretend to say that I could give a correct version
of the way in which you conveyed to me the pain it gave you that I was not
a princess, a Borromeo, or a Colonna, or an Altieri. That Greek adventurer,
yes--you cannot deny it, I overheard these words myself. You were talking
to an English girl, a tall, rather handsome person she was--I shall
remember her name in a moment if you cannot help me to it sooner--a Lady
Bickerstaffe--’

‘Yes, there was a Lady Maude Bickerstaffe; she merely passed through Rome
for Naples.’

‘You called her a cousin, I remember.’

‘There is some cousinship between us; I forget exactly in what degree.’

‘Do try and remember a little more; remember that you forgot you had
engaged me for the cotillon, and drove away with that blonde beauty--and
she was a beauty, or had been a few years before--at all events, you lost
all memory of the daughter of the adventurer.’

‘You will drive me distracted, Nina, if you say such things.’

‘I know it is wrong and it is cruel, and it is worse than wrong and cruel,
it is what you English call underbred, to be so individually disagreeable,
but this grievance of mine has been weighing very heavily on my heart, and
I have been longing to tell you so.’

‘Why are you not singing, Nina?’ cried Kate from the terrace. ‘You told me
of a duet, and I think you are bent on having it without music.’

‘Yes, we are quarrelling fiercely,’ said Nina. ‘This gentleman has been
rash enough to remind me of an unsettled score between us, and as he is the
defaulter--’

‘I dispute the debt.’

‘Shall I be the judge between you?’ asked Kate.

‘On no account; my claim once disputed, I surrender it,’ said Nina.

‘I must say you are very charming company. You won’t sing, and you’ll only
talk to say disagreeable things. Shall I make tea, and see if it will
render you more amiable?’

‘Do so, dearest, and then show Mr. Walpole the house; he has forgotten what
brought him here, I really believe.’

‘You know that I have not,’ muttered he, in a tone of deep meaning.

‘There’s no light now to show him the house; Mr. Walpole must come
to-morrow, when papa will be at home and delighted to see him.’

‘May I really do this?’

‘Perhaps, besides, your friend will have found the little inn so
insupportable, that he too will join us. Listen to that sigh of poor Nina’s
and you’ll understand what it is to be dreary!’

‘No; I want my tea.’

‘And it shall have it,’ said Kate, kissing her with a petting affectation
as she left the room.

‘Now one word, only one,’ said Walpole, as he drew his chair close to her:
‘If I swear to you--’

‘What’s that? who is Kate angry with?’ cried Nina, rising and rushing
towards the door. ‘What has happened?’

‘I’ll tell you what has happened,’ said Kate, as with flashing eyes and
heightened colour she entered the room. ‘The large gate of the outer yard,
that is every night locked and strongly barred at sunset, has been left
open, and they tell me that three men have come in, Sally says five, and
are hiding in some of the outhouses.’

‘What for? Is it to rob, think you?’ asked Walpole.

‘It is certainly for nothing good. They all know that papa is away, and
the house so far unprotected,’ continued Kate calmly. ‘We must find out
to-morrow who has left the gate unbolted. This was no accident, and now
that they are setting fire to the ricks all round us, it is no time for
carelessness.’

‘Shall we search the offices and the outbuildings?’ asked Walpole.

‘Of course not; we must stand by the house and take care that they do not
enter it. It’s a strong old place, and even if they forced an entrance
below, they couldn’t set fire to it.’

‘Could they force their way up?’ asked Walpole.

‘Not if the people above have any courage. Just come and look at the stair;
it was made in times when people thought of defending themselves.’ They
issued forth now together to the top of the landing, where a narrow, steep
flight of stone steps descended between two walls to the basement-storey.
A little more than half-way down was a low iron gate or grille of
considerable strength; though, not being above four feet in height, it
could have been no great defence, which seemed, after all, to have been its
intention. ‘When this is closed,’ said Kate, shutting it with a heavy bang,
‘it’s not such easy work to pass up against two or three resolute people at
the top; and see here,’ added she, showing a deep niche or alcove in the
wall, ‘this was evidently meant for the sentry who watched the wicket: he
could stand here out of the reach of all fire.’

