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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78945 ***
+
+                      EACH VOLUME SOLD SEPARATELY.
+
+
+
+
+                               COLLECTION
+
+                                   OF
+
+                             BRITISH AUTHORS
+
+                           TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
+
+
+                                VOL. 809.
+
+                    MAXWELL DREWITT BY F. G. TRAFFORD
+
+                             IN TWO VOLUMES.
+
+                                 VOL. 1.
+
+
+                      LEIPZIG: BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ.
+
+              PARIS: C. REINWALD, 15, RUE DES SAINTS PÈRES.
+
+                            _This Collection
+    is published with copyright for Continental circulation, but all
+  purchasers are earnestly requested not to introduce the volumes into
+                  England or into any British Colony._
+
+
+
+
+                               COLLECTION
+
+                                   OF
+
+                            BRITISH AUTHORS.
+
+                               VOL. 809.
+
+
+                   MAXWELL DREWITT BY F. G. TRAFFORD.
+
+                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
+
+                                VOL. I.
+
+
+
+
+                            MAXWELL DREWITT.
+                                A NOVEL.
+
+
+                                   BY
+
+                            F. G. TRAFFORD,
+
+                     AUTHOR OF “GEORGE GEITH,” ETC.
+
+                          _COPYRIGHT EDITION._
+
+                            IN TWO VOLUMES.
+
+                                VOL. I.
+
+
+                                LEIPZIG
+
+                           BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
+
+                                 1866.
+
+                _The Right of Translation is reserved._
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+                              OF VOLUME I.
+
+                                                       Page
+             CHAPTER     I. Diamond cut Diamond           1
+                —       II. Maxwell’s Little Game        14
+                —      III. The Master of Kincorth       33
+                —       IV. Coming Home                  50
+                —        V. Peacemaking                  62
+                —       VI. At the Hustings              76
+                —      VII. The Result of the Poll       93
+                —     VIII. Not Dead                    113
+                —       IX. Mrs. Drewitt understands    125
+                —        X. Maxwell’s Engagements       142
+                —       XI. Warned                      158
+                —      XII. Son and Heir                172
+                —     XIII. Maxwell’s Improvements      187
+                —      XIV. Next                        203
+                —       XV. Man and Beast               218
+                —      XVI. Poor Jenny                  230
+                —     XVII. Master Harold               243
+                —    XVIII. A Little Political Economy  260
+                —      XIX. Durrow                      278
+                —       XX. A Little Leap               294
+                —      XXI. Help                        307
+
+
+
+
+                            MAXWELL DREWITT.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I.
+                          Diamond cut Diamond.
+
+
+“Confoundedly unlucky for you, Max.”
+
+“Truth, though you spoke it, my boy.”
+
+Having uttered which civil reply, Mr. Maxwell Drewitt flung the fag-end
+of a cigar he had been gnawing out of the window, lit another, and
+commenced smoking like a chimney.
+
+I wonder, reader, what opinion you, looking into that little
+sitting-room, would be inclined to form concerning the two men who
+tenanted it—what sort of character you would naturally attribute to
+each—what precise road through life you might think it most probable
+they would respectively follow.
+
+That tall one lolling on the sofa will, if you ask his name, answer,
+“Tim Ryan, at your service;” whilst the younger man, supposing you put
+the same question to him, would first inquire, “What the deuce business
+it was of yours?” and finally give in to the fact, that people did call
+him Maxwell Drewitt, nephew to Archibald Drewitt, Esquire, of Kincorth,
+near Duranmore, Connemara, Galway, Ireland.
+
+It is the story of Maxwell Drewitt’s life which I am about to try to
+tell, and I must ask you before we go further, to look attentively at
+him, and at the man whom for lack of a better word must be called his
+friend.
+
+There they sit in the sunlight, in the parlour of Mr. Ryan’s house,
+which is a long, low, two-storey, whitewashed cottage, standing a little
+back from the highroad leading to Duranmore. There they are for you to
+study at your leisure. Ryan fair; Drewitt dark; the former grey-eyed,
+reddish haired, wide-mouthed, and eight-and-twenty; the latter nearly
+six years younger, slightly made, and rather under than over the middle
+height, with dark eyes, dark complexion, and regular features.
+
+Nothing very remarkable, you think, about either of them in face, dress,
+circumstances, or expression.
+
+Perhaps you may judge that Ryan is inclined to mirth, whilst Drewitt
+affects gravity; that Max has more brains than Tim, and Tim a better
+temper than Max; but still, notwithstanding Ryan turns his eyes at times
+in a way which is not pleasant, and although when Drewitt speaks he has
+a peculiar and most ungraceful knack of not moving his lips like other
+people, you see nothing evil in either face.
+
+Look again, look steadily, and be sure. Nothing evil? No, decidedly not;
+and this time you are certain of the accuracy of your observation.
+
+All of which only proves that, spite of Lavater, faces are oftentimes
+great lies. They are the paper-money of society, for which, on demand,
+there frequently proves to be no gold in the human coffer.
+
+Maxwell Drewitt’s face, at any rate, was a lie, for it told no
+unpleasant tales about his character. There was nothing disagreeable in
+its expression; there was no shadow of evil in his eyes, and yet the
+person that knew him best perhaps on earth—his uncle—once declared, “the
+man who trusted Maxwell Drewitt twice was a fool.”
+
+He had been that fool, so it is fair to suppose him a competent judge in
+the matter.
+
+Wherever Maxwell Drewitt had been born; under whatsoever circumstances
+he had been brought up; had he been the son of a bishop, or the heir of
+a duke, there can be no reasonable doubt but that he would have turned
+out just as bad a man, though, perhaps, a man differently bad.
+
+With Timothy Ryan the case was different. It seemed as though Nature had
+hardly been able to decide what to make of him; that she had hesitated
+between an honest man and a rogue; and that while she remained
+irresolute, training and nurture took the matter into their own hands,
+and did the worst for him they could.
+
+He himself was wont to declare he was as honest as he could afford to
+be; and if such were the case we can only suppose that the smallness of
+his capital restricted his expenditure of probity and fair dealing to
+almost a minimum sum per annum.
+
+There ensued a long pause after the two remarks I have recorded, during
+which the younger man puffed the smoke of his cigar out into the summer
+air, and the elder toyed with the tassels of the window-curtains and
+looked forth upon Duranmore Bay.
+
+“Confoundedly unlucky,” he at length repeated, bringing his eyes back
+from the sea and the mountains, and stretching one long leg across a
+neighbouring chair—“confoundedly unlucky, indeed.”
+
+“You have made that remark three times,” answered Mr. Drewitt, “and I do
+not see that it grows any less true by repetition, for which reason let
+us quit talking about the matter. If I am not at Kincorth I shall be
+elsewhere. We must always be someplace, Tim; on the earth, or in it.
+What’s done is done, and there is no use fretting over it. When one door
+is shut, another is open. The thing that has been predestined from the
+beginning of time must come to pass before the end of it. Are not those
+your sentiments?”
+
+“Yes, but then we never know what has been predestined till it actually
+happens; and this cursed marriage has not come off yet. Though I am a
+firm fatalist, still I never leave anything for fate to do that I can do
+for myself, and should advise you ditto. Can’t you scotch the wheel,
+Max?”
+
+“I? No,” replied the other.
+
+“Nor loosen a screw, nor upset the coach matrimonial, nor—nor do
+anything, my son?”
+
+“Not a thing,” said Mr. Drewitt out of one side of his mouth.
+
+“Could you not go to London and marry her yourself?”
+
+“And saddle myself with a poor wife, and in due time a tribe of hungry
+brats, leaving my worthy uncle at liberty to marry any one else whom he
+might take it into his wise head to fancy. No thank you, Tim, I am
+rather too wide awake for that. Let him bring home his young wife; I
+won’t try to prevent him.”
+
+“They say she is pretty, Max, as well as young,” remarked Mr. Ryan. “She
+will wind him round her finger. There will be some stir at the old place
+when she comes over.”
+
+“Yes, the same stir there always has been,” said Maxwell Drewitt with a
+malicious smile, “a rustling of bills, and clamour of duns, a rumour of
+writs and dread of bailiffs. I wish the lady joy of her bargain. She
+will see hundreds going out, but not a sixpence will she ever be able to
+keep in her purse. She will have to pay the servants’ wages with
+promises, and manage her housekeeping on credit, and turn her silk gowns
+three times. She will be the scapegoat in trouble, the stay at home in
+pleasure. She will have to teach Willy and Katty, and fight it out with
+Sue. She will have no excitement from year’s end to year’s end, for it
+is not likely she can either drink or hunt. Altogether, Mrs. Archibald
+Drewitt of Kincorth will have an agreeable life of it, and if she were
+the devil I pity her.”
+
+At that Ryan looked up. “You pity her?” he repeated slowly and
+doubtingly, for he knew his companion seldom pitied any but those he was
+resolved should ere long require an abundance of the article from some
+one. “You pity her?”
+
+“Yes, faith,” answered the other; “I know what Kincorth has been to us;
+I know what it will be to her. But hang it, Ryan, let us quit talking
+about this new martyr; put a cigar in your mouth and shut up.”
+
+“They say,” continued Mr. Ryan, unheeding his friend’s polite request,
+“that your uncle intends settling Kincorth upon her.”
+
+For a moment Maxwell Drewitt remained silent, while his face changed and
+darkened; then he answered—
+
+“Likely enough. The man’s in love, you know.”
+
+“So he may be,” replied Ryan, “but justice is justice for all that; and
+it is not justice to cut you out of the house and demesne for ever.”
+
+“And a day,” finished the smoker; “but bless your soul, it may just as
+well be decided, now that I am never to be a farthing the better for any
+Drewitt living or dead, except myself. It must have come to this sooner
+or later, and I say it is better sooner, than later.”
+
+“Then how am I to be paid?” inquired the other. At which question Mr.
+Maxwell Drewitt raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders and
+looked full in his friend’s face while he laughed aloud.
+
+“What the devil is amusing you?” asked Ryan angrily.
+
+“So you were waiting to be paid out of Kincorth, were you?” answered Mr.
+Drewitt. “You would have been content to run barefoot till Archibald
+Drewitt dropped off his shoes some fine winter morning following the
+hounds, or slipped his feet out of them after a night’s hard drinking
+preparatory to taking a sound sleep in Eversbeg Abbey. Laugh!—it is
+enough to make a cat laugh to think of such patience.”
+
+“I was not waiting for his death,” retorted Ryan. “I thought he would do
+something for you before long—make some suitable provision for the next
+heir.”
+
+“You chanced to be damnably out in your thought, then,” replied the
+younger man; “that is all the remark I have to offer on the subject.”
+
+“Well, then, how am I to be paid?” repeated Mr. Ryan. “You owe me more
+than I can afford to lose, Max, and——”
+
+“Don’t trouble yourself to make a speech,” interrupted Drewitt, “there
+is no audience; you want to know how you are to be paid. I’ll pay you.
+You perhaps want to know when. Within twelve months. You may further
+desire to know how, but that is my business, not yours. Now let us talk
+about something else.”
+
+“If you have not much gold, you have lots of brass,” remarked the other:
+“you borrow and borrow and borrow, and then say I am not to ask a
+question about repayment.”
+
+“Are you going to dun me, Ryan?”
+
+“I do not want to dun you; I only wish to know how I am to be paid.”
+
+“I have told you I will pay you within twelve months from this present
+hour.”
+
+“But how? How is it possible?”
+
+“Mr. Timothy Ryan,” broke in his friend, “there is only one way in which
+a man without a pound note in his pocket can possibly pay his debts
+honourably—with an ounce of lead. If you would choose that settlement
+between us I can have no possible objection to such an arrangement; but
+if, on the other hand, you prefer taking your principal and interest in
+the coin of the realm you must wait my time, and my time is a year from
+this date.”
+
+“Have your year, then,” said the other, sulkily. “I don’t want to press
+you. I only——”
+
+“That’s right,” answered Mr. Drewitt, as his friend paused. “Now let us
+talk about something else.”
+
+“What else? The election?”
+
+“Thank you. I hear enough about that up at the house. The very name of
+it drives me away. I am sick and tired to death of the whole confounded
+humbug;” and as he concluded, the young man rose from his chair, placed
+a somewhat shabby hat jauntily on his head, and prepared to take his
+departure.
+
+“Stop a minute,” entreated Ryan. “You know the seat is to be contested
+this time, and pretty hotly too. Sache is not going to walk over the
+course as Abbott did. You are old enough to take some decided part on
+your own account. Which party do you side with?”
+
+“Really, I have never thought about the matter; but I will now. Let me
+see—who is my uncle for?”
+
+“Sache, of course.”
+
+“Then I am for Ryan, of course,” returned Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“May we count upon your assistance?” asked Ryan eagerly.
+
+“I do not know,” answered the younger man. “Any good likely to come of
+it?” he inquired, after a moment’s pause.
+
+“What is your figure?” said Ryan. (Among friends, you see, reader, much
+ceremony can be dispensed with.) “What is your figure?”
+
+“That place of Lynch’s has just fallen in—that place near Eversbeg—round
+the headland, I mean—between the abbey and the shore.”
+
+“Oh, that! It is promised to Hunter, a Scotch fellow. He talked about
+building a good house on it.”
+
+“Did he? Well, talk’s cheaper than building, any day. It is a nice farm
+though, and you can just mention to Waller that I like it, and that
+Hunter is a Sacheite. I would take it without a fine, on lease of
+Waller’s life. You might think it over. Good-bye.” And without waiting
+for an answer, Mr. Drewitt strolled leisurely out of the house, and
+wended his way towards home.
+
+“It is my belief,” remarked Mr. Ryan, as he watched his visitor’s
+departure, “it is my belief, Max, that you are the making of as great a
+scoundrel as ever broke bread.”
