Kitabı oku: «Lord Kilgobbin», sayfa 13

CHAPTER XXII

A CONFIDENTIAL TALK

Dick Kearney walked the bog from early morning till dark without firing a shot. The snipe rose almost at his feet, and wheeling in circles through the air, dipped again into some dark crevice of the waste, unnoticed by him! One thought only possessed, and never left him, as he went. He had overheard Nina’s words to his sister, as he made his escape over the fence, and learned how she promised to ‘spare him’; and that if not worried about him, or asked to pledge herself, she should be ‘merciful,’ and not entangle the boy in a hopeless passion.

He would have liked to have scoffed at the insolence of this speech, and treated it as a trait of overweening vanity; he would have gladly accepted her pity as a sort of challenge, and said, ‘Be it so; let us see who will come safest out of this encounter,’ and yet he felt in his heart he could not.

First of all, her beauty had really dazzled him, and the thousand graces of a manner of which he had known nothing captivated and almost bewildered him. He could not reply to her in the same tone he used to any other. If he fetched her a book or a chair, he gave it with a sort of deference that actually reacted on himself, and made him more gentle and more courteous, for the time. ‘What would this influence end in making me?’ was his question to himself. ‘Should I gain in sentiment or feeling? Should I have higher and nobler aims? Should I be anything of that she herself described so glowingly, or should I only sink to a weak desire to be her slave, and ask for nothing better than some slight recognition of my devotion? I take it that she would say the choice lay with her, and that I should be the one or the other as she willed it, and though I would give much to believe her wrong, my heart tells me that I cannot. I came down here resolved to resist any influence she might attempt to have over me. Her likeness showed me how beautiful she was, but it could not tell me the dangerous fascination of her low liquid voice, her half-playful, half-melancholy smile, and that bewitching walk, with all its stately grace, so that every fold as she moves sends its own thrill of ecstasy. And now that I know all these, see and feel them, I am told that to me they can bring no hope! That I am too poor, too ignoble, too undistinguished, to raise my eyes to such attraction. I am nothing, and must live and die nothing.

‘She is candid enough, at all events. There is no rhapsody about her when she talks of poverty. She chronicles every stage of the misery, as though she had felt them all; and how unlike it she looks! There is an almost insolent well-being about her that puzzles me. She will not heed this, or suffer that, because it looks mean. Is this the subtle worship she offers Wealth, and is it thus she offers up her prayer to Fortune?

‘But why should she assume I must be her slave?’ cried he aloud, in a sort of defiance. ‘I have shown her no such preference, nor made any advances that would show I want to win her favour. Without denying that she is beautiful, is it so certain it is the kind of beauty I admire? She has scores of fascinations – I do not deny it; but should I say that I trust her? And if I should trust her and love her too, where must it all end in? I do not believe in her theory that love will transform a fellow of my mould into a hero, not to say that I have my own doubt if she herself believes it. I wonder if Kate reads her more clearly? Girls so often understand each other by traits we have no clue to; and it was Kate who asked her, almost in tone of entreaty, “to spare me,” to save me from a hopeless passion, just as though I were some peasant-boy who had set his affection on a princess. Is that the way, then, the world would read our respective conditions? The son of a ruined house or the guest of a beggared family leaves little to choose between! Kate – the world – would call my lot the better of the two. The man’s chance is not irretrievable, at least such is the theory. Those half-dozen fellows, who in a century or so contrive to work their way up to something, make a sort of precedent, and tell the others what they might be if they but knew how.

‘I’m not vain enough to suppose I am one of these, and it is quite plain that she does not think me so.’ He pondered long over this thought, and then suddenly cried aloud, ‘Is it possible she may read Joe Atlee in this fashion? is that the stuff out of which she hopes to make a hero?’ There was more bitterness in this thought than he had first imagined, and there was that of jealousy in it too that pained him deeply.

Had she preferred either of the two Englishmen to himself, he could have understood and, in a measure, accepted it. They were, as he called them, ‘swells.’ They might become, he knew not what. The career of the Saxon in fortune was a thing incommensurable by Irish ideas; but Joe was like himself, or in reality less than himself, in worldly advantages.