‘Would you not say she was longing for a conflict?’ said Nina, gazing at
her.

‘No, but if it comes I’ll not decline it.’

‘You mean you’ll defend the stair?’ asked Walpole.

She nodded assent.

‘What arms have you?’

‘Plenty; come and look at them. Here,’ said she, entering the dining-room,
and pointing to a large oak sideboard covered with weapons, ‘Here is
probably what has led these people here. They are going through the country
latterly on every side, in search of arms. I believe this is almost the
only house where they have not called.’

‘And do they go away quietly when their demands are complied with?’

‘Yes, when they chance upon people of poor courage, they leave them with
life enough to tell the story.--What is it, Mathew?’ asked she of the old
serving-man who entered the room.

‘It’s the “boys,” miss, and they want to talk to you, if you’ll step out on
the terrace. They don’t mean any harm at all.’

‘What do they want, then?’

‘Just a spare gun or two, miss, or an ould pistol, or a thing of the kind
that was no use.’

‘Was it not brave of them to come here, when my father was from home?
Aren’t they fine courageous creatures to come and frighten two lone
girls--eh, Mat?’

‘Don’t anger them, miss, for the love of Joseph! don’t say anything hard;
let me hand them that ould carbine there, and the fowling-piece; and if
you’d give them a pair of horse-pistols, I’m sure they’d go away quiet.’

A loud noise of knocking, as though with a stone, at the outer door, broke
in upon the colloquy, and Kate passed into the drawing-room, and opened
the window, out upon the stone terrace which overlooked the yard: ‘Who is
there?--who are you?--what do you want?’ cried she, peering down into the
darkness, which, in the shadow of the house, was deeper.

‘We’ve come for arms,’ cried a deep hoarse voice.

‘My father is away from home--come and ask for them when he’s here to
answer you.’

A wild, insolent laugh from below acknowledged what they thought of this
speech.

‘Maybe that was the rayson we came now, miss,’ said a voice, in a lighter
tone.

‘Fine courageous fellows you are to say so! I hope Ireland has more of such
brave patriotic men.’

‘You’d better leave that, anyhow,’ said another, and as he spoke he
levelled and fired, but evidently with intention to terrify rather than
wound, for the plaster came tumbling down from several feet above her head;
and now the knocking at the door was redoubled, and with a noise that
resounded through the house.

‘Wouldn’t you advise her to give up the arms and let them go?’ said Nina,
in a whisper to Walpole; but though she was deadly pale there was no tremor
in her voice.

‘The door is giving way, the wood is completely rotten. Now for the stairs.
Mr. Walpole, you’re going to stand by me?’

‘I should think so, but I’d rather you’d remain here. I know my ground
now.’

‘No, I must be beside you. You’ll have to keep a rolling fire, and I can
load quicker than most people. Come along now, we must take no light with
us--follow me.’

‘Take care,’ said Nina to Walpole as he passed, but with an accent so full
of a strange significance it dwelt on his memory long after.

‘What was it Nina whispered you as you came by?’ said Kate.

‘Something about being cautious, I think,’ said he carelessly.

‘Stay where you are, Mathew,’ said the girl, in a severe tone, to the old
servant, who was officiously pressing forward with a light.

‘Go back!’ cried she, as he persisted in following her.

‘That’s the worst of all our troubles here, Mr. Walpole,’ said she boldly;
‘you cannot depend on the people of your own household. The very people you
have nursed in sickness, if they only belong to some secret association,
will betray you!’ She made no secret of her words, but spoke them loud
enough to be heard by the group of servants now gathered on the landing.
Noiseless she tripped down the stairs, and passed into the little dark
alcove, followed by Walpole, carrying any amount of guns and carbines under
his arm.