+
+And considering Mr. Timothy Ryan was a long way from being a honest man
+himself, this remark may be regarded as a solemn truth, for Mr. Maxwell
+Drewitt’s friend was by no means biased in his judgment, either by the
+prejudices of superior virtue or by any contracted ideas as to the
+number of vices requisite to form a scoundrel.
+
+It was simply the confession of faith of a man who stuck at few things,
+concerning the character of a man who stuck at none; and when he had
+given utterance to his opinion in the sentence recorded, Timothy Ryan,
+Esq., solicitor, felt himself wonderfully relieved, and at liberty to
+retire from the window to a table covered with books and papers and
+letters and deeds and leases, where he was soon up to his ears in
+business.
+
+He had not been writing for more than fifteen minutes, however, when
+Maxwell Drewitt re-appeared.
+
+He came lounging into the room with the same immoveable expression on
+his countenance, and the eternal cigar between his lips—for Maxwell
+Drewitt lived smoking; he did nothing without either a pipe or a weed in
+his mouth, and the principal reason perhaps why he liked tobacco was,
+because his uncle detested it.
+
+“I say, Ryan,” began the young man, taking one hand out of his pocket in
+order to knock the ash off his cigar, “I say, Ryan, lend me a pen and
+sheet of paper, will you, for five minutes? I want to send a letter off
+to-day, and it will be too late for post, I find, if I go back to
+Kincorth. There, don’t disturb yourself—that will do.”
+
+And as he concluded, the speaker pulled a chair up to the opposite end
+of the table, dragged the writing materials his friend looked out,
+towards him, and then, after sitting biting his nails for a few seconds,
+shaded the top of the sheet with his hand, dipped his pen in the ink,
+muttered an oath about the latter being so infernally thick, and began.
+
+Busily the quill at the lawyer’s desk went scratching over the foolscap;
+rapidly was line after line completed; hurriedly were erasures made and
+other sentences substituted; but spite of all his hurry, Mr. Ryan
+managed to keep an eye on his visitor, and tried to make out what he was
+writing.
+
+He might as well have spared himself the trouble, for even when Maxwell
+did lift his hand for a moment from the top of the page to the end, that
+he might finish biting his nails down to the quick, Mr. Ryan found it
+impossible to read his friend’s letter upside down.
+
+“Never mind,” he thought, “I shall know all about it one of these days.
+Judging from his face, he means no good to some poor devil.”
+
+Mr. Ryan was right, and if you, dear reader, would like to watch the
+progress of Mr. Maxwell Drewitt’s little game, we can walk round to the
+other end of the table, and read the epistle over his shoulder.
+
+                                   [PRIVATE.]
+                                   “Inchnagawn Cottage, near Duranmore,
+                                                         June 11th, 18—.
+
+  “DEAR SIR,—I suppose you have heard ere this that my uncle is going to
+  be married to a young lady named Dyak, a daughter of Colonel Dyak, of
+  London, but conclude that his intention of settling Kincorth upon her
+  will be as new to you as it was until last night to me.
+
+  “I am sure it will seem but natural to you that I should wish to
+  prevent this, as you are aware that by the terms of my grandfather’s
+  will, my father, the elder son, was disinherited, and that my sisters
+  and self were consequently left dependent on the generosity, or
+  justice, of my uncle.
+
+  “You will at once see the effect of such a settlement. It would cut me
+  off for ever from all hope of possessing this portion of my
+  grandfather’s property; as in case of my uncle dying without issue,
+  Kincorth would pass absolutely to Mrs. Drewitt, who would thus be left
+  at liberty to contract a second marriage, and to will the house and
+  demesne to whom she pleased.
+
+  “Further, it would render your chances of repayment almost indefinite,
+  Kincorth being the gem of the property; indeed, the result of the
+  whole arrangement would be to place Kincorth beyond the reach of Mr.
+  Drewitt’s creditors; and though there is no doubt but that he would
+  bitterly repent his imprudence in after years, at the present moment
+  any remonstrance on my part would only tend to produce an estrangement
+  between us.
+
+  “I want nothing except what is fair, and certainly think as the lady
+  has no fortune of her own, that some settlement is desirable. But an
+  equitable settlement is one thing, and making over an entire estate to
+  a stranger, another.
+
+  “However, I now leave the matter entirely in your hands, to act as you
+  think best, _for you are the only person who can interfere with
+  advantage to all parties_, and shall only beg that you will in any
+  case consider this letter as strictly confidential.
+
+  “Trusting your health is re-established,
+
+                                       “I remain, dear sir,
+                                               “Yours faithfully,
+                                                       “MAXWELL DREWITT.
+
+  “P.S.—I am at present staying with my friend Mr. Thomas Ryan, and
+  shall feel obliged by your directing me here _under cover_ to him.”
+
+“So you have finished at last, Max?” remarked the attorney, as his
+visitor commenced folding up his letter. “I think the sky must be going
+to fall when you take to the quill. Surely you have not gone and done
+it?”
+
+“Gone and done what?” demanded the younger man, hurriedly.
+
+“Put your foot in your fortune—made a fool of yourself—fallen in love.”
+
+“Fallen in nonsense!” retorted Mr. Drewitt. “No, Tim, I’m not in love
+with anybody, unless it be with myself.”
+
+“Ah! that’s best. You will have no rivals there,” replied the lawyer,
+which remark Maxwell affected not to hear.
+
+“You are not writing love-letters, then?” persisted Mr. Ryan.
+
+“Not I, faith; the sort of love-letters I want to fall in with are money
+letters. Thank God, I am not such a fool as you are, Tim.”
+
+“You are thankful for small mercies,” was the retort, uttered as Mr.
+Drewitt reached the door. “Are you off in a huff? Well, good-bye—but
+stay—when shall I see you again about the election?”
+
+“Damn the election!” replied the young hypocrite. “Do you think I have
+nothing to interest me but drunken voters and lying candidates? I’ll
+come when it suits me; and besides, I have not yet made up my mind
+whether I will be your man or not.”
+
+“You had better, then, lose no time about making it up,” snapped back
+Ryan; “for Sache and his people are in the field already, and we ought
+to be there too.”
+
+“That is your affair,” said Drewitt, as he passed out into the hall.
+“Adieu, my dear fellow, _au revoir!_” And this time he banged the door
+after him and was fairly off.
+
+“Some day,” soliloquized the lawyer, “some day, Maxwell Drewitt, I shall
+pay you out in your own coin. Some day when you stand in no need of me,
+nor I of you, then we shall be equals—then we shall have many an old
+score to settle. Meanwhile——”
+
+He went back to his work, leaving the remainder of the sentence
+unspoken; and as it would be but waste of time for us to follow his
+thoughts, we will step out into the bright sunshine, and track Mr.
+Drewitt’s indolent footsteps home.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II.
+                         Maxwell’s Little Game.
+
+
+Very leisurely Mr. Maxwell Drewitt lounged along, for it was part of
+that young man’s creed to work rather with his head than with his body.
+In that caldron he was eternally brewing something which turned out food
+for him, and poison for other people.
+
+From childhood he had been plotting and scheming, and by dint of long
+thought and care and study he had finally reached almost the top step of
+the ladder of hypocrisy, and was, as Ryan said, “the making of as great
+a scoundrel as ever lived.”
+
+So he went on his way very slowly, with his hands plunged in his
+pockets. Kicking the small stones ruthlessly before him, he went along
+the road leading to Duranmore, where, having posted his letter, he
+turned aside from the regular thoroughfare and descended to the beach,
+along which there was a path, though a circuitous one, home.
+
+Sometimes he looked over the bay; but more generally he kept his eyes
+riveted on the ground.
+
+Written on the sands he saw the story of his future life traced
+out—riches, prosperity, success; he beheld them all. There were
+obstacles, but he crushed them; impediments, but he removed them; foes,
+but he annihilated them.
+
+“Yes, yes,” he cried at last, halting suddenly, and looking away towards
+the hills that rose to heaven—“Yes, yes, Kincorth, you shall yet be
+mine—you and many a fair property beside; but you in especial, because I
+have sworn that neither man nor devil shall keep you from me. And shall
+a woman? No, before God!”
+
+And the veins came swelling up in his forehead as he stretched out one
+clenched hand towards Kincorth, and registered his oath.
+
+There lay his home—his home where he lived a dependent—which was his,
+only so long as his uncle’s charity chose to give him the shelter of its
+roof.
+
+Look at it, reader, intently as he did, for it was destined to bring
+agony unto many hearts, to curse many lives, to peril some souls.
+
+Kincorth! there was not a lovelier spot in Ireland; and is not that
+almost equivalent to saying there was not a lovelier spot in the wide
+world?
+
+Halfway up a hill stood the house, backed by dark plantations,
+surrounded by woods and long belts of trees, and verdant fields and
+trickling streams. It was built of the blue granite for which Galway is
+noted, and some Drewitt had in other days erected a porch of black
+marble, around the pillars of which wreathed roses and fuchsias and
+myrtles.
+
+There was the flower-garden, with its hedges of sweetbriar and
+evergreens, with its baskets of wickerwork filled with mignonette.
+
+There were rose-trees covered with buds, and little wild Scotch bushes
+that crept close to the ground, and strewed it with a carpet of white
+and yellow leaves. There were perfumed syringas, Italian broom, and
+barberry-trees, and beds of tulips.
+
+There was a fountain in the centre where the supply of water never
+failed, and creepers and passionflowers and honeysuckles grew about the
+inclosure at their own sweet will.
+
+Kincorth had also its glen and waterfall, and at the top of the fall
+there stood a dilapidated summer-house, from which you could see away
+and away over the sea and the land. The trackless ocean and the distant
+mountains, the villages and hamlets below, and the dashing water near at
+hand—all were visible from this place, which was made of fir, and
+ornamented with shells, and shaded with sycamore and chesnut trees.
+
+Then there was the old entrance, built of the same dark stone as the
+house, half covered with wild white roses, whilst the lodge looked
+brilliant in its scarlet deckings of pyracanthus, the blossoms of which
+mixed among the white buds that were straggling about everywhere, and
+trying to effect an entrance even at the latticed windows.
+
+There were holes in the roof and breakages in the wall; but trees shaded
+the one, and wild flowers concealed the other; and Kincorth, with all
+its dilapidations—with its ruined buildings, and trailing brambles, and
+unmown grass, and unpruned trees—looked beautiful in the dancing
+sunshine.
+
+“And it was this place he wanted to settle on her, and secure from me,”
+muttered Maxwell, as he entered the drive, across which the branches of
+the dark trees met and formed a sort of cathedral roof; and again he
+paused, and with arms folded across his chest, with his lips tightly
+pressed together, and his dark brows bent down looked up at the house
+once more.
+
+Look at him now, reader. Would you like to be an obstacle in his path?
+Would you care to be a thing in his way? Cannot you see he would stamp
+you into the earth as he stamps his heel into the gravel? Would it not
+be an awful thing to have to plead to that man for mercy?—to hear him
+answer you with that mocking devil in his eyes, out of those thin,
+relentless lips?
+
+He is young now: what will he be when he is old? He is just starting on
+life’s journey: what will he be when the road has been traversed—when
+the world has hardened him—when experience has matured him? If you come
+on to the end, you shall see what he is like when the raven hair is
+gray, and the keen eyes dulled, and the devil within satisfied—you shall
+see. Meantime he stands with the evening sunbeams making their way
+through the trees and falling aslant on his figure, and lighting up the
+green and beautiful sward and the plotting, scheming, wary man whose
+heart was full of bitterness, whose soul was full of hate.
+
+Kincorth should have been his! If primogeniture were worth anything—if
+being the eldest son of the eldest son entitled a man to name and land
+and houses—Maxwell Drewitt ought to have been master of Kincorth, and
+Archibald should have been eking out existence somewhere else as best he
+could.
+
+What had George Drewitt done that his father should cut him off? In the
+natural course George Drewitt would have succeeded Nicholas Drewitt,
+Maxwell’s grandfather, save for one deadly sin which he committed. He
+married a nobody, and a Roman Catholic; and though he tried to keep his
+indiscretion a secret, it came finally to his father’s ears, who cut him
+off with a shilling on the spot.
+
+“I would as soon you had married the devil, sir!” thundered the old man;
+and before very long poor Nicholas Drewitt found he might almost as soon
+have mated with that objectionable personage as with his wife, who,
+fortunately perhaps for all parties, died in giving birth to her fourth
+child, leaving George Drewitt at liberty to marry again if he pleased.
+
+But George Drewitt did not please; he lived to get his shilling
+certainly, and to see his brother Archibald owner of Kincorth; he lived
+to move himself and his children back as guests to the old place which
+he had expected to possess; and then he quietly slipped out of this
+world, leaving Maxwell and his sisters to be provided for by their
+uncle, a man full of good intentions, who offered to see to them as if
+they were his own boys and girls.
+
+“I promise you, George, so long as I have sixpence they shall share it.
+I swear it, and you may die happy,” he said to the dying man; who,
+whether he died happy or not, accepted the promise and departed, leaving
+Archibald Drewitt to perform his good intentions if he could.
+
+It is something more than probable that the owner of Kincorth fulfilled
+his promise strictly to the letter, though his own embarrassments and
+wretched mismanagement made it impossible for him to carry out the
+scheme he had proposed to himself in the spirit.
+
+“I will put aside a certain amount,” he determined, “and devote it to
+Maxwell’s education and to portioning his sisters.” A good resolution,
+and perhaps only fair, but one which Mr. Drewitt found he could never
+carry into practice.
+
+He would have done just the same by his own children; he would have
+planned all manner of good things for their benefit, and then he would
+have let them grow up as he let his nephews and nieces grow
+up—uneducated, untrained, unprovided for.