This pang of jealousy was very bitter; but still it served to stimulate him and rouse him from a depression that was gaining fast upon him. It is true, he remembered she had spoken slightingly of Joe Atlee. Called him noisy, pretentious, even vulgar; snubbed him openly on more than one occasion, and seemed to like to turn the laugh against him; but with all that she had sung duets with him, corrected some Italian verses he wrote, and actually made a little sketch in his note-book for him as a souvenir. A souvenir! and of what? Not of the ridicule she had turned upon him! not the jest she had made upon his boastfulness. Now which of these two did this argue: was this levity, or was it falsehood? Was she so little mindful of honesty that she would show these signs of favour to one she held most cheaply, or was it that her distaste to this man was mere pretence, and only assumed to deceive others.

After all, Joe Atlee was a nobody; flattery might call him an adventurer, but he was not even so much. Amongst the men of the dangerous party he mixed with he was careful never to compromise himself. He might write the songs of rebellion, but he was little likely to tamper with treason itself. So much he would tell her when he got back. Not angrily, nor passionately, for that would betray him and disclose his jealousy, but in the tone of a man revealing something he regretted – confessing to the blemish of one he would have liked better to speak well of. There was not, he thought, anything unfair in this. He was but warning her against a man who was unworthy of her. Unworthy of her! What words could express the disparity between them? Not but if she liked him – and this he said with a certain bitterness – or thought she liked him, the disproportion already ceased to exist.

Hour after hour of that long summer day he walked, revolving such thoughts as these; all his conclusions tending to the one point, that he was not the easy victim she thought him, and that, come what might, he should not be offered up as a sacrifice to her worship of Joe Atlee.

‘There is nothing would gratify the fellow’s vanity,’ thought he, ‘like a successful rivalry of him! Tell him he was preferred to me, and he would be ready to fall down and worship whoever had made the choice.’

By dwelling on all the possible and impossible issues of such an attachment, he had at length convinced himself of its existence, and even more, persuaded himself to fancy it was something to be regretted and grieved over for worldly considerations, but not in any way regarded as personally unpleasant.

As he came in sight of home and saw a light in the small tower where Kate’s bedroom lay, he determined he would go up to his sister and tell her so much of his mind as he believed was finally settled, and in such a way as would certainly lead her to repeat it to Nina.

‘Kate shall tell her that if I have left her suddenly and gone back to Trinity to keep my term, I have not fled the field in a moment of faint-heartedness. I do not deny her beauty. I do not disparage one of her attractions, and she has scores of them. I will not even say that when I have sat beside her, heard her low soft voice, and watched the tremor of that lovely mouth vibrating with wit, or tremulous with feeling, I have been all indifference; but this I will say, she shall not number me amongst the victims of her fascinations; and when she counts the trinkets on her wrist that record the hearts she has broken – a pastime I once witnessed – not one of them shall record the initial of Dick Kearney.’

With these brave words he mounted the narrow stair and knocked at his sister’s door. No answer coming, he knocked again, and after waiting a few seconds, he slowly opened the door and saw that Kate, still dressed, had thrown herself on her bed, and was sound asleep. The table was covered with account-books and papers; tax-receipts, law-notices, and tenants’ letters lay littered about, showing what had been the task she was last engaged on; and her heavy breathing told the exhaustion which it had left behind it.

‘I wish I could help her with her work,’ muttered he to himself, as a pang of self-reproach shot through him. This certainly should have been his own task rather than hers; the question was, however, Could he have done it? And this doubt increased as he looked over the long column of tenants’ names, whose holdings varied in every imaginable quantity of acres, roods, and perches. Besides these there were innumerable small details of allowances for this and compensation for that. This one had given so many days’ horse-and-car hire at the bog; that other had got advances ‘in seed-potatoes’; such a one had a claim for reduced rent, because the mill-race had overflowed and deluged his wheat crop; such another had fed two pigs of ‘the lord’s’ and fattened them, while himself and his own were nigh starving.

Through an entire column there was not one case without its complication, either in the shape of argument for increased liability or claim for compensation. It was makeshift everywhere, and Dick could not but ask himself whether any tenant on the estate really knew how far he was hopelessly in debt or a solvent man? It only needed Peter Gill’s peculiar mode of collecting the moneys due, and recording the payment by the notched stick, to make the complication perfect; and there, indeed, upon the table, amid accounts and bills and sale warrants, lay the memorable bits of wood themselves, as that worthy steward had deposited them before quitting his master’s service.