‘These are loaded, I presume?’ said he.

‘All, and ready capped. The short carbine is charged with a sort of
canister shot, and keep it for a short range--if they try to pass over
the iron gate. Now mind me, and I will give you the directions I heard my
father give on this spot once before. Don’t fire till they reach the foot
of the stair.’

‘I cannot hear you,’ said he, for the din beneath, where they battered at
the door, was now deafening.

‘They’ll be in in another moment--there, the lock has fallen off--the door
has given way,’ whispered she; ‘be steady now, no hurry--steady and calm.’

As she spoke, the heavy oak door fell to the ground, and a perfect silence
succeeded to the late din. After an instant, muttering whispers could be
heard, and it seemed as if they doubted how far it was safe to enter, for
all was dark within. Something was said in a tone of command, and at the
moment one of the party flung forward a bundle of lighted straw and tow,
which fell at the foot of the stairs, and for a few seconds lit up the
place with a red lurid gleam, showing the steep stair and the iron bars of
the little gate that crossed it.

‘There’s the iron wicket they spoke of,’ cried one. ‘All right, come on!’
And the speaker led the way, cautiously, however, and slowly, the others
after him.

‘No, not yet,’ whispered Kate, as she pressed her hand upon Walpole’s.

‘I hear voices up there,’ cried the leader from below. ‘We’ll make them
leave that, anyhow.’ And he fired off his gun in the direction of the upper
part of the stair; a quantity of plaster came clattering down as the ball
struck the ceiling.

‘Now,’ said she. ‘Now, and fire low!’

He discharged both barrels so rapidly that the two detonations blended
into one, and the assailants replied by a volley, the echoing din almost
sounding like artillery. Fast as Walpole could fire, the girl replaced
the piece by another; when suddenly she cried, ‘There is a fellow at the
gate--the carbine--the carbine now, and steady.’ A heavy crash and a cry
followed his discharge, and snatching the weapon from him, she reloaded and
handed it back with lightning speed. ‘There is another there,’ whispered
she; and Walpole moved farther out, to take a steadier aim. All was still,
not a sound to be heard for some seconds, when the hinges of the gate
creaked and the bolt shook in the lock. Walpole fired again, but as he did
so, the others poured in a rattling volley, one shot grazing his cheek,
and another smashing both bones of his right arm, so that the carbine fell
powerless from his hand. The intrepid girl sprang to his side at once, and
then passing in front of him, she fired some shots from a revolver in quick
succession. A low, confused sound of feet and a scuffling noise followed,
when a rough, hoarse voice cried out, ‘Stop firing; we are wounded, and
going away.’

‘Are you badly hurt?’ whispered Kate to Walpole.

‘Nothing serious: be still and listen!’

‘There, the carbine is ready again. Oh, you cannot hold it--leave it to
me,’ said she.

From the difficulty of removal, it seemed as though one of the party
beneath was either killed or badly wounded, for it was several minutes
before they could gain the outer door.

‘Are they really retiring?’ whispered Walpole.

‘Yes; they seem to have suffered heavily.’

‘Would you not give them one shot at parting--that carbine is charged?’
asked he anxiously.

‘Not for worlds,’ said she; ‘savage as they are, it would be ruin to break
faith with them.’

‘Give me a pistol, my left hand is all right.’ Though he tried to speak
with calmness, the agony of pain he was suffering so overcame him that he
leaned his head down, and rested it on her shoulder.

‘My poor, poor fellow,’ said she tenderly, ‘I would not for the world that
this had happened.’

‘They’re gone, Miss Kate, they’ve passed out at the big gate, and they’re
off,’ whispered old Mathew, as he stood trembling behind her.

‘Here, call some one, and help this gentleman up the stairs, and get a
mattress down on the floor at once; send off a messenger, Sally, for Doctor
Tobin. He can take the car that came this evening, and let him make what
haste he can.’