+
+The curse of the Drewitts, improvidence, was on him, and the consequence
+was that, though Maxwell Drewitt and his sisters had food and shelter
+out of their grandfather’s property, they had little more.
+
+Maxwell was not sent to college nor the girls to school. Ready money was
+one of those things which Mr. Drewitt only knew by name; of himself he
+had no acquaintance with it. That George Drewitt’s family did not grow
+up idiots was attributable rather to their own natural cleverness than
+to any advantages of society or education provided for them by their
+uncle. Kincorth was swamped with debt. Every blade of grass, every ear
+of corn, was due to some one ere ever it lifted its head above ground;
+the description given to Ryan by Maxwell of the state of things at his
+uncle’s was not exaggerated in the slightest, and while duns and
+bailiffs besieged the old home of the Drewitts, Maxwell looked on, and
+gnashed his teeth, and thought how, if _he_ had the management, Kincorth
+should soon be clear of debt and the Drewitts rear their heads in the
+county once again.
+
+From his mother he had inherited a clear clever head—a head calculated
+to look closely and warily after the interests of No. 1. His hospitality
+would not have carried him away; his generosity would never have made
+him a poorer man; and it was natural perhaps for such a temper to be
+irritated with the senseless prodigality of his uncle’s _ménage_, and to
+feel more angry at what Mr. Drewitt had left undone than grateful for
+that which he had performed.
+
+Above all, Maxwell Drewitt had been brought up a martyr; since boyhood
+he had thought his uncle a usurper, himself the lawful heir. With that
+love for the first-born which is so distinguishing a feature of the
+Irish, his nurse had always regarded him as “wronged,” and had taught
+him to believe himself so. We read in a very ancient book that when
+Jacob put his hand on the head of Ephraim, Joseph was displeased, and
+just so the mass of the poorer population, much as they liked Archibald
+Drewitt, still considered that the boy had been hardly done by, and that
+he was the rightful owner of all the broad acres that went sloping to
+the sea.
+
+With this idea Maxwell grew up: he had been done out of the estate by
+his grandfather; he was being kept out of it by his uncle, but the day
+must come when the property would revert to him. He was the heir.
+Kincorth must eventually return to the only son of the eldest son—and
+then—
+
+Then all at once came the news that Mr. Drewitt was about to marry.
+
+“And if he marry,” thought Maxwell Drewitt, as he lay awake and tossed
+about from side to side of his bed; “and if he marry—and if he have
+sons—where am I?”
+
+That was the question Archibald Drewitt ought to have considered when he
+adopted the children, but which he had never thought about, first or
+last.
+
+“What was to become of them?” girls who could never earn enough to buy
+shoes to their feet? A young man who could ride across country—bring
+down his bird—dance all night—walk all day—but who knew nothing likely
+to put a guinea in his pocket—what was to become of him?—“What was to
+become of them?”
+
+I echo the question which Maxwell Drewitt put to himself as he lay
+thinking out all manner of disagreeable and evil thoughts in the
+darkness.
+
+All the stories he had read and scoffed at of self-made men came into
+his head. “Why should not a gentleman’s son do well too? Why should not
+a Drewitt and an Irishman make money if he could? What the devil could
+there be in those English people that made them seem able to turn the
+very dirt under their feet to gold? Could _he_ do nothing? Was there no
+El Dorado to which he might turn his steps? If he had Kincorth, could he
+not make money out of it? And if he tried the same scheme with any other
+place, might he not do well with that?”
+
+And Maxwell Drewitt sprang out of bed as he thought of this, and looked
+down over the trees, away and away towards Duranmore, which lay by the
+sea-shore, looking dark and disconsolate in the first dawn of morning.
+
+He looked beyond Duranmore—at something he saw in his mind’s eye, but
+which certainly his outward vision could not have presented to him. “I
+will have that,” he said, and he went back to bed again and fell asleep
+as calmly and peacefully as a child.
+
+From that night the young man formed his plans. Ready money he, like his
+uncle, had none, and like his uncle also he was considerably in debt. He
+had no property save some forty acres of freehold land that came to him
+through his maternal grandfather, and which, having been let during his
+minority to a farmer, were now available if Maxwell chose to give him
+the usual notice. The land, however, was poor and unproductive, and
+though there was a house on the ground, it had been left to go to rack
+and ruin for so long a time that it was almost uninhabitable.
+
+So far the future was unpromising enough. Poor and involved, with no
+profession, with no cash in hand, with no property save a neglected
+piece of barren land, value certainly not exceeding 25_l._ a-year—how
+could the man push his way to fortune?
+
+It was not a cheerful prospect for any one, but still Maxwell Drewitt
+looked out over it bravely, and hour by hour, and day by day, perfected
+his schemes.
+
+He would be idle no longer—he would work, he would be a rich man, when
+Archibald Drewitt was a beggar. Kincorth should NOT pass away from him.
+His uncle should yet be glad to give over the whole place and receive an
+allowance from his nephew. It would take him, say ten years to compass
+this end, and then he would paper and paint Kincorth from garret to
+cellar; he would give every old servant notice; he would keep the
+gardens and grounds in such order that Kincorth should be the talk of
+all the county; and when he had got his own again he would marry—he
+would marry birth, money, and rank, and take his leisure under the
+shadow of his vine and his fig-tree.
+
+In the middle of this day-dream came Ryan’s announcement of his uncle’s
+intention to settle Kincorth upon his wife; and it was the thought of
+the possibility of such a settlement being effected that made Maxwell
+Drewitt stand still as he entered the drive, and look eagerly, longingly
+over Kincorth.
+
+There came a day when he looked over it with different eyes, when the
+netted sunbeams fell aslant on the figure of a bowed and broken man;
+when, satiated with possession and wearied of all he had struggled and
+sinned to obtain, Maxwell Drewitt walked feebly under the shadow of
+those self-same trees, thinking not of this world, wherein he had laid
+house to house and acre to acre, but with a terrible dread, with a
+horrible affright, of that other, to which the treasures of earth may
+not be carried.
+
+But on the summer evening of which I am speaking youth was present and
+age afar off. He was strong, he knew neither ache nor pain, life was all
+before him, it was the spring of his year, the time of budding promise,
+of fearless hope. He had no dread of anything save of Kincorth being
+placed beyond his reach, and he had but little fear of that, for when he
+finished his reverie, and walked on towards the house, he muttered—
+
+“I think I have scotched that wheel. Old Turner has too tight a hold
+over my good uncle to let that cock fight. I would give five pounds to
+see the old fellow’s face when he reads my letter.” And Maxwell Drewitt
+laughed aloud as he pictured to himself the Quaker’s consternation on
+receipt of his communication.
+
+Had Samuel Turner been anything except a “friend” he would have relieved
+his mind by swearing; as it was he merely said “infamous,” and went
+straight off to his solicitor.
+
+After a consultation with that gentleman, who comforted him exceedingly,
+he sent back the following reply to his young correspondent:—
+
+                                        “Ashton-under-Lyne, June —, 18—.
+
+  “FRIEND MAXWELL,
+
+  “Thee hast done quite right, and acted (an unusual thing for youths of
+  thine age and country) with sound sense and good feeling. Be satisfied
+  I shall do the best I can for thee and thy sisters. I grieve that thy
+  uncle, a sensible man, should think at his time of life of marrying a
+  young wife, and she a fashionable woman from London.
+
+                                                 “Thy sincere friend,
+                                                         “SAMUEL TURNER.
+
+  “If thee should turn thy attention at any time to business, I would
+  try to advance thy views if in my power.”
+
+Which letter, coming to Mr. Ryan amongst a number of others, was opened
+by him in mistake, and read right through by intention. He read it once,
+he read it twice, and then laying it down, he said to himself, “So this
+is your dodge, Maxwell Drewitt, is it?—this is the first step.” And when
+Maxwell himself appeared he handed him the epistle, adding, “You are a
+deal cleverer than I thought you. You will—”
+
+“What the devil, sir, do you mean by opening my letters?” burst forth
+his visitor, the blood rushing up warm and red even through his dark
+complexion. “I tell you what it is, Ryan,” he went on, “for many a less
+thing than this a fellow has had a bullet in his skull.”
+
+“Hold your tongue, my son, and don’t talk like a fool,” interrupted Mr.
+Ryan. “How the deuce am I to know a letter is not for me till I have
+read it? On my honour I was half way through the thing before it
+occurred to me there was any blunder.”
+
+“I don’t believe you,” said Drewitt.
+
+“For less than that many a man has been sent into kingdom-come at twelve
+paces,” retorted Ryan; “but there is one blessed comfort in the affair,
+which is, I don’t care whether you believe me or not. There now, boy,
+sit down, and don’t make such a confounded row about the matter. Honour
+among thieves, you know; and I am not going to turn informer.”
+
+“You are an unprincipled scoundrel,” Maxwell persisted, “to open another
+person’s letter.”
+
+“Oh, for Heaven’s sake! drop the saint,” exclaimed his friend. “Maxwell
+Drewitt talking about principle, and Satan reproving sin, always seem to
+me to sail together in the same boat. I tell you I did NOT open the
+letter of malice afore-thought. Now I have made all the apology I intend
+to make, and if you do not like to take it you may leave it.”
+
+“When a letter comes to you under cover, you cannot open it by
+accident.”
+
+“Hang the lad!” exclaimed Ryan, pettishly, “the thing did not come under
+cover at all. There is the whole cursed concern.” And he flung letter
+and envelope to their rightful owner, who, turning up the latter, read:
+
+  “MAXWELL DREWITT,
+    “Care of T. Ryan,
+      “Inchnagawn Cottage,
+        “near Duranmore, Galway, Ireland.
+
+“What an idiot the old fellow must be. I told him as—”
+
+“I know all you said as well as if I had seen your letter,” interrupted
+Ryan. “Besides, what does it matter about my knowing you wrote to
+Turner? Whenever I heard Mrs. Drewitt’s jointure was cut down, I should
+have been sure you had put your foot in it somehow. Indeed, Max Drewitt,
+you are a very promising young man, and your uncle has every right to be
+proud of you.”
+
+“He is proud of nothing just at present, I fancy,” answered the other,
+recovering his temper at this neatly-turned compliment, and flinging
+himself into a chair as he spoke. “I left him wishing all Quakers and
+lawyers in the hottest of hot quarters. We send for our letters, you
+know, and so get them earlier than you do; and you may depend the
+opening of the bag made an uncommon fuss at Kincorth this morning.”
+
+“Let the cat out?” suggested Mr. Ryan.
+
+“No, faith. If it had I might have walked. As it was I had nothing but
+black looks and short answers. Turner has lost no time about the affair
+though, has he?”
+
+“Trust a Quaker for that,” said Mr. Ryan.
+
+“It seems to me,” remarked Mr. Drewitt, “that a dislike to losing money
+is common to both churchmen and Quakers; but really you should see my
+uncle, he is worth travelling from here to Kincorth to get a sight of.”
+
+“What will he do now?” inquired his companion.
+
+“How should I know? write, I suppose, to his father-in-law elect, and
+tell him unforeseen circumstances, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, prevent
+his fulfilling his liberal intentions; or he may try to raise money to
+pay off Turner. He could scarcely do it in the time though,” added
+Maxwell, reflectively.
+
+“Scarcely,” acquiesced Ryan. “But now, I say, Max, tell me why is this
+woman marrying your uncle? You declare she is young, pretty,
+well-born—she can therefore scarcely be in her last wonder yet. What is
+the attraction?”
+
+“Kincorth,” sneered his visitor, pulling his chair up to the table as he
+spoke, with a violence which spilt the contents of the lawyer’s tea-cup
+over his hand.
+
+“You don’t think she loves him, then?” persisted the other, as he wiped
+the tea off his sleeve and wristband.
+
+“Why, what on earth should she love him for?” asked Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“I cannot tell—perhaps because he is frank, handsome, generous, amiable.
+Although he is nearly twenty years older than you, Master Maxwell
+Drewitt, I know if I were a woman, which thank heaven I am not, I should
+fall in love with him sooner than with you.”
+
+“You cannot tell what you might do if you were a woman,” answered the
+youth, thus plainly complimented; “but in this case what I tell you is
+true. The Colonel, her father, is poor as a church-mouse; he has this
+daughter single, and no sons; his income dies with him. It follows,
+therefore, that the girls must either marry or starve, and there is
+Kincorth for the one who is left. A pretty little catch it sounds.
+Fifteen thousand a year, with no encumbrance that she knows of, is worth
+looking pretty and pleasant for, eh, Ryan?”
+
+“In theory,” replied Ryan, “but not in fact. If they are playing such a
+game it is a pity they should lose it; my creed is that whatever people
+marry for, whether for love or money, or position or birth, they should
+get it; and they have mistaken the cards over in England if they are
+reckoning on Kincorth as a trump. Suppose, however, Max, that you are
+wrong, and that this Miss Dyak is marrying your uncle not for love of
+Kincorth, but for love of himself.”
+
+“Love of folly!” was the civil answer. “Why, man, you are turning
+spooney all at once.”
+
+“No I am not,” said Ryan. “Mr. Drewitt is still very handsome; he is a
+thoroughbred Irish gentleman, just the sort to take a girl’s fancy.
+Everywhere but at Kincorth he is as lively and talkative as a boy. I do
+not see why she should not love him; and if she do, God help her!”
+
+“And wherefore?” demanded his visitor, who was employing himself in
+cramming hot buttered toast down his throat—“and wherefore?”
+
+“Because love is too valuable and scarce a commodity to be wasted,”
+answered the lawyer, oracularly; “and further, if Miss Dyak be a woman
+who can love, she will probably feel inclined to do her duty, and if she
+do her duty, why God help her again, I say.”
+
+“You mean with Sue?” This was interrogative.
+
+“I mean with everything: all is wrong at Kincorth—master, nephew,
+nieces, servants, labourers, tenants, everything!”