Peter’s character, too, written out in Kate’s hand, and only awaiting her father’s signature, was on the table – the first intimation Dick Kearney had that old Gill had quitted his post.

‘All this must have occurred to-day,’ thought Dick; ‘there were no evidences of these changes when I left this morning! Was it the backwater of my disgrace, I wonder, that has overwhelmed poor Gill?’ thought he, ‘or can I detect Miss Betty’s fine Roman hand in this incident?’

In proportion to the little love he bore Miss O’Shea, were his convictions the stronger that she was the cause of all mischief. She was one of those who took very ‘utilitarian’ notions of his own career, and he bore her small gratitude for the solicitude. There were short sentences in pencil along the margin of the chief book in Kate’s handwriting which could not fail to strike him as he read them, indicating as they did her difficulty, if not utter incapacity, to deal with the condition of the estate. Thus: —

‘There is no warranty for this concession. It cannot be continued.’ – ‘The notice in this case was duly served, and Gill knows that it was to papa’s generosity they were indebted for remaining.’ – ‘These arrears have never been paid, on that point I am positive!’ – ‘Malone’s holding was not fairly measured, he has a just claim to compensation, and shall have it.’ – ‘Hannigan’s right to tenancy must not be disputed, but cannot be used as a precedent by others on the same part of the estate, and I will state why.’ – ‘More of Peter Gill’s conciliatory policy! The Regans, for having been twice in gaol, and once indicted, and nearly convicted of Ribbonism, have established a claim to live rent-free! This I will promise to rectify.’ – ‘I shall make no more allowances for improvements without a guarantee, and a penalty besides on non-completion.’

And last of all came these ominous words: —

‘It will thus be seen that our rent-roll since ‘64 has been progressively decreasing, and that we have only been able to supply our expenses by sales of property. Dick must be spoken to on this, and at once.’

Several entries had been already rubbed out, and it was clear that she had been occupied in the task of erasion on that very night. Poor girl! her sleep was the heavy repose of one utterly exhausted; and her closely clasped lips and corrugated brow showed in what frame of intense thought she had sunk to rest. He closed the book noiselessly, as he looked at her, replaced the various objects on the table, and rose to steal quietly away.

The accidental movement of a chair, however, startled her; she turned, and leaning on her elbow, she saw him as he tried to move away. ‘Don’t go, Dick, don’t go. I’m awake, and quite fresh again. Is it late?’

‘It’s not far from one o’clock,’ said he, half-roughly, to hide his emotion; for her worn and wearied features struck him now more forcibly than when she slept.

‘And are you only returned now? How hungry you must be. Poor fellow – have you dined to-day?’

‘Yes; I got to Owen Molloy’s as they were straining the potatoes, and sat down with them, and ate very heartily too.’

‘Weren’t they proud of it? Won’t they tell how the young lord shared their meal with them?’

‘I don’t think they are as cordial as they used to be, Kate; they did not talk so openly, nor seem at their ease, as I once knew them. And they did one thing, significant enough in its way, that I did not like. They quoted the county newspaper twice or thrice when we talked of the land.’

‘I am aware of that, Dick; they have got other counsellors than their landlords now,’ said she mournfully, ‘and it is our own fault if they have.’

‘What, are you turning Nationalist, Kitty?’ said he, laughing.

‘I was always a Nationalist in one sense,’ said she, ‘and mean to continue so; but let us not get upon this theme. Do you know that Peter Gill has left us?’

‘What, for America?’

‘No; for “O’Shea’s Barn.” Miss Betty has taken him. She came here to-day to “have it out” with papa, as she said; and she has kept her word. Indeed, not alone with him, but with all of us – even Nina did not escape.’

‘Insufferable old woman. What did she dare to say to Nina?’

‘She got off the cheapest of us all, Dick,’ said she, laughing. ‘It was only some stupid remark she made her about looking like a boy, or being dressed like a rope-dancer. A small civility of this sort was her share of the general attention.’