‘Is he wounded?’ said Nina, as they laid him down on the floor. Walpole
tried to smile and say something, but no sound came forth.

‘My own dear, dear Cecil,’ whispered Nina, as she knelt and kissed his
hand, ‘tell me it is not dangerous.’ He had fainted.




CHAPTER XI

WHAT THE PAPERS SAID OF IT


The wounded man had just fallen into a first sleep after his disaster, when
the press of the capital was already proclaiming throughout the land the
attack and search for arms at Kilgobbin Castle. In the National papers a
very few lines were devoted to the event; indeed, their tone was one of
party sneer at the importance given by their contemporaries to a very
ordinary incident. ‘Is there,’ asked the _Convicted Felon_, ‘anything very
strange or new in the fact that Irishmen have determined to be armed? Is
English legislation in this country so marked by justice, clemency, and
generosity that the people of Ireland prefer to submit their lives and
fortunes to its sway, to trusting what brave men alone trust in--their
fearlessness and their daring? What is there, then, so remarkable in the
repairing to Mr. Kearney’s house for a loan of those weapons of which his
family for several generations have forgotten the use?’ In the Government
journals the story of the attack was headed, ‘Attack on Kilgobbin Castle.
Heroic resistance by a young lady’; in which Kate Kearney’s conduct was
described in colours of extravagant eulogy. She was alternately Joan of Arc
and the Maid of Saragossa, and it was gravely discussed whether any and
what honours of the Crown were at Her Majesty’s disposal to reward such
brilliant heroism. In another print of the same stamp the narrative began:
‘The disastrous condition of our country is never displayed in darker
colours than when the totally unprovoked character of some outrage has
to be recorded by the press. It is our melancholy task to present such a
case as this to our readers to-day. If it was our wish to exhibit to a
stranger the picture of an Irish estate in which all the blessings of good
management, intelligence, kindliness, and Christian charity were displayed;
to show him a property where the wellbeing of landlord and tenant were
inextricably united, where the condition of the people, their dress, their
homes, their food, and their daily comforts, could stand comparison with
the most favoured English county, we should point to the Kearney estate
of Kilgobbin; and yet it is here, in the very house where his ancestors
have resided for generations, that a most savage and dastardly attack is
made; and if we feel a sense of shame in recording the outrage, we are
recompensed by the proud elation with which we can recount the repulse--the
noble and gallant achievement of an Irish girl. History has the record of
more momentous feats, but we doubt that there is one in the annals of any
land in which a higher heroism was displayed than in this splendid defence
by Miss Kearney.’ Then followed the story; not one of the papers having any
knowledge of Walpole’s presence on the occasion, or the slightest suspicion
that she was aided in any way.

Joe Atlee was busily engaged in conning over and comparing these somewhat
contradictory reports, as he sat at his breakfast, his chum Kearney being
still in bed and asleep after a late night at a ball. At last there came a
telegraphic despatch for Kearney; armed with which, Joe entered the bedroom
and woke him.

‘Here’s something for you, Dick,’ cried he. ‘Are you too sleepy to read
it?’

‘Tear it open and see what it is, like a good fellow,’ said the other
indolently.

‘It’s from your sister--at least, it is signed Kate. It says: “There is no
cause for alarm. All is going on well, and papa will be back this evening.
I write by this post.”’

‘What does all that mean?’ cried Dick, in surprise.

‘The whole story is in the papers. The boys have taken the opportunity of
your father’s absence from home to make a demand for arms at your house,
and your sister, it seems, showed fight and beat them off. They talk of two
fellows being seen badly wounded, but, of course, that part of the story
cannot be relied on. That they got enough to make them beat a retreat is,
however, certain; and as they were what is called a strong party, the feat
of resisting them is no small glory for a young lady.’

‘It was just what Kate was certain to do. There’s no man with a braver
heart.’