+
+“I’d soon make all right if I had the management,” remarked Maxwell.
+
+“Old maids’ children and bachelors’ wives,” sneered Ryan.
+
+“I keep every soul about the place in order when my uncle is away,”
+returned the other, hotly. “I should like to see the man that would
+disobey my orders if I were master. I’d undertake to tame any dog,
+horse, or woman in a week. But what is the matter with you, Ryan, you
+are as white as a sheet?”
+
+Mr. Ryan did not answer: he got up and walked to the window; after
+standing there for a minute he came back and reseated himself at the
+table.
+
+“What ails you?” persisted his companion, “are you not well?”
+
+“No, I am not,” was the reply. “I feel as weak as a cat at times, and if
+I were standing in the biggest room at Kincorth I should seem
+suffocating when the fit takes me. I don’t intend to work at home at all
+for the future, and I wish you would come and see me at the office,
+after Monday next, when you want to see me.”
+
+“Upon my soul, you are civil. I like that,” said his visitor. “Why do
+you want me to call at the office? Why do you not want me to come here?”
+
+“Because I want my house to be my home after this week,” was the reply.
+
+“You are going to be married!” exclaimed Mr. Drewitt. “Saul is among the
+prophets.”
+
+“I wish I were married,” answered the lawyer, “if only for my poor
+little sister’s sake. She is coming back to me now her aunt is dead, and
+I must shift for her as best I can. That is the reason I want you to
+call at the office. Do you understand?”
+
+“You are afraid I might fall in love with her, I suppose,” laughed
+Maxwell.
+
+“No; but I am afraid, nothing being impossible, of her falling in love
+with you, and,” went on Mr. Ryan, speaking rapidly and, I might almost
+add, fiercely, “as you and I know one another so well that we need not
+stand on ceremony, I may say that although I do not pretend to be either
+a very good or a very scrupulous man, I had rather put the child in her
+grave than give her to you.”
+
+“I do not know what may be the fashion in your rank,” said Maxwell
+Drewitt, “but in ours we do not consider it the thing to refuse our
+sisters till they are asked for, and I shall certainly never ask you for
+yours. It is all very well for me to know you, but Miss Bourke is a
+different affair altogether. When I take to running in double harness it
+shall be with something more thoroughbred. Tit for tat is fair play.
+Never look so cross about being hit back, man. Let us get to business. I
+am your man throughout the election—at least I think I am; and if you
+like, whenever my uncle leaves for England, I will go canvassing.”
+
+“How many voters can you insure?” asked Ryan, “because if you can bring
+nobody but yourself, I don’t know that you will be of much use.”
+
+“Bless my heart, how independent we are all of a sudden!” exclaimed
+young Drewitt. “Shall I go and tell Pryor’s committee you think me a
+bird not worth catching? How would it be with Waller’s agency then? What
+have you got to say to that?”
+
+“Simply what I said before—a single voter is not worth the having, even
+though he be a Drewitt. How many can you bring with you?” And the pair
+looked straight into one another’s eyes as Ryan finished.
+
+Two dogs might have looked in the same way before flying, with hungry
+teeth, each at the throat of his fellow, but the two men drew off. If
+Drewitt had not changed his tone there would have been a quarrel, but
+the young man spied danger, and answered quietly enough—
+
+“That depends on the cash. I can bribe where you could not. I can get
+refractory fellows out of the way. I can do lots of things if you make
+it worth my while. In short, I will do anything you please, on two
+conditions.”
+
+“There was only one the other day,” remarked the lawyer.
+
+“There are two now, though,” was the reply. “First, the farm, which I
+suppose we may call settled; next, I must second Pryor.”
+
+“Why——”
+
+“I have a crow to pluck with Sache, and I can then have it out with
+him,” answered Mr. Drewitt. “Even you have no idea how much I can help
+you if I choose. Pitted against me, my uncle has no chance. He is an
+intruder—a man who has no earthly right to be at Kincorth. He has
+brought me up as his heir until now, and now he takes a young wife to
+himself, so as to cut me out for ever. On principle I am opposing him.
+Contrary to my own interests I am leaving the old ship of the Drewitts.
+If he would only turn me out of the house it would be the best thing
+possible for the Liberal party. Would not it be capital for us? Heavens!
+what fools people are, and what humbug they will swallow!”
+
+Having concluded which complimentary speech relative to the
+understandings of his fellows, the young man stuffed his hand into his
+coat pocket, and produced thence a book, which Ryan seized eagerly.
+
+“There are their voters,” remarked his friend, “and a precious job I had
+to get it. There you have them all—dead, doubtful, and certain. Now how
+many of our own dead can we personate, and how many of their doubtfuls
+can we get?”
+
+“That depends greatly on you; but are we not losing time most
+needlessly? Sache and Munks and Marsden and Tooley and your uncle have
+been hard at work for days past, and here are we, with all the landed
+interests against us, doing nothing—literally nothing.”
+
+“True; but when once I do start I won’t let the grass grow under my
+feet. There has been many an election at Duranmore, but this will cap
+everything. I hear my uncle is going to bring the new mistress of
+Kincorth home right away, and there are to be election balls and dinners
+and Heaven knows what besides, up at the old place. I should have
+thought the excitement of marrying ought to have been enough for him,
+without any extra fuss; but Archibald Drewitt is like no other human
+being on earth.”
+
+“There is not a man in the county much better liked at any rate,”
+remarked Mr. Ryan, drily. “I wish we had him on our side.”
+
+“Stuff!” exclaimed Maxwell; “can’t you take the book and let us get to
+business?”
+
+“It is impossible to refuse a request urged with such politeness,”
+answered the lawyer, moving over to his writing-table, indistinctly
+catching, as he did so, Maxwell Drewitt’s comment, which was, “Damn your
+politeness.”
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III.
+                        The Master of Kincorth.
+
+
+Archibald Drewitt, Esq., of Kincorth, was born a mistake. He said so
+himself, and therefore there can be no discourtesy in my repeating the
+observation. Whether different circumstances and a different training
+might have rectified nature’s error, it is hard to say. Circumstances
+and training did nothing for him, and accordingly a mistake he remained
+to the end of the chapter.
+
+“Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel;” that was the pleasant
+programme sketched out for him. “Unstable as water, he did not excel,”
+and he made everybody who had the misfortune to be connected with him,
+miserable in consequence.
+
+“Unstable as water!” Good heavens! how could a man, not, to be a bad
+man, have more said in his dispraise!
+
+Unstable as water, his purposes flowed backwards and forwards
+perpetually. With youth, health, ample means, fair talents, he started
+at six-and-twenty with as fair prospects of happiness as need to be
+possessed by any man. Life was before him,—life with its objects, its
+pleasures, its duties; but the duties he never fulfilled, the pleasures
+he never tasted, the objects he never attained. At twenty-seven
+existence seemed a vast conception; at forty-one it was an unfinished,
+unsatisfactory, miserable failure.
+
+God deliver us, friends, from such a result! God grant that, when the
+noon of our life comes, it may find some work finished, some duty
+discharged, so that as the sorrowful sunset draws near—as the darkening
+twilight and the darker night approach, we may be able to look back on
+the bright mid-day hours without tears of anguish, without the bitterest
+thought humanity knows, of having lost time, which, even with all
+eternity before us, we may never retrieve—never—for ever!
+
+Unstable as water, the force with which the current of his feelings
+hurried him along to an object one moment, was only equalled by the
+violence of the flood by which he was distracted from it the next.
+
+Over the sea of life he floated—a boat without a rudder, a mariner
+without a star—tossed hither and thither by every wave of passion, by
+every caprice and impulse. Almost continually he kept within sight of
+the promised land of peace and comfort and content; but never once, ah!
+never, did he manage to touch its shores.
+
+Always planning, never executing. Always commencing, never completing.
+Always borrowing, never repaying. Always thinking, never acting. Always
+proposing, never performing, he spent the whole of his boyhood, manhood,
+and age in sending down lost opportunities and good intentions to that
+place which is paved with the one and roofed with the other.
+
+It was not, I need scarcely add, that he meant to break his word or
+intended to disappoint any living being; it was merely that his theory
+proved better than his practice, that purposing and promising to do
+everything he finished, like many another, by doing nothing.
+
+Unstable as water, there was not a trait in his character but was
+counteracted by some diametrically opposite peculiarity. He was not
+religious, yet he was superstitious and bigoted. He hated the Roman
+Catholics, yet he was always asking the priest to dinner; he was
+prodigal, but still gave little away; he was impatient, yet bore
+disappointment as calmly as a philosopher; he was popular, yet always at
+feud with some one. He was by turns energetic and indolent, kind and
+harsh, forbearing and provoking. His abstract ideas on the subject of
+obedience were excellent, yet his servants and nieces ran counter to his
+orders before his face. He was a stickler for birth and blood, yet he
+supported with heart and soul Mr. Sache—a parvenu, and blackguard. He
+was honourable, yet he could never pay a debt to the day; his bills had
+always to be lifted by a friend, the interest on his mortgages was
+always falling behind, somebody was for ever suffering through, or being
+embarrassed by him. He loved punctuality, yet he could not keep an
+appointment to the hour. He was never out of hot water, yet he looked as
+well and happy as though care and duns and anxiety were meat and drink
+to him. He never had a settled plan, yet he would not adopt any other
+person’s scheme. He was for ever asking advice and never following it;
+in brief, Maxwell Drewitt described his uncle to a nicety when he said
+that he was “consistent in nothing except his inconsistency.”
+
+But notwithstanding all his faults, Archibald Drewitt was better liked
+than many a better man. He had such frank, gracious manners; he was such
+a thorough gentleman in his ideas, his appearance, his bearing; he had
+such a knack of turning a compliment, of saying pleasant things as if he
+meant them, of implying that the man to whom he was talking at the
+moment was his friend of friends—his friend beyond all other friends,
+that it was impossible to resist him, as impossible to remain cold and
+calculating in his presence, as it is for ice to keep from thawing in
+the sun. Let a creditor be ever so angry, an interview with Mr. Drewitt
+satisfied him. Those who had made vows concerning paper lent their name
+to the owner of Kincorth; even Samuel Turner, an Englishman, a Quaker,
+and a merchant, who, for his sins, had once enjoyed the hospitality of
+the Irish gentleman, did bills for him, and was wont to lie awake whole
+nights wondering how they were to be met, till Mr. Drewitt cut the knot
+of his perplexity by a long and pathetic letter setting forth how that
+he could not take up the bill, stating why he could not do so,
+explaining when he should have money in abundance, and imploring Mr.
+Turner meanwhile to do what was needful under the circumstances. “Please
+renew,” was the burden of Mr. Drewitt’s everlasting song, a burden with
+which many business men are conversant; but very few business men meet
+with such correspondents as fell to the lot of the owner of Kincorth.
+
+If was entirely his own fault getting into debt, but people forgot that
+and pitied him for it.
+
+There never was a man who drew so largely on the sympathies and purses
+of his friends, and yet his cheques never came back dishonoured. Liking
+was not the word to express the feeling Mr. Drewitt inspired in those
+with whom he came in contact. He was loved, he was idolized, and yet he
+left no track of good deeds behind him as he walked through life. Even
+his charity, which consisted in letting every tramp who listed walk into
+the kitchen at Kincorth, and drink a basin of milk, or toss off a glass
+of poteen, before he trudged away with his wallet full of broken
+victuals, was as purposeless and as useless as every other action of his
+life. He helped no man who was helping himself; it was not the
+struggling tradesman, the hard-working labourer who benefited by Mr.
+Drewitt’s careless open-handedness; rather, it was the worthless
+vagabond, the lazy idle beggar, who fattened on the waste and profusion
+of Kincorth.
+
+Open house to all comers: covers for a score if a score liked to drop
+in; great sirloins of beef, fish as fine as ever swam in the sea, wine
+of the best, whisky of the strongest, brandy that had never paid the
+king a halfpenny, claret that was in the same predicament; “cead mille
+failthe!” uttered in a rich soft Irish brogue—this was the order of
+things in the parlour; whilst in the kitchen there was a bit and a sup
+for all who chose to claim hospitality; for hungry dogs and for hungry
+men and women. There was the heat of the piled-up turf fire for the lame
+and halt who stood looking over the half door, muttering, “God save all
+here!” There was the cup of tea for the deaf and dumb, who, by reason of
+their misfortunes, were considered able to read the fortunes of others,
+and who kept all the maids from their work by prophesying in signs and
+gestures the advent of certain husbands, probable journeys, possible
+misfortunes.
+
+If the prayer of the poor avail, Archibald Drewitt should have been a
+happy man; for never a day passed over without “God bless him” being
+repeated thirty or forty times. To be sure, the lips that blessed would
+have cursed even more volubly had help been refused; but the help never
+was refused. It was _but_ a handful of meal, _but_ a plate of broken
+meat, _but_ the bag of potatoes, _but_ the screw of tea, _but_ the
+blessing lightly earned, the curse readily averted; and still Archibald
+Drewitt did not prosper, still the property went like the house, like
+the grounds, like the porter’s lodge, like the entrance—to rack and
+ruin.
+
+“Would you grudge the craturs a bite to keep life in them?” asked one of
+the old servants one day when Maxwell Drewitt had made some remark
+concerning the number of beggars he saw about the place.
+
+“I’d make the rascals work and earn it,” he answered.
+
+“Yer grandfather, God rest his sowl! would niver have made a spache like
+that about poor done men,” she replied. “There was many a one thought he
+had done wrong,—I thrust he is now in glory—in passing by his eldest son
+to lave the place to the masther; but there is one thing sure and
+certain, that it is a blessing for the poor you did not get it, Masther
+Maxwell.”
+
+“The poor had best make the most of their blessing then while it lasts,”
+remarked the young man; “for a man cannot go on feeding a county for
+ever, and my uncle is making ducks and drakes of Kincorth as fast as he
+knows how.”