‘And how did Nina take the insolence?’

‘With great good-temper, or good-breeding. I don’t know exactly which covered the indifference she displayed, till Miss Betty, when taking her leave, renewed the impertinence in the hall, by saying something about the triumphant success such a costume would achieve in the circus, when Nina curtsied, and said: “I am charmed to hear you say so, madam, and shall wear it for my benefit; and if I could only secure the appearance of yourself and your little groom, my triumph would be, indeed, complete.” I did not dare to wait for more, but hurried out to affect to busy myself with the saddle, and pretend that it was not tightly girthed.’

‘I’d have given twenty pounds, if I had it, to have seen the old woman’s face. No one ever ventured before to pay her back with her own money.’

‘But I give you such a wrong version of it, Dick. I only convey the coarseness of the rejoinder, and I can give you no idea of the ineffable grace and delicacy which made her words sound like a humble apology. Her eyelids drooped as she curtsied, and when she looked up again, in a way that seemed humility itself, to have reproved her would have appeared downright cruelty.’

‘She is a finished coquette,’ said he bitterly; ‘a finished coquette.’

Kate made no answer, though he evidently expected one; and after waiting a while, he went on: ‘Not but her high accomplishments are clean thrown away in such a place as this, and amongst such people. What chance of fitting exercise have they with my father or myself? Or is it on Joe Atlee she would try the range of her artillery?’

‘Not so very impossible this, after all,’ muttered Kate quietly.

‘What, and is it to that her high ambitions tend? Is he the prize she would strive to win?’

‘I can be no guide to you in this matter, Dick. She makes no confidences with me, and of myself I see nothing.’

‘You have, however, some influence over her.’

‘No; not much.’

‘I did not say much; but enough to induce her to yield to a strong entreaty, as when, for instance, you implored her to spare your brother – that poor fellow about to fall so hopelessly in love – ’

‘I’m not sure that my request did not come too late after all,’ said she, with a laughing malice in her eye.

‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ retorted he, almost fiercely.

‘Oh, I never bargained for what you might do in a moment of passion or resentment.’

‘There is neither one nor the other here. I am perfectly cool, calm, and collected, and I tell you this, that whoever your pretty Greek friend is to make a fool of, it shall not be Dick Kearney.’

‘It might be very nice fooling, all the same, Dick.’

‘I know – that is, I believe I know – what you mean. You have listened to some of those high heroics she ascends to in showing what the exaltation of a great passion can make of any man who has a breast capable of the emotion, and you want to see the experiment tried in its least favourable conditions – on a cold, soulless, selfish fellow of my own order; but, take my word for it, Kate, it would prove a sheer loss of time to us both. Whatever she might make of me, it would not be a hero; and whatever I should strive for, it would not be her love.’

‘I don’t think I’d say that if I were a man.’

He made no answer to these words, but arose and walked the room with hasty steps. ‘It was not about these things I came here to talk to you, Kitty,’ said he earnestly. ‘I had my head full of other things, and now I cannot remember them. Only one occurs to me. Have you got any money? I mean a mere trifle – enough to pay my fare to town?’

‘To be sure I have that much, Dick; but you are surely not going to leave us?’

‘Yes. I suddenly remembered I must be up for the last day of term in Trinity. Knocking about here – I’ll scarcely say amusing myself – I had forgotten all about it. Atlee used to jog my memory on these things when he was near me, and now, being away, I have contrived to let the whole escape me. You can help me, however, with a few pounds?’

‘I have got five of my own, Dick; but if you want more – ’

‘No, no; I’ll borrow the five of your own, and don’t blend it with more, or I may cease to regard it as a debt of honour.’

‘And if you should, my poor dear Dick – ’

‘I’d be only pretty much what I have ever been, but scarcely wish to be any longer,’ and he added the last words in a whisper. ‘It’s only to be a brief absence, Kitty,’ said he, kissing her; ‘so say good-bye for me to the others, and that I shall be soon back again.’

‘Shall I kiss Nina for you, Dick?’

‘Do; and tell her that I gave you the same commission for Miss O’Shea, and was grieved that both should have been done by deputy!’

And with this he hurried away.