I wonder how the beautiful Greek behaved? I should like greatly to hear
what part she took in the defence of the citadel. Was she fainting or in
hysterics, or so overcome by terror as to be unconscious?’

‘I’ll make you any wager you like, Kate did the whole thing herself. There
was a Whiteboy attack to force the stairs when she was a child, and I
suppose we rehearsed that combat fully fifty--ay, five hundred times. Kate
always took the defence, and though we were sometimes four to one, she kept
us back.’

‘By Jove! I think I should be afraid of such a young lady.’

‘So you would. She has more pluck in her heart than half that blessed
province you come from. That’s the blood of the old stock you are often
pleased to sneer at, and of which the present will be a lesson to teach you
better.’

‘May not the lovely Greek be descended from some ancient stock too? Who is
to say what blood of Pericles she had not in her veins? I tell you I’ll not
give up the notion that she was a sharer in this glory.’

‘If you’ve got the papers with the account, let me see them, Joe. I’ve half
a mind to run down by the night-mail--that is, if I can. Have you got any
tin, Atlee?’

‘There were some shillings in one of my pockets last night. How much do you
want?’

‘Eighteen-and-six first class, and a few shillings for a cab.’

‘I can manage that; but I’ll go and fetch you the papers, there’s time
enough to talk of the journey.’

The newsman had just deposited the _Croppy_ on the table as Joe returned
to the breakfast-table, and the story of Kilgobbin headed the first column
in large capitals. ‘While our contemporaries,’ it began, ‘are recounting
with more than their wonted eloquence the injuries inflicted on three poor
labouring men, who, in their ignorance of the locality, had the temerity to
ask for alms at Kilgobbin Castle yesterday evening, and were ignominiously
driven away from the door by a young lady, whose benevolence was
administered through a blunderbuss, we, who form no portion of the polite
press, and have no pretension to mix in what are euphuistically called the
“best circles” of this capital, would like to ask, for the information of
those humble classes among which our readers are found, is it the custom
for young ladies to await the absence of their fathers to entertain
young gentlemen tourists? and is a reputation for even heroic courage
not somewhat dearly purchased at the price of the companionship of the
admittedly most profligate man of a vicious and corrupt society? The
heroine who defended Kilgobbin can reply to our query.’

Joe Atlee read this paragraph three times over before he carried in the
paper to Kearney.

‘Here’s an insolent paragraph, Dick,’ he cried, as he threw the paper to
him on the bed. ‘Of course it’s a thing cannot be noticed in any way, but
it’s not the less rascally for that.’

‘You know the fellow who edits this paper, Joe?’ said Kearney, trembling
with passion.

‘No; my friend is doing his bit of oakum at Kilmainham. They gave him
thirteen months, and a fine that he’ll never be able to pay; but what would
you do if the fellow who wrote it were in the next room at this moment?’

‘Thrash him within an inch of his life.’

‘And, with the inch of life left him, he’d get strong again and write at
you and all belonging to you every day of his existence. Don’t you see
that all this license is one of the prices of liberty? There’s no guarding
against excesses when you establish a rivalry. The doctors could tell you
how many diseased lungs and aneurisms are made by training for a rowing
match.’

‘I’ll go down by the mail to-night and see what has given the origin to
this scandalous falsehood.’

‘There’s no harm in doing that, especially if you take me with you.’

‘Why should I take you, or for what?’

‘As guide, counsellor, and friend.’

‘Bright thought, when all the money we can muster between us is only enough
for one fare.’

‘Doubtless, first class; but we could go third class, two of us for the
same money. Do you imagine that Damon and Pythias would have been separated
if it came even to travelling in a cow compartment?’

‘I wish you could see that there are circumstances in life where the comic
man is out of place.’

‘I trust I shall never discover them; at least, so long as Fate treats me
with “heavy tragedy.”’