+
+“Well, Masther Maxwell, it’s not for you to be saying anything about who
+he feeds.”
+
+“Because he has fed me, I suppose; because he has kept me like the
+beggars in poverty and idleness,” remarked Maxwell. “I owe him no thanks
+for that, Nannie, rather the reverse.”
+
+“I always heard that Nicholas Drewitt was a terribly wise old gentleman,
+but I am sure of it now,” answered Nannie.
+
+“Well, do you be a wise old woman,” recommended Mr. Drewitt, junior,
+“and make a purse for yourself and keep it; for I swear to you, Nannie,
+that if ever I am owner of Kincorth I’ll clear it of all the vermin that
+are eating the heart out of the corn now.”
+
+And with this Maxwell Drewitt turned on his heel and walked away,
+thinking, “If ever it do come to me it will be valueless, and I—I would
+have kept it together; I would have made Kincorth something worth
+talking about. Curse him,” said the young man stopping suddenly. “Curse
+him for a fool!”
+
+It was hard. His uncle ought either to have cast him off or provided for
+him suitably. The very beggars had almost as much good of the estate as
+he, and they had no claim on Kincorth as he had—a claim in equity though
+not in law.
+
+Why did the man want to marry now? Had he not been in love fourteen
+years before? and was not one love enough for such a temperament for
+life? Had he not been jilted? Had he not stood with the muzzle of a
+pistol touching his forehead, when his brother found him? and did not
+the pistol miss fire? and had not the pair a fight for the weapon, which
+ended in George Drewitt knocking the owner of Kincorth down and sending
+for a doctor to bleed him till he fainted?
+
+“I wish he would take the same notion again,” thought Maxwell, “and that
+I had the loading. He would not fall in love a third time;” and the
+young man sneered bitterly as he remembered his father’s weakness in
+interfering to save the life that stood between him and Kincorth, as he
+thought of all the oaths Archibald Drewitt had sworn when the fever
+passed away about dividing the estate, about giving his brother a share,
+about all he would do for the children, about how he would never marry,
+never look with love on the face of any woman again, but live single,
+and bring up Maxwell and his sisters as though they were his own son and
+daughters.
+
+If an amiable man does us a wrong we hate him fifty times more than if
+he were as black as Erebus—hate him because the world joins issue with
+us on the question. Had Archibald Drewitt been like Maxwell Drewitt,
+nephew and uncle could have fought the matter out on equal social
+grounds; but as it was society could never be made to believe that
+Archibald Drewitt could be wrong, for which reason Maxwell Drewitt hated
+him.
+
+It was hard. I can imagine no cross harder to bear than that of a man
+like Maxwell Drewitt placed in Maxwell Drewitt’s position.
+
+In England such a position would have been bad enough; in England, where
+any one with courage, and industry, and cleverness, may eventually make
+his way; but in Ireland, in Connemara, in a country where trade is
+looked down upon, where work is ignominy, where there are but two
+classes—the very rich who do nothing, and the very poor who do as little
+as they can help, my reader, think of it!—think of a gentleman beggar—of
+a man who had all the instincts of his class—who looked upon a merchant
+as an inferior being—who had been brought up to no profession—whose
+proud stomach could never have brooked the idea of business—who laughed
+scornfully at Samuel Turner’s well-meant postscript—who would have tried
+to keep up the name and the property and the family dignity,—and who was
+still a pauper.
+
+Think of it. He was hardly done by, and all the more hardly, perhaps,
+because Kincorth belonged to an interloper—to one of those younger sons
+who, since the time of the patriarchs, have been continually putting the
+noses of elder sons out of joint.
+
+Never a Drewitt before had thought of making money; but Maxwell was
+determined to make it now. He was born in advance of his age; the men of
+thirty years ago did not think much of draining, of subsoils, of
+top-dressing, of the rotation of crops, and for that matter indeed to
+look at Connemara now, one would think that the men of the present day
+thought as little of these matters as their predecessors.
+
+Once Maxwell had visited England—once he had seen corn growing, where
+for centuries previously nothing had thriven save rushes and reeds and
+wild fowl. He had asked how the change was effected, how the morass was
+turned into a garden, the wilderness into a fruitful plain; and while
+his host told him he thought of Galway—thought of the rushes and the
+bogs there—thought as only an Irishman can think of his native country,
+and of the best way of bettering his condition.
+
+In England, too, he saw smiling cottages, well-fed men and women,
+children with clothes on their back and shoes to their feet. Again he
+asked for information, and again he was told that these men, who were
+better clad than the best tenants who reluctantly came to Kincorth in
+May and November, were not landholders, only labourers.
+
+“That is it,” thought Maxwell Drewitt, then only a lad; “the small farms
+are the curse of Ireland. Our tenants ought to be our labourers—that is
+it.”
+
+And he went back, Irish like, making fun of the English for having a
+good dinner, and yet scorning his countrymen for being contented with
+potatoes and salt. It is the Irishman of thirty years ago and more I am
+talking about, remember. It is not to be supposed the Irishman of 1865
+bears more than the faintest family resemblance to him.
+
+At any rate, the individual whose story I am telling detested the
+English as English, and yet was willing to learn a lesson out of their
+book of prosperity. He liked the flesh-pots, but he hated the country.
+He loved the wealth, but he could not stand the accent. He could have
+horsewhipped the first Irish peasant he saw shrinking out of the way of
+his galloping horse, and yet he thought the English too independent.
+
+“Look at England,” he would say in Ireland, and yet in his heart, while
+he was in England, he loved Irish ways and Irish manners best.
+
+He thought of those great English farmers riding their thoroughbreds,
+sending their daughters to boarding-schools, walking to church beside
+their wives, who were dressed in silks and merinos, and then he looked
+into Irish hovels, where the owner of the soil—owner so far as paying
+his rent can make a man so—never knew what it was to eat an egg laid by
+his own hens, to taste butter made from his own cows’ milk, year after
+year.
+
+“It is all wrong,” concluded Maxwell Drewitt; “these men ought to be
+labourers: they ought to be eating fat bacon and drinking strong ale
+like the English. How _do_ the English make money as if it was to be
+picked up by the road side? Give Galway to them and in twenty years they
+would be advertising villa sites—villa sites”—and the young man looked
+away towards the mountains and smiled to think how soon the Cockneys
+could spoil Connemara.
+
+“But they would live like fighting cocks out of it—they would,” finished
+Maxwell Drewitt; “and it is a burning shame and a crying disgrace that
+the Irish cannot do the same.”
+
+“We do very well as we are, Max,” said his uncle, when he propounded
+these heretical doctrines to him. “Let well alone. The Almighty never
+intended us to be like England or he would not have given us such an
+iron-bound coast. The country is different and the people are different
+and our ways are different. If you put shoes and stockings on the
+children they would limp along the roads. If you washed their faces and
+sent them to school they would cry their eyes out. If you put Davy Blake
+into an English farmhouse and told his wife she must keep it clean, they
+would be wretched. Each nation goes through the centuries its own way,
+as each man travels to heaven by a different road. Many a person has
+tried to mend us, and many a person has come to grief. Stick to your
+horse across country, Maxwell, and leave the rights and wrongs of
+Ireland to those whose business it is to study them.”
+
+Admirable advice doubtless, and kindly meant; but then the giver was a
+man whose way had been made for him, and the receiver had to try and
+make his own way as best he could. And gold mines were not common in
+that part of the country. Money was not lying under foot as it was
+reported to be in London; where, however, Colonel Dyak had not improved
+his opportunities any more than Mr. Archibald Drewitt had improved his,
+in Connemara.
+
+No two men ever travelled to the dogs at so equal a pace as the
+Englishman about town and the Irish country gentleman. They went by
+different roads, but their destination was the same: and yet each looked
+up to the other, and while Dyak thought Drewitt was rolling in wealth,
+Drewitt considered Dyak an individual without a care.
+
+They had met after a fashion common enough in Galway. Colonel Dyak went
+there to fish, and Mr. Drewitt coming across him one day, on the shores
+of one of the innumerable lakes, asked him to dinner.
+
+And Colonel Dyak accepted the invitation, and ate Mr. Drewitt’s mutton
+and drank his claret, and rode his horses every day for six weeks; at
+the end of which time he insisted on carrying his host back to London
+with him.
+
+Nothing loth, Mr. Drewitt went over twice, and the second time he
+returned to Kincorth it was as an engaged man; who by way of bettering
+his prospects had asked a young and portionless woman to cast in her lot
+with his.
+
+There was one kind of wife who might have saved both him and Kincorth. A
+wife with a clear head and a strong will, able to carry things with a
+high hand—clever and active and determined and economical withal, would
+have queened it at the old place and kept the mortgaged acres together;
+but, as a matter of course, Miss Dyak was gentle and loving and
+trusting—a woman perfectly incompetent to fight out any battle—a woman
+with a sweet placid face—with calm, thoughtful eyes—with smooth, glossy
+hair—with a soft, white, satiny skin—with a low voice—with timid,
+caressing manners—with no head to plan; but with a heart to be broken.
+
+It is hard for me to write about her—hard for me to go on from this
+point and tell of the storms and rain that fell upon that drooping
+head—of the trials and crosses that bowed that poor heart before she lay
+down to sleep the only really peaceful slumber our poor humanity knows.
+
+She was not the wife for Mr. Drewitt, and Mr. Drewitt was not the
+husband for her; but notwithstanding that, they chose to take one
+another for better or for worse.
+
+There was no better to the matter, however—it was all worse; it was like
+everything Archibald Drewitt did or proposed to do—a mistake.
+
+Colonel Dyak was charmed with the match, and delighted with his
+son-in-law elect. He had enjoyed himself greatly at Kincorth. He knew
+Mr. Drewitt’s horses were capital. He had landed salmon twelve pounds
+weight. The lakes in Galway were alive with fish: the mountains were
+covered with game.
+
+“A fine country, I believe,” remarked one of his club acquaintance to
+him. “Magnificent scenery, they tell me—monstrous properties—capable of
+being improved to any extent.”
+
+Whereupon Colonel Dyak broke ground.
+
+“A fine country! Why, sir, there is not an Englishman breathing knows
+what a country it is; there is not a Londoner would believe in such
+scenery being within five hundred miles of him unless he saw it.
+Mountains! I couldn’t tell you how high they are. Lakes! God only knows
+how many hundred lakes I saw in one day. Harbours! why the coast is a
+succession of front doors facing America. Rivers! if you turned the
+Thames the other way, and made it run from Yorkshire south, it would not
+be half so fine as the Shannon. Fuel! you can’t imagine what a
+magnificent fire turf makes. Land! there are thousands upon thousands of
+acres that have never been turned up by a plough. Labour! eightpence to
+tenpence a day in the summer, sixpence to eightpence in the winter.
+Society! I never was among a more jovial set of people in my life. Ay,
+that is a country! with building materials lying by the wayside, with
+granite roads, with marble quarries, silver mines, rock and mountain and
+lake and sea. You must come to Galway with me sometime and judge for
+yourself.”
+
+“I should like to go greatly,” was the reply. “I am curious to know why
+such a country should not prosper.” And the little Londoner took snuff,
+and then adjusted his double eye-glasses, thinking doubtless that he
+could solve the problem, which is about as dark as the Sphinx, in a
+scamper through Ireland.
+
+That is one of the beauties of Ireland, I may here remark. Everybody
+imagines, when he begins the pleasing study of her manifold sorrows, of
+her excessive poverty, that he has got hold of the right end of the
+stick at last; that he has hit on the word with which in some remote age
+the puzzle was locked so carefully that no one has ever been able to
+open it since; and led on by this delusion, he proceeds triumphantly
+only to discover that the riddle seems to have no solution, that all
+arguments about the sister island work in a circle, and return to the
+same point in the end.
+
+Colonel Dyak, however, was a man who did not trouble himself with
+questions of this kind. He took things as he found them: if they were
+well, he was pleased; if they were ill, he trusted they would right
+themselves in time; and if they did not right themselves, it still was
+no business of his; and he felt something more than satisfied with the
+match his daughter proposed to herself, although her intended husband’s
+property was situated in Ireland; in a country the nonprosperity whereof
+puzzled the wise head of his club acquaintance.
+
+Good fishing, good shooting, good hunting could not, however, quite
+reconcile Mrs. Dyak to the idea of Agnes throwing herself away upon a
+commoner, and that commoner a man unable to make satisfactory marriage
+settlements upon her.
+
+“If she _must_ marry,” remarked the eldest daughter, who, on the
+strength of having secured a baronet, took upon herself airs in the
+family cabinet—“if she _must_ marry a baronet, why did she not make sure
+that he was a rich one?”
+
+“But your papa says, my love,” put in Mrs. Dyak, mildly, “that Mr.
+Drewitt’s income is fifteen thousand a year.”
+
+“More likely fifteen hundred,” answered Lady Ebbutt.
+
+“And he settles an estate of I think it is two thousand acres on Agnes,”
+went on Mrs. Dyak, not heeding her daughter’s remark.
+
+“Depend upon it the estate is a mountain, mamma,” said the baronet’s
+wife.
+
+“Well, Bertha, whether it is a mountain or not we cannot help ourselves
+in the matter now. Agnes and her papa have set their minds on the match;
+and indeed, my dear, I may tell you in confidence, that as we could not
+have afforded another season in town, it is a great blessing Aggy has
+made a choice. For we must go abroad, and what chance would there be of
+her marrying abroad, tell me that?”
+
+But Lady Ebbutt declined to gratify her mother’s desire: she only
+observed that she thought it would be better for her parents to reside
+in Ireland rather than on the Continent.
+
+“Papa would like it of all things,” she finished.
+
+“I should not,” answered Mrs. Dyak, and the conversation dropped.