CHAPTER XXIII

A HAPHAZARD VICEROY

When the Government came into office, they were sorely puzzled where to find a Lord-Lieutenant for Ireland. It is, unhappily, a post that the men most fitted for generally refuse, while the Cabinet is besieged by a class of applicants whose highest qualification is a taste for mock-royalty combined with an encumbered estate.

Another great requisite, beside fortune and a certain amount of ability, was at this time looked for. The Premier was about, as newspapers call it, ‘to inaugurate a new policy,’ and he wanted a man who knew nothing about Ireland! Now, it might be carelessly imagined that here was one of those essentials very easily supplied. Any man frequenting club-life or dining out in town could have safely pledged himself to tell off a score or two of eligible Viceroys, so far as this qualification went. The Minister, however, wanted more than mere ignorance: he wanted that sort of indifference on which a character for impartiality could so easily be constructed. Not alone a man unacquainted with Ireland, but actually incapable of being influenced by an Irish motive or affected by an Irish view of anything.

Good-luck would have it that he met such a man at dinner. He was an ambassador at Constantinople, on leave from his post, and so utterly dead to Irish topics as to be uncertain whether O’Donovan Rossa was a Fenian or a Queen’s Counsel, and whether he whom he had read of as the ‘Lion of Judah’ was the king of beasts or the Archbishop of Tuam!

The Minister was pleased with his new acquaintance, and talked much to him, and long. He talked well, and not the less well that his listener was a fresh audience, who heard everything for the first time, and with all the interest that attaches to a new topic. Lord Danesbury was, indeed, that ‘sheet of white paper’ the head of the Cabinet had long been searching for, and he hastened to inscribe him with the characters he wished.

‘You must go to Ireland for me, my lord,’ said the Minister. ‘I have met no one as yet so rightly imbued with the necessities of the situation. You must be our Viceroy.’

Now, though a very high post and with great surroundings, Lord Danesbury had no desire to exchange his position as an ambassador, even to become a Lord-Lieutenant. Like most men who have passed their lives abroad, he grew to like the ways and habits of the Continent. He liked the easy indulgences in many things, he liked the cosmopolitanism that surrounds existence, and even in its littleness is not devoid of a certain breadth; and best of all he liked the vast interests at stake, the large questions at issue, the fortunes of states, the fate of dynasties! To come down from the great game, as played by kings and kaisers, to the small traffic of a local government wrangling over a road-bill, or disputing over a harbour, seemed too horrible to confront, and he eagerly begged the Minister to allow him to return to his post, and not risk a hard-earned reputation on a new and untried career.

‘It is precisely from the fact of its being new and untried I need you,’ was the reply, and his denial was not accepted.

Refusal was impossible; and with all the reluctance a man consents to what his convictions are more opposed to even than his reasons, Lord Danesbury gave in, and accepted the viceroyalty of Ireland.

He was deferential to humility in listening to the great aims and noble conceptions of the mighty Minister, and pledged himself – as he could safely do – to become as plastic as wax in the powerful hands which were about to remodel Ireland.

He was gazetted in due course, went over to Dublin, made a state entrance, received the usual deputations, complimented every one, from the Provost of Trinity College to the Chief Commissioner of Pipewater; praised the coast, the corporation, and the city; declared that he had at length reached the highest goal of his ambition; entertained the high dignitaries at dinner, and the week after retired to his ancestral seat in North Wales, to recruit after his late fatigue, and throw off the effects of that damp, moist climate which already he fancied had affected him.