‘I’m not exactly sure, either, whether they ‘d like to receive you just now
at Kilgobbin.’

‘Inhospitable thought! My heart assures me of a most cordial welcome.’

‘And I should only stay a day or two at farthest.’

‘Which would suit me to perfection. I must be back here by Tuesday if I had
to walk the distance.’

‘Not at all improbable, so far as I know of your resources.’

‘What a churlish dog it is! Now had you, Master Dick, proposed to me that
we should go down and pass a week at a certain small thatched cottage
on the banks of the Ban, where a Presbyterian minister with eight olive
branches vegetates, discussing tough mutton and tougher theology on
Sundays, and getting through the rest of the week with the parables and
potatoes, I’d have said, Done!’

‘It was the inopportune time I was thinking of. Who knows what confusion
this event may not have thrown them into? If you like to risk the
discomfort, I make no objection.’

‘To so heartily expressed an invitation there can be but one answer, I
yield.’

‘Now look here, Joe, I’d better be frank with you: don’t try it on at
Kilgobbin as you do with me.’

‘You are afraid of my insinuating manners, are you?’

‘I am afraid of your confounded impudence, and of that notion you cannot
get rid of, that your cool familiarity is a fashionable tone.’

‘How men mistake themselves. I pledge you my word, if I was asked what was
the great blemish in my manner, I’d have said it was bashfulness.’

‘Well, then, it is not!’

‘Are you sure, Dick, are you quite sure?’

‘I am quite sure, and unfortunately for you, you’ll find that the majority
agree with me.’

‘“A wise man should guard himself against the defects that he might have,
without knowing it.” That is a Persian proverb, which you will find in
_Hafiz_. I believe you never read _Hafiz_!’

‘No, nor you either.’

‘That’s true; but I can make my own _Hafiz_, and just as good as the real
article. By the way, are you aware that the water-carriers at Tehran sing
_Lalla Rookh_, and believe it a national poem?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t care.’

‘I’ll bring down an _Anacreon_ with me, and see if the Greek cousin can
spell her way through an ode.’

‘And I distinctly declare you shall do no such thing.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear, what an unamiable trait is envy! By the way, was that
your frock-coat I wore yesterday at the races?’

‘I think you know it was; at least you remembered it when you tore the
sleeve.’

‘True, most true; that torn sleeve was the reason the rascal would only let
me have fifteen shillings on it.’

‘And you mean to say you pawned my coat?’

‘I left it in the temporary care of a relative, Dick; but it is a
redeemable mortgage, and don’t fret about it.’

‘Ever the same!’

‘No, Dick, that means worse and worse! Now, I am in the process of
reformation. The natural selection, however, where honesty is in the
series, is a slow proceeding, and the organic changes are very complicated.
As I know, however, you attach value to the effect you produce in that
coat, I’ll go and recover it. I shall not need Terence or Juvenal till we
come back, and I’ll leave them in the avuncular hands till then.’

‘I wonder you’re not ashamed of these miserable straits.’

‘I am very much ashamed of the world that imposes them on me. I’m
thoroughly ashamed of that public in lacquered leather, that sees
me walking in broken boots. I’m heartily ashamed of that well-fed,
well-dressed, sleek society, that never so much as asked whether the
intellectual-looking man in the shabby hat, who looked so lovingly at the
spiced beef in the window, had dined yet, or was he fasting for a wager?’

‘There, don’t carry away that newspaper; I want to read over that pleasant
paragraph again!’




CHAPTER XII

THE JOURNEY TO THE COUNTRY


The two friends were deposited at the Moate station at a few minutes after
midnight, and their available resources amounting to something short of two
shillings, and the fare of a car and horse to Kilgobbin being more than
three times that amount, they decided to devote their small balance to
purposes of refreshment, and then set out for the castle on foot.