+
+Thus the marriage was finally agreed to by all the parties interested.
+As a matter of course Mrs. Dyak protested against it, and maintained for
+some time sufficient coolness of demeanour to impress Mr. Drewitt with a
+due sense of the honour Miss Dyak had conferred upon him by accepting
+his hand, and the very moderate settlement that accompanied it; but in
+the end Mrs. Dyak gracefully gave way; and in a very fashionable church,
+and attended by a little crowd of bridesmaids, Archibald Drewitt and
+Agnes Dyak were made man and wife.
+
+It was a very gay wedding. There were plenty of grand people in the
+church: there was no lack of fashionable guests at the breakfast.
+
+Everything was in the best style. It was Colonel Dyak’s last shot, and
+he did not spare the powder. Any one might have thought his yearly
+income something enormous. Even Mr. Drewitt wondered how it happened
+that behind such a marriage feast there should be no marriage
+settlement, little dreaming that if there had been, Miss Dyak would
+never have been permitted to marry a man who lived in Ireland, who had
+no house in London, or even in Dublin, who never resided abroad for any
+part of the year, and whose estates were embarrassed to such an extent
+that only two or three people had other than the faintest idea which
+part of his property belonged to him and which to his mortgagees.
+
+It was a nice fate, truly, that Agnes Dyak was robed that morning, all
+in pure white, to go out to meet.
+
+“Who shall say that human sacrifices have ceased to be offered in
+Britain?” whispered one cynical bachelor to his neighbour, when the pair
+joined hands and took one another till death should part them. “Who
+shall say there are no victims slain on the horns of the altar now?” And
+the speaker laughed, and his friend laughed, and the friend said the
+idea was “devilish good,” and the speaker thought in his heart that he
+had put it rather neatly, while both forgot how true many words spoken
+in jest may be; and neither imagined that when Agnes Drewitt walked down
+the long aisle a wife, she was walking on, at the same time, to endure
+her martyrdom.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV.
+                              Coming Home.
+
+
+When a man goes a-wooing, he does not, as a rule, turn the worst side of
+his affairs out for the inspection of his ladye love and his ladye
+love’s family. Rather on the contrary: he is apt to throw a little
+_couleur de rose_ over his prospects, and to insist that all whom the
+matter may concern shall view the landscape through that medium, instead
+of by any truer light.
+
+This had been Mr. Drewitt’s policy, at all events. He had kept his
+advantages in the foreground—his drawbacks well in the rear. He intended
+to reform Kincorth, so what use could there be in talking about its
+previous state of wretched mismanagement? He was quite determined to
+make a radical change with regard to Maxwell and his sisters; so why,
+when the Drewitts’ soiled linen was all going straight off to the
+laundress, should he trouble himself to wash it in London, in the sight
+of the enemy?
+
+“Only let me get this election business over,” thought Mr. Drewitt, “and
+I will send the two younger girls to school, and try if I cannot buy or
+beg Maxwell a commission. Susan is my greatest difficulty. I wish to
+heaven somebody would marry her. I might manage a small portion.”
+
+Alas! and alas! for the good intentions unfulfilled, for the faithful
+promises broken, for the debt of gratitude that had now become
+burdensome, for the trust he had broken, for the noble plans he had
+never carried out.
+
+Is there nothing pitiful to you, my reader, in the picture of this
+middle-aged man, whose work remained for ever undone, who had planned in
+youth to reap such abundant harvests, but who stood now, in the very
+prime and summer of his age, with the spring crops still unsown, with
+the fields of his life bare and barren, with the broad lands of
+opportunity still untilled, with his Lord’s talents still
+unemployed—still bringing in no interest against the day when his
+accounts would be required of him?
+
+If we miss the seed time, what shall we even think of casting into the
+ground when our neighbours’ wheat is ripening? Even such poor intentions
+as Mr. Drewitt now muttered to himself, in lieu of those great honest
+designs that he had once promised to work out for the benefit of his
+brother’s children. Half his wealth, all his influence, all his care,
+had come to a vague commission for Maxwell, a possible school for
+Wilhelmina and Kathleen, and an uncertain fortune for the _bête noir_ of
+the establishment, Susan Drewitt.
+
+It was all wrong together—the time had not been redeemed, the seed had
+not been sown, the talent had not been put out at usury—it was all
+wrong; and so Archibald Drewitt found when the harvest time arrived, and
+there was no grain for the gathering.
+
+But in those bright sunshiny days, when he brought home his bride, the
+summer sun was gladdening the earth, the autumn was afar off; and cursed
+with that peculiar temperament which always believes that “the future is
+the time to mend,” Archibald Drewitt made himself happy in the present,
+and still permitted his wife to view her future prospects through the
+medium of that stained glass to which I have already referred.
+
+She knew, of course, that Maxwell and his sisters resided at Kincorth;
+and if there was anything unpleasant to hear about them she would become
+acquainted with it soon enough, seeing that she was travelling home as
+fast as a very indifferent pair of post horses could take her.
+
+Maxwell had been right. London is a long distance from Galway now, and
+in the days of which I am writing it was further still.
+
+It had cost Mr. Drewitt some ready money to get to London at all, and
+although he was the bridegroom, it had cost him more to get married.
+Elsewhere the fact has been stated that coin of the realm and Mr.
+Drewitt were comparative strangers—adding all of which together, the
+result arrived at is that a bridal tour was beyond his means, that he
+could only do what he did do, viz., bring home his wife with as little
+delay as possible.
+
+We read that when Elijah the Tishbite fled from the wrath of Jezebel he
+journeyed into the wilderness, and travelled thence forty days and forty
+nights, till he came to that cave in Horeb where his wanderings ended.
+
+In the wilderness, on the mountain, the queen’s anger was impotent to
+hurt him—towards those fastnesses, the hand of that “cursed woman” was
+stretched out in vain.
+
+When, in the after-time, Agnes Drewitt heard the story of the prophet
+recited, she always fancied that from all the haunts of men, from all
+the towns and cities in which Baal was worshipped, Elijah must have fled
+to a country like Connemara, where, beside lonely lakes, the plover
+whistles and the bittern cries, where desolation reigns supreme, where
+there is a solitude which may be heard, a silence which has a voice.
+
+Under the shadow of those never-ending mountains they travelled on;
+beside those interminable lakes the road wound in and about. Away to the
+left were hills without end; to the right the blue conical mountains
+reared their heads towards heaven. In the valley—which has no end, but
+runs between chains of mountain, the commencement of which lies so far
+behind that one forgets when a view of any extent of level land was last
+obtained—in the valley, I say, the very genius of desolation appeared to
+Mrs. Drewitt to have taken up his abode.
+
+Here were no smiling fields, no neat farmhouses, no cows luxuriating in
+pleasant pastures, no gentlemen’s seats, no hedges, no gardens, no
+homesteads. Mile after mile stretched away the valley; no turn in the
+road brought with it a change of scene; and often, as the road turned,
+far as the valley extended, nothing met the eye save lonely lakes and
+swiftly-flowing streams, thousands of acres of bog land, thousands more
+of moor, where a few sheep and a few ponies grazed at will among the
+blocks of granite and the huge boulders, that, becoming detached from
+the mountain side, had fallen through the centuries, and still lay where
+they had fallen.
+
+Lakes where water-lilies float, where the tall reeds grow
+sparingly—lakes, the shores of which are bog and moorland—lakes that for
+number are well-nigh countless, that are desolate, and solitary beyond
+all power of description; rivers that wind not between wooded banks, or
+in deep beds of their own digging, but that crawl on in the summer over
+stone and granite, and that in winter spread wide as they like over
+moorland and bog, carrying with them detached fragments of rock, which
+seem in the arms of the mighty flood to be borne lightly as feathers,
+away and away! A country without wood, without a house; a country where
+it seemed out of place, out of keeping, to meet a living being. This was
+what Agnes Drewitt saw as the post-horses laboured up the hills, or were
+lashed into a weary canter down them; this was the strange land which
+she was entering as a pilgrim and a stranger, wherein she was going to
+try to make her home.
+
+It is all very well to travel through these Irish Highlands. The kingdom
+of Connemara is a grand kingdom, and the guide-books do not exaggerate
+when they call its scenery solemn and sublime; but it is one thing to
+visit a country and another to reside in it. The young Englishwoman
+looked out with dread and dismay on those over-shadowing mountains, on
+those endless lakes that looked stern and desolate even with the
+summer’s sun shining down upon them.
+
+The wilderness Elijah fled through could not have been more lonely than
+Connemara; the cave at the mouth whereof he stood while the strong wind
+passed by, and the earthquake shook the hills, and the fire flashed
+before him, might have been in just such a mountain as any of those that
+frowned upon her.
+
+Ahab’s wrath was powerless to touch the prophet there; the king’s writ,
+she had heard, was not worth a halfpenny in the land through which she
+was travelling; and Mrs. Drewitt was just thinking of this saying, and
+wondering what such a savage country would be like when winter’s frosts
+covered the ground, when winter’s rains and snows swelled the
+torrents,—when suddenly, the road taking a sharp curve, the view
+changed—the bogs and the lakes and the mountains were left behind, and
+the sea burst upon her view.
+
+How shall words ever give even the faintest idea of the exquisite beauty
+and peace of that summer’s evening scene? How can pen and ink ever tell
+how green looked the grassy knolls that lay down by the shore; how fair
+were the islands in Duranmore Bay; how soft, and rich, and mellow the
+golden light that lay on wood and water, that steeped the trees and fell
+in great patches on the hill sides? With what a glad sound of welcome
+the “sweet chimes of the waves” sung their low song in the stranger’s
+ear! “From Newfoundland and from Labrador,” as has been happily said,
+they had come “to mingle their voice in harmony,” on that sea-beat
+shore; and Agnes Drewitt fancied she knew what they were telling her,
+and listened to their melody with an answering music swelling in her
+breast.
+
+It was like heaven bursting upon her view; it was like light after
+darkness; it was like liberty after slavery; it was like everything her
+fancy had painted—her heart desired; it was beautiful—it was perfect;
+and Agnes Drewitt, young, impressionable, imaginative, basked in the
+loveliness and the sunshine, and was happy.
+
+On one of the roads through Connemara there is a stone bearing the
+singular statement that from there it is twenty-one miles to Hell.
+
+Where the Hell referred to may be—whether in this world or the next—I am
+unable to tell; but I am sure had Mrs. Drewitt been intrusted with the
+preparation of a table of distances she would have called Duranmore
+heaven, and given it as the ultimate destination of all tourists in
+Galway.
+
+That sweet bay! those soft green hills! those grand headlands! seemed
+beautiful—thrice beautiful, after the bleak desolation, the utter
+loneliness of the wilderness through which she had passed; and she
+leaned forward in the carriage and strained her eyes over the landscape,
+while she said—
+
+“How exquisite! How perfect!”
+
+“That is Kincorth,” said Mr. Drewitt, pointing to the northern side of
+the bay. “That is Kincorth,” and he sighed as he spoke.
+
+From sea, from hill, from wood, from mountain Agnes Drewitt withdrew her
+eager gaze, to turn towards her husband and inquire the meaning of that
+sigh. She was a clinging creature, reader, a woman who could not bear
+the sight of unhappiness, the sound of woe; she was a loving woman, who
+could not endure that her husband should have a care or a sorrow hidden
+from her.
+
+Why did he sigh? Was he tired? Was he ill? Was he unhappy? And the
+little hand stole out to clasp his, and the sweet eyes turned towards
+him full of a ready sympathy.
+
+“Unhappy!” he answered, carried away by one of those impulses he was as
+impotent as a child to control. “Unhappy! I have never been happy
+before. I never knew the meaning of the word till I saw you. I never
+felt peace, perfect peace till I sat thus, with your hand clasped in
+mine. If I sighed it was because I felt at last happy and contented—as
+one takes a long, deep breath, when sitting down, after a weary journey,
+to rest. Do you understand me, darling? Life has been that journey, and
+you are the rest to me.”
+
+She did not understand him then, though she comprehended his meaning
+perfectly afterwards. She did not know that instead of bringing her home
+to comfort and bless her, he was bringing her home to comfort and bless
+him.
+
+A slight, fragile thing she was, yet strong enough for this poor, weak,
+unstable creature to lean against and feel secure. From that day forth
+she was to be the crutch and he the cripple; she the rock and he the
+billow; she the nest and he the bird. Maxwell Drewitt had sketched the
+outline of her future life to perfection; but he had not been equally
+accurate in calling her choice mercenary, her marriage an interested
+one.
+
+She had elected to cast her lot with Archibald Drewitt because she loved
+him; and loving him, she would have gone through fire and water for his
+sake.
+
+It is strange that such men are able to secure such wives; but it is not
+more strange than that the most unselfish of men draw so often viragos
+out of the matrimonial lottery.
+
+We hear a great deal about the balance of power; is this the balance
+(matrimonially) of good and evil?
+
+After his little lament about having found life’s paths rough and
+dreary, Mr. Drewitt became both talkative and cheerful, and discoursed
+concerning the improvements he purposed effecting, concerning the
+alterations he intended making.
+
+“Next year,” he said, “I will rebuild the porter’s lodge; and you shall
+draw me a pretty design for one.”
+
+In her heart Agnes thought that a new lodge ought to be erected at once;
+but she had sense enough not to say so, and merely remarked that the
+creepers and climbers which covered the damp walls and the broken roof
+were extremely picturesque.
+
+Irish picturesqueness, however, could not make up to this stranger from
+a wealthier land for the absence of all comfort, for the ruined walls,
+for the unmown grass, for the unrolled gravel, for the unswept walks.
+
+The place, as Maxwell Drewitt in his pride thought he could keep it,
+would have suited Mrs. Drewitt a vast deal better than Kincorth, as it
+was.