He had been sworn in with every solemnity of the occasion; he had sat on the throne of state, named the officers of his household, made a master of the horse, and a state steward, and a grand chamberlain; and, till stopped by hearing that he could not create ladies and maids of honour, he fancied himself every inch a king; but now that he had got over to the tranquil quietude of his mountain home, his thoughts went away to the old channels, and he began to dream of the Russians in the Balkan and the Greeks in Thessaly. Of all the precious schemes that had taken him months to weave, what was to come of them now? How and with what would his successor, whoever he should be, oppose the rogueries of Sumayloff or the chicanery of Ignatief? what would any man not trained to the especial watchfulness of this subtle game know of the steps by which men advanced? Who was to watch Bulgaria and see how far Russian gold was embellishing the life of Athens? There was not a hungry agent that lounged about the Russian embassy in Greek petticoats and pistols whose photograph the English ambassador did not possess, with a biographical note at the back to tell the fellow’s name and birthplace, what he was meant for, and what he cost. Of every interview of his countrymen with the Grand-Vizier he was kept fully informed, and whether a forage magazine was established on the Pruth, or a new frigate laid down at Nickolief, the news reached him by the time it arrived at St. Petersburg. It is true he was aware how hopeless it was to write home about these things. The ambassador who writes disagreeable despatches is a bore or an old woman. He who dares to shake the security by which we daily boast we are surrounded, is an alarmist, if not worse. Notwithstanding this, he held his cards well ‘up’ and played them shrewdly. And now he was to turn from this crafty game, with all its excitement, to pore over constabulary reports and snub justices of the peace!

But there was worse than this. There was an Albanian spy who had been much employed by him of late, a clever fellow, with access to society, and great facilities for obtaining information. Seeing that Lord Danesbury should not return to the embassy, would this fellow go over to the enemy? If so, there were no words for the mischief he might effect. By a subordinate position in a Greek government-office, he had often been selected to convey despatches to Constantinople, and it was in this way his lordship first met him; and as the fellow frankly presented himself with a very momentous piece of news, he at once showed how he trusted to British faith not to betray him. It was not alone the incalculable mischief such a man might do by change of allegiance, but the whole fabric on which Lord Danesbury’s reputation rested was in this man’s keeping; and of all that wondrous prescience on which he used to pride himself before the world, all the skill with which he baffled an adversary, and all the tact with which he overwhelmed a colleague, this same ‘Speridionides’ could give the secret and show the trick.

How much more constantly, then, did his lordship’s thoughts revert to the Bosporus than the Liffey! all this home news was mean, commonplace, and vulgar. The whole drama – scenery, actors, plot – all were low and ignoble; and as for this ‘something that was to be done for Ireland,’ it would of course be some slowly germinating policy to take root now, and blossom in another half-century: one of those blessed parliamentary enactments which men who dealt in heroic remedies like himself regarded as the chronic placebo of the political quack.

‘I am well aware,’ cried he aloud, ‘for what they are sending me over. I am to “make a case” in Ireland for a political legislation, and the bill is already drawn and ready; and while I am demonstrating to Irish Churchmen that they will be more pious without a religion, and the landlords richer without rent, the Russians will be mounting guard at the Golden Horn, and the last British squadron steaming down the Levant.’

It was in a temper kindled by these reflections he wrote this note: —

PLMNUDDM CASTLE, NORTH WALES.

‘DEAR WALPOLE, – I can make nothing out of the papers you have sent me; nor am I able to discriminate between what you admit to be newspaper slander and the attack on the castle with the unspeakable name. At all events, your account is far too graphic for the Treasury lords, who have less of the pictorial about them than Mr. Mudie’s subscribers. If the Irish peasants are so impatient to assume their rights that they will not wait for the “Hatt-Houmaïoun,” or Bill in Parliament that is to endow them, I suspect a little further show of energy might save us a debate and a third reading. I am, however, far more eager for news from Therapia. Tolstai has been twice over with despatches; and Boustikoff, pretending to have sprained his ankle, cannot leave Odessa, though I have ascertained that he has laid down new lines of fortification, and walked over twelve miles per day. You may have heard of the great “Speridionides,” a scoundrel that supplied me with intelligence. I should like much to get him over here while I am on my leave, confer with him, and, if possible, save him from the necessity of other engagements. It is not every one could be trusted to deal with a man of this stamp, nor would the fellow himself easily hold relations with any but a gentleman. Are you sufficiently recovered from your sprained arm to undertake this journey for me? If so, come over at once, that I may give you all necessary indications as to the man and his whereabouts.

‘Maude has been “on the sick-list,” but is better, and able to ride out to-day. I cannot fill the law-appointments till I go over, nor shall I go over till I cannot help it. The Cabinet is scattered over the Scotch lakes. C. alone in town, and preparing for the War Ministry by practising the goose-step. Telegraph, if possible, that you are coming, and believe me yours,

DANESBURY.’