‘It is a fine moonlight; I know all the short cuts, and I want a bit of
walking besides,’ said Kearney; and though Joe was of a self-indulgent
temperament, and would like to have gone to bed after his supper and
trusted to the chapter of accidents to reach Kilgobbin by a conveyance some
time, any time, he had to yield his consent and set out on the road.

‘The fellow who comes with the letter-bag will fetch over our portmanteau,’
said Dick, as they started.

‘I wish you’d give him directions to take charge of me, too,’ said Joe, who
felt very indisposed to a long walk.

‘I like _you_,’ said Dick sneeringly; ‘you are always telling me that you
are the sort of fellow for a new colony, life in the bush, and the rest
of it, and when it conies to a question of a few miles’ tramp on a bright
night in June, you try to skulk it in every possible way. You’re a great
humbug, Master Joe.’

‘And you a very small humbug, and there lies the difference between us.
The combinations in your mind are so few, that, as in a game of only three
cards, there is no skill in the playing; while in my nature, as in that
game called tarocco, there are half-a-dozen packs mixed up together, and
the address required to play them is considerable.’

‘You have a very satisfactory estimate of your own abilities, Joe.’

‘And why not? If a clever fellow didn’t know he was clever, the opinion of
the world on his superiority would probably turn his brain.’

‘And what do you say if his own vanity should do it?’

‘There is really no way of explaining to a fellow like you--’

‘What do you mean by a fellow like me?’ broke in Dick, somewhat angrily.

‘I mean this, that I’d as soon set to work to explain the theory of
exchequer bonds to an Eskimo, as to make an unimaginative man understand
something purely speculative. What you, and scores of fellows like you,
denominate vanity, is only another form of hopefulness. You and your
brethren--for you are a large family--do you know what it is to Hope! that
is, you have no idea of what it is to build on the foundation of certain
qualities you recognise in yourself, and to say that “if I can go so far
with such a gift, such another will help me on so much farther.”’

‘I tell you one thing I do hope, which is, that the next time I set out
a twelve miles’ walk, I’ll have a companion less imbued with
self-admiration.’

‘And you might and might not find him pleasanter company. Cannot you see,
old fellow, that the very things you object to in me are what are wanting
in you? they are, so to say, the compliments of your own temperament.’

‘Have you a cigar?’

‘Two--take them both. I’d rather talk than smoke just now.’

‘I am almost sorry for it, though it gives me the tobacco.’

‘Are we on your father’s property yet?’

‘Yes; part of that village we came through belongs to us, and all this bog
here is ours.’

‘Why don’t you reclaim it? labour costs a mere nothing in this country.
Why don’t you drain those tracts, and treat the soil with lime? I’d live
on potatoes, I’d make my family live on potatoes, and my son, and my
grandson, for three generations, but I’d win this land back to culture and
productiveness.’

‘The fee-simple of the soil wouldn’t pay the cost. It would be cheaper to
save the money and buy an estate.’

‘That is one, and a very narrow view of it; but imagine the glory of
restoring a lost tract to a nation, welcoming back the prodigal, and
installing him in his place amongst his brethren. This was all forest once.
Under the shade of the mighty oaks here those gallant O’Caharneys your
ancestors followed the chase, or rested at noontide, or skedaddled in
double-quick before those smart English of the Pale, who I must say treated
your forbears with scant courtesy.’

‘We held our own against them for many a year.’

‘Only when it became so small it was not worth taking. Is not your father a
Whig?’

‘He’s a Liberal, but he troubles himself little about parties.’

‘He’s a stout Catholic, though, isn’t he?’

‘He is a very devout believer in his Church,’ said Dick with the tone of
one who did not desire to continue the theme.

‘Then why does he stop at Whiggery? why not go in for Nationalism and all
the rest of it?’

‘And what’s all the rest of it?’

‘Great Ireland--no first flower of the earth or gem of the sea humbug--but
Ireland great in prosperity, her harbours full of ships, the woollen trade,
her ancient staple, revived: all that vast unused water-

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