+
+Within the gates, under the arching trees, the old feeling of loneliness
+and desolation came upon her once more, and she shivered she scarcely
+knew why; and Mr. Drewitt wrapped her shawl more closely round her,
+while he whispered tenderly—
+
+“Welcome home, my darling; welcome home.”
+
+They were on the very threshold of home now; but no one came forth to
+greet her. The hall door stood wide, but no servant was there—no
+relation, no living thing to meet the woman who, with that lonely
+feeling growing stronger every moment, walked into the house which she
+never left for any other habitation until she passed from under its
+roof-tree in middle age, with children beside her, with youth behind
+her, wearing widow’s weeds for the husband of her choice, old before her
+time, with wrinkles across her forehead, with silver threads sprinkled
+through her rich dark hair.
+
+When I come to tell you of how she left Kincorth, I would ask you to
+remember how she entered it—how she stood in the hall while the driver
+brought in the luggage and her husband fee’d him handsomely with almost
+the last money in his purse, how she followed Mr. Drewitt as he flung
+open the door of room after room to find each in succession empty, how
+she sat down finally in a little breakfast parlour and watched her
+husband first pull the bell till he broke it, and then go to the
+kitchens personally, to summon assistance.
+
+In the distance she heard him rating and raging and cursing and swearing
+as she had never heard any one rate and rage and curse and swear before;
+and then the tempest lulled as suddenly as it had arisen, and Mr.
+Drewitt returned, followed by Nannie, who, curtseying reverentially to
+her new mistress, at once broke the ice with,
+
+“It’s welcome home ye are, ma’am, and shure an’ we did not expec’ ye for
+a couple of hours yit, Mr. Maxwell said—”
+
+“Show your mistress her room, Nannie,” interrupted Mr. Drewitt, “and
+I’ll see to the trunks being taken up. And Agnes, my darling,” he
+murmured, while Nannie, who was “up to the manœuvres of new-married
+folks,” discreetly left the room, “if the house seems cold to you just
+at first, don’t be vexed; they did not mean it, they did not know.”
+
+She lifted her sweet face to his, but she did not raise her eyes, for
+they were full of tears, and she did not want him to see that they were
+so. It was all mightily unlike the coming home she had so foolishly
+pictured to herself. No friendly hands stretched out towards her! no
+warm Irish words of welcome! But she would not let that discourage her:
+she would be brave, she would be strong, and do her duty.
+
+She made this vow to herself with her husband’s kiss warm on her lips.
+And she was strong, she did do her duty, and she had her reward.
+
+“An’ shure, ma’am, an’ it’s myself is heartily glad to see a mistress
+comin’ home till the ould place,” remarked Nannie, as she assisted Mrs.
+Drewitt to change her dress and unpack her boxes, and put some portion
+of their contents in order. “The lonely dissolate place this has been,
+the Lord knows, wantin’ a lady to keep things straight and genteel. An’
+ye have come all the way from London, I hear; and it’s a terrible big
+place, they tells me. I hope ye won’t be feelin’ lonesome here, ma’am;
+for though it is a fine country—God bless it!—ye’ll know it strange and
+solitary like at first.”
+
+At that Agnes Drewitt gave way, and she stooped her head for a minute
+while her tears fell fast as rain. Then she recovered herself and said—
+
+“It is strange and solitary; you are right. You have put what I was
+feeling into words for me; but it is a fine country, and I will love it
+for my husband’s sake, and I will love its people too, if they will let
+me.”
+
+“They would be mighty queer people if they did not love ye back, my
+lady,” answered Nannie, in all sincerity; “so don’t fret, ma’am, but
+just give them the pleasant word and the bright smile and they’ll come
+to like you so well they’ll forget you’re not Irish.”
+
+Having administered which piece of comfort Nannie proceeded with her
+folding and straightening, and Mrs. Drewitt bathed the traces of tears
+from her cheeks preparatory to returning to the room where she had left
+her husband.
+
+Mr. Drewitt was not there, however, when she descended; but she met in
+his stead a young man who, with his hat on his head, and his hands
+buried deep in his pockets, was whistling to himself that loveliest of
+all the Irish airs—Cushla ma cree.
+
+At sight of Mrs. Drewitt he pulled his hands out of his pockets, took
+his hat off his head, and introduced himself to her as Maxwell Drewitt.
+“And these are my sisters,” he added, as three girls came trooping into
+the room.
+
+“And consequently my nieces,” finished Mrs. Drewitt, kissing them all
+round; an attention the young ladies seemed to regard as altogether
+superfluous and ill-timed.
+
+“Does she know who we are really?” thought Maxwell Drewitt, as he saw
+Mrs. Drewitt’s glance resting first on his sisters’ shabby dresses, and
+then reverting to her own rich attire. “Does she know I ought to be
+master here—that I am the eldest son of the eldest son? or can she fancy
+we are pauper dependents on the bounty of her husband? I will take care
+she does not long remain in a state of blissful ignorance about that
+matter.”
+
+And he did take care; before three days he had found opportunity to tell
+her the whole story; before three days he had opened the skeleton-closet
+at Kincorth, and anatomized its contents for her benefit.
+
+“It is very hard for them, and it is very hard for me,” argued poor Mrs.
+Drewitt; “but I will try to do my duty by them—and by everybody about
+the place. I will—I will—I will.”
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V.
+                              Peacemaking.
+
+
+Doing one’s duty (a charming phrase in the abstract, doubtless) is
+usually much less agreeable in practice than in theory, seeing that it
+generally involves annoying oneself, and displeasing other people.
+
+No credit attaches to it, because after all we have only done what we
+ought to have done; duty goes to bed weary and rises early; duty darns
+stockings and turns its dresses; duty does needlework, and pricks its
+fingers in the process; duty tends the sick and humours the fretful;
+duty gives to the poor, and goes about clad in the garments of humility;
+and for many and many a long day—perhaps until, there being no more
+duties to be performed in this world, it betakes itself to the next—duty
+has the felicity of receiving all the kicks of which society is so
+liberal, while halfpence and silver and gold are showered upon those who
+do not go in for duty at all, but simply for pleasure.
+
+There is nothing so hard to discharge, satisfactorily, as our duty;
+there is nothing for which we get so little thanks. It is like work
+looked down upon as a vulgar virtue: and yet when the small sums that go
+to make up life’s great account come to be cast out, duty and work may
+be found to have borne good interest; though the one has oftentimes
+seemed to our eyes but as the toil of the ant, and the other but useless
+labour, but misspent energy.
+
+Shall we say for all this, however, that the weakest among us is right
+to drift with the stream—to make no effort to stem its torrent? Would it
+have been better for Mrs. Drewitt to have never attempted to mend the
+ways of that wretched Irish household?
+
+She never achieved a great deal, but she did something. After all it is
+not given to many women to accomplish much, and she tried her best; and,
+as I have said before, in the long run she had her reward.
+
+During the first few weeks of her residence at Kincorth the
+establishment was in a state of anarchy, for was not the election coming
+on, and did not an election always upset everything?
+
+Gentlemen from Dublin—gentlemen from England—gentlemen from the remotest
+parts of the country came to Kincorth the moment Mr. Drewitt’s return
+was announced, and took up their quarters there.
+
+It was breakfast all the morning—it was luncheon all the day—it was
+dinner all the night—it was noise and confusion and excitement from one
+sunrise to another.
+
+Canvassing was about the last work Mrs. Drewitt was fitted for, but out
+canvassing she had to go, with the Honourable Mrs. Munks and the
+Countess of Popingham.
+
+There was not a description of bribery she did not see practised.
+
+“I am hungry,” Lady Popingham would say, with her arch Irish face
+lighted up by a very intelligible smile; and she would go into a baker’s
+shop in Duranmore and ask for a bun.
+
+“You’re for Pryor?” she would remark—her mouth full of new bread, and
+her small fingers fiddling with half her purchase—“You’re for Pryor.”
+
+“Well, I am not quite determined, my lady. They were in here the other
+day, and were bidding uncommon high; but your ladyship understands that
+I never did sell my vote, and I never will.”
+
+“That is honest and independent, is it not, Mrs. Drewitt?” observed the
+Countess. “I suppose you will not consider it bribery though to ask you
+to a ball, Mr. Rorke? There is to be one over at Kincorth to-morrow
+night, and Mrs. Drewitt will be very glad to see you there.”
+
+And with that Lady Popingham left her unfinished bun on the counter, and
+the baker said he would come and bring “the wife.”
+
+“And we may count on you, Mr. Rorke,” remarked the Countess, from the
+doorstep; “you would rather give your vote to us than sell it to Mr.
+Pryor.” At which observation the man laughed and the lady laughed, and
+the bread was swept into the till, and the Conservatives could count one
+more on their side.
+
+It is not in flesh and blood to be near a contested election and not to
+become interested in it; and before long Mrs. Drewitt found herself
+doing what she could to secure voters and to please their wives. She
+danced with the men—she danced with that identical baker—and had for her
+_vis-à-vis_ Lady Marsden and a Duranmore butcher. She invited a hundred
+frieze-coated men into the drawing-room and sang for them till she was
+hoarse. She ordered some thousands of yards of blue ribbon, and paid for
+it herself; and she and Lady Popingham and Mrs. Munks made it up into
+rosettes for future use.
+
+Mrs. Drewitt had expected her nieces to assist her in the work; but
+Susan, for self and fellows, flatly declined to do anything of the kind.
+
+“If we wear anything we shall wear red,” she said. “Our brother is for
+Mr. Pryor; and we are for Mr. Pryor too.”
+
+At this Mrs. Drewitt drew back astounded.
+
+“Do you mean,” she said, “that Maxwell and Mr. Drewitt are on different
+sides?”
+
+“Our mother was a Roman Catholic,” explained Miss Drewitt; “and it is
+only right that Maxwell should remember that, and vote accordingly.”
+
+“If it were not for landlord terrorism,” put in Wilhelmina—she was
+usually called Willy—“no one who was not for the Catholics would ever be
+returned in Ireland.”
+
+“The very servants about the house are all for Pryor,” added Susan,
+“only they would be discharged if they were to say so.”
+
+“And Maxwell was telling us that if you had been wise you would not have
+taken so active a part in the canvassing, because it will set the poor
+people against you,” capped Wilhelmina.
+
+“But I only did it to please your uncle, and he is liked by every one.”
+
+“Perhaps so,” answered Miss Drewitt, with a sneer; “but at any rate _he_
+is not English.”
+
+“And that makes a difference, you think?”
+
+“That makes all the difference, I know.”
+
+And Miss Susan Drewitt drew up her tall figure and looked down upon her
+aunt, who was at least half a head shorter, as she made this pleasant
+remark.
+
+“It’s just beyond me, childer,” said Nannie to them one day, “till
+understand what delight ye can find in making that craythur’s life a
+burden till her; she has not a bit the same look in her face she had
+when she came here first.”
+
+“She had no business to come here at all,” answered Miss Drewitt.
+“Ireland for the Irish, as Maxwell says: we want no strangers here.”
+
+“But shure and it’s most of all because she is a stranger that ye ought
+to be good till her, so that she might not always be fretting for the
+country and the friends she has left behind her. Why can’t ye make it
+up, young ladies, and live agreeable? See, now, how Miss Kathleen has
+taken to her.”
+
+“You are an old hypocrite, Nannie,” returned Miss Drewitt. “You and Miss
+Kathleen both like Mrs. Drewitt for the sake of what she gives you.”
+
+“Now may I niver, Miss Susan! may I niver die in my bed if the
+mistress—God grant her a long life!—ever give me more than ‘Thank ye,
+Nannie,’ or ‘If ye plaze.’ Miss Kathleen has I know got many a thing
+from her; but I mind hearing you, Miss Susan, tell your aunt, when she
+wanted you to get that illigant blue silk let down and wear it yourself,
+that your brother would not allow you to wear any person’s cast-off
+gowns, ye did; and ye knew she had never had that same silk on her back;
+and she went away to her own room and cried so pitiful! I’d have gone in
+and told her never to heed what you said, for that nobody did, only I
+was afraid she might be angry.”
+
+“Well, I tell you what, Nannie,” said Willy, at this juncture; “if you
+get her to give me that new riding-habit she brought over with her, I’ll
+be friends, for I am rather sick of war.”
+
+“If you take it you are quits with me,” remarked her sister.
+
+“There is no chance of your giving me a riding-habit, Sue,” retorted the
+other, “and I do want one so badly; Loo Munks is so proud of hers from
+Dublin, and it is nothing like such a beauty as Mrs. Drewitt’s. Ask her,
+Nannie, like a good old soul, which you’re not, and see if she will give
+it to me.”
+
+“Give it to you! she would cut the hair off her head and give it away if
+she thought it could pleasure you; but I won’t ask, faith I won’t, for
+she has only the one, and it’s meself hopes to see her riding with the
+masther over to Tully Kill whenever the hunting begins again.”
+
+“Then I will ask her,” said Wilhelmina; and she was rushing into the
+drawing-room to prefer her request, when the sound of angry voices and
+loud speaking frightened her back.
+
+It was Mr. Drewitt and Maxwell having it out concerning the
+election—concerning Maxwell’s canvass of Colonel Vervensoe’s tenantry.
+
+“He was over here himself this morning,” said Mr. Drewitt
+
+“It was not likely he would come over as anybody else,” remarked
+Maxwell.
+
+“Don’t mock me, sir,” shouted out the owner of Kincorth. “Keep your
+insolence for other people, for d—n me if I’ll stand it. And I won’t
+stand your interference, either, You shall not tamper with our voters.
+Vote for Pryor yourself if you like, and be hanged to you; but don’t try
+to get up a party against me, I advise you.”
+
+“I was not aware you were going to stand,” observed Maxwell, coolly.
+
+“You know I am for Sache, at any rate,” retorted Mr. Drewitt, “and you
+know you turned round to Pryor without ever telling me your intention,
+without ever saying a word to put me on my guard. And now listen to
+this: Colonel Vervensoe swears that if ever he finds you about his house
+again, he will horsewhip you; and he is a man to keep his promise.”
+
+“He had better not try to horsewhip me,” said Maxwell, slowly, “not if
+he values his life; for so sure as he attempts it, I’ll break every bone
+in his body.”
+
+“He is a stronger man than you.”
+
+“Is he?”
+
+“And he declares he will not have his tenantry tampered with, or endure
+any man dangling after his wife.”
+
+“He must speak to Lady Emmeline about that. If she likes me to canvass
+with her, I shall certainly do it, and I shall do my best to get Geoffry
+Pryor returned, if the devil himself tried to stop me.”
+
+“You shall not.”
+
+“I shall;” and Maxwell turned to leave the room, but Mr. Drewitt
+prevented him.
+
+“Look here, Maxwell,” he said, “it is time you and I came to an
+understanding.”
+
+“Oh! Archibald,” implored Mrs. Drewitt, “do not say any more while you
+are angry—do not speak while you are irritated. If Maxwell thinks Mr.
+Pryor ought to get in, why should he not canvass for him? I am certain
+you are wrong in this matter, love; I am, indeed.”
+
+“You know nothing about it, Agnes; you are talking on subjects you do
+not understand,” said her husband; while Maxwell, with a grave bow,
+thanked her for her interference, but remarked he and his uncle had
+argued out many a point before, and settled many a dispute, without the
+help of a third party.
+
+Which speech was intended to cut two ways—to make Mr. Drewitt more angry
+than he was, and to send Mrs. Drewitt out of the room.
+
+It did neither. Mrs. Drewitt would not go, because she felt her presence
+was some restraint upon both, and Mr. Drewitt calmed down in a moment,
+and said, “I see what you are driving at, Maxwell, but you may as well
+save yourself the trouble, for I will not turn you out of the house.”
+
+“There are more ways of killing a dog than hanging him,” answered
+Maxwell, “and it is possible to make a place so confoundedly
+uncomfortable for a man that he may leave it of his own accord. We need
+not quarrel any more, sir,” he went on, his face hardening and setting
+as he spoke, “for I shall leave Kincorth without being shown to the
+door.”
+
+“You shall not leave Kincorth,” said Mr. Drewitt, forgetting his anger
+in the rush of memories that came swelling up in his heart. “Vote for
+whom you like, I’ll say nothing more to you about it. I may have been
+wrong. Don’t go away like this. You shall not go, Maxwell;” and as he
+spoke, he laid a detaining hand on his nephew’s arm.
+
+Maxwell shook it off scornfully.
+
+“It is not in the power of any man to make another stay in hell,” he
+answered; “and for many a long day Kincorth has been like hell to me.
+You have my father’s property, but you shan’t have my father’s son as
+well;” and with that Maxwell walked past his uncle, and out of the
+apartment.
+
+“Agnes, stop him, talk to him, don’t let him go,” said Mr. Drewitt; and
+only too glad of the order, his wife ran up to her nephew’s room, at the
+door of which she knocked gently.
+
+“Who is there?” asked Maxwell.
+
+“It is I,” she answered; “let me in, Maxwell—let me speak to you. I have
+something particular to say; I have, indeed.”
+
+“Is my uncle with you?” he inquired.
+
+“No, I am here alone; there is no one with me; let me in, Maxwell, do——”
+
+He unlocked the door, and held it open for her to pass in; then he
+bolted and locked it, putting the key in his pocket; after which he
+placed the only chair the apartment boasted for her to sit on, and
+shutting a box he had just commenced packing, he sat down himself, and
+waited patiently for her to commence.
+
+All round the room Mrs. Drewitt’s glance wandered. She had often been in
+it before, and done her best to make it more comfortable for its
+occupant; but now it seemed to her to look more bare and wretched than
+ever, and she wondered whether she had done right in letting Maxwell
+keep his den, instead of insisting on his occupying some of the spare
+chambers on the first floor.
+
+Those spare chambers had been full of guests almost ever since her own
+arrival, so that she need scarcely have blamed herself in the matter;
+but Mrs. Drewitt was one of those women who always magnify their own
+shortcomings, and she could have burst out crying to think Maxwell was
+going, and she should never have a chance of doing better for him than
+that.
+
+He half guessed what she was thinking about, and said:
+
+“You have done as much for it as could be done, but it is not a very
+first-rate bedchamber. In the winter time the rain comes in there, and
+there, and there, and the wind blows the candle out, and it is damp, and
+cold, and wretched. Till you came—well, you know what it was when you
+came, and I see what it is now. Don’t think I blame my uncle for things
+like this, though,” he added hastily, “or that I am so effeminate as to
+care for them. I only regret the years I have wasted here. I only
+reproach my uncle for having let me live here in idleness when he knew
+the day must come that I would have to turn out from even this shelter
+and earn my living as I could.”
+
+“But you will not go,” she pleaded; “your uncle told me to ask you to
+stay. We will do what we can for you, only remain—only—only—remain.”
+
+And she stretched out her hands imploringly towards Maxwell, who sat
+with his hands clasped tightly together and his head bent down, for a
+moment silent after she had ceased speaking. Then he answered:
+
+“Because you ask me, I would remain if I could; but I cannot. Mr.
+Drewitt thinks that he and I might make up this quarrel; and so,
+perhaps, we might. But if we healed this sore, it would only break out
+in a fresh place to-morrow. I am too old now for there to be peace
+between us,” he went on fiercely. “He ought either never to have
+undertaken to do anything for us, or he ought to have done it. If he had
+given me even a chance of earning my living, I would have worked and
+slaved to make myself and my sisters independent. It could not have been
+a great expense had he put me through college; but he never could afford
+to send me to Trinity—could not afford with Kincorth, and Analore, and
+twenty other nice little properties beside! When he came into this
+estate he had, if you believe me, Mrs. Drewitt, eight thousand a year
+clear—I think there was a mortgage on the place, which brought the
+rent-roll down to eight thousand—but a man may live on eight thousand a
+year,” finished Maxwell Drewitt, bitterly. “It is a long way off
+starvation that.”
+
+“If he has been imprudent,” remarked Mrs. Drewitt, “he is sorry for that
+imprudence; if he has never done anything for you, it is not too late
+for him to mend his error now. I am not saying, Maxwell, remember, that
+he has acted rightly—indeed, I am afraid he has been very wrong; but he
+has done wrong without intending it, and if you stay, he can try to make
+reparation.”
+
+“He has not the means now,” answered Maxwell; “if he had the will he has
+not the power. He is mortgaged up to his ears. There is nothing free,
+excepting Kincorth, and Kincorth will have to be pawned to provide funds
+to pay for the expenses of this election and a few other extravagances
+in which he has lately been indulging. I have waited long enough—I have
+waited and I have hesitated; but now I will take my pack on my back and
+go to seek my fortune.”
+
+“But you will not go at once,” she said. “You will stay and see—you will
+not part in anger when you do leave. Your uncle is dreadfully grieved,
+and, Maxwell, you were insolent! You ought not to have tried his
+patience as you did.”
+
+“A beggar has only one weapon, and it is hard if he may not use that,”
+replied the young man. “No,” he continued, “I must either go now or
+never—”
+
+“Let it be never, then,” she interrupted; but Maxwell shook his head.
+
+“Mrs. Drewitt,” he said, “I put it to your own sense. Can I stay here?
+Would it be well for me to do so? Would it be wise—would it be manly?
+Would you like to see any one you cared for, occupying the dependent
+position I fill? Would you not bid him rather go out and work—earn his
+bread, rather than have it given to him?”
+
+“Perhaps so,” she assented; “but I would have no one go in anger. Your
+uncle was saying something about thinking you might like a commission,
+Maxwell. Should you like it? My father might be able to get you one; or
+if not, I am positive my brother-in-law could obtain some government
+appointment for you, in England or the colonies. Should you care for
+that?”
+
+“No, thank you, Mrs. Drewitt,” answered Maxwell; “an officer without
+private means is only a pauper in uniform; and besides, to be frank,” he
+went on, “I would rather take no favour from your family.”
+
+“You dislike me so much, I suppose,” she said, a little flush coming up
+into her face. She had never been disliked before, and it hurt her to
+think she could only make enemies, let her try her best to gain friends.
+“You dislike me so much.”
+
+“Not personally,” he replied. “I only dislike you as being Mr. Drewitt’s
+wife.”
+
+“But what difference can being his wife make?” she asked.
+
+“I cannot tell you that now,” he said, “but perhaps I may some day. What
+I can tell you at this moment,” he proceeded, suddenly returning to the
+question at issue, “is, that I wish to leave Kincorth at once, on
+account of the election. My uncle wants me to stop for a similar reason.
+He thinks it will damage his canvassing if—”
+
+“If people imagine you and he have quarrelled,” finished Mrs. Drewitt,
+as he paused and hesitated. “Then, Maxwell, was he right? Were you
+trying to provoke him to tell you to leave the house?”
+
+There was a moment’s hesitation, but then Maxwell Drewitt said boldly—
+
+“You may as well know me for what I am at once. I was wanting him to
+turn me out. As he is too wise to do that, I am going to turn myself
+out. You look shocked. You begin to see that there may be things in
+heaven and earth undreamed of in your hitherto very limited philosophy;
+but in the future, when you are thinking what a sinner I am, remember
+that I have had no opportunity of becoming a saint. Life has not been a
+bed of roses to me. The teachings I have listened to have not always
+been such as the regenerate hear in church. As time goes by you will
+come to understand what kind of a home Kincorth has been to us, and then
+judge us if you like. You will do what you can for the girls, I know,
+till I am able to take them from you.”
+
+“Don’t go, Maxwell,” entreated Mrs. Drewitt, and there was a sick, dead
+feeling about her heart as she spoke. “Don’t go; let us try all together
+to make a better use of your life; let us live in peace and unity, as
+such near relations should.”
+
+“Did Esau live at peace with Jacob?” asked Maxwell, who was weary of the
+discussion. “Was Ishmael suffered to remain after the new heir was born?
+Do you suppose Lazarus, living on the crumbs that fell from Dives’
+table, had a friendly feeling towards the men who fared sumptuously
+every day? If Solomon had not slain Adonijah, would Adonijah ever have
+ceased troubling his brother? Can you remember an instance where the
+disinherited loved the man who inherited? Is it not better for us to
+live apart in peace, than under the same roof at war?”
+
+“I wish I were a better peacemaker,” she said.
+
+“If an angel came down from heaven, unless indeed he were the angel of
+death,” said Maxwell, with an emphasis on the latter part of his
+sentence which was not quite intelligible to his auditor, “he could not
+keep me in Kincorth now. It will not take me long to pack my clothes, I
+have not so many of them, and then I mean to go. Tell my uncle I thank
+him for wanting me to stay all the same, but I would rather travel my
+own road, and that leads me out of Kincorth.”
+
+Having finished which explicit speech, Mr. Maxwell Drewitt unlocked the
+door, and held it open for his aunt to pass out, as he had held it open
+for her to pass in.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI.
+                            At the Hustings.
+
+
+Mr. Drewitt and his nephew did not part quite as friends, and yet to the
+eye of the world they did not part as enemies. Finding his wife’s
+intervention useless, the owner of Kincorth, though grievously wounded
+and worsted, let matters take their course. Had the quarrel originated
+in anything else than the election, Mr. Drewitt would have felt its
+consequences more bitterly than was the case. He could not have let his
+dead brother’s only son leave Kincorth in such a fashion had a question
+of politics not been raised between them; but as it was so it was.
+Maxwell had done what his father would not have done—helped a man’s wife
+to tamper with his tenantry; and if he liked to go, and if nothing could
+hinder his going, why, he must do so, and take the consequences.
+
+“He will be glad enough to come back when the election is over,” thought
+Mr. Drewitt; but in this idea he was wrong. Maxwell had made up his mind
+by very slow degrees to moving; but once made up it would have been
+impossible to induce him to return.
+
+He and his uncle had often had quarrels before, and Maxwell had
+frequently hinted that if pushed too far he might leave Kincorth
+altogether.
+
+On one of these occasions Mr. Drewitt had told him he might go to the
+devil if he chose, and Maxwell had retorted that his uncle had taken
+precious good care he should not travel post at any rate.
+
+Between such near relations little amenities of this kind meant nothing,
+or next to nothing; but now the case was different. With no great
+provocation, the young man had elected to leave Kincorth, and could not
+be persuaded to remain in it.
+
+If he repented of his choice at any future period, Kincorth was free to
+him still. Meantime, as he sowed he must reap, and Kincorth could do
+without him.
+
+Supposing Archibald Drewitt ever reasoned out the question, it is very
+likely he did it in somewhat the preceding fashion; but truth was, he
+had little time for thinking. He was so taken up with the election—he
+had such hosts of people to see—he was so eternally occupied, that he
+had no leisure to observe things which did not, however, escape his
+wife’s observation.
+
+She saw her husband was not quite so popular as formerly. She perceived
+that the lower orders were looking coldly on her; she heard indirectly
+that the Liberals were making way; she understood that Maxwell’s
+departure was being made a party question; she learnt that many laid the
+blame of the fracas on her; when she passed through the tents that were
+erected on the lawn, where the populace got drunk _au discrétion_ at her
+husband’s expense, she heard muttered remarks on the subject of English
+pride, and outlandish airs, and “interlopers.”
+
+The election had seemed good fun at first; if it had done nothing else,
+it had served to divert her attention from household grievances, from
+domestic shortcomings; but now, when she laid her aching head on her
+pillow, she sighed for the peace and the happiness of her father’s
+house, and prayed for the contest to be well over.
+
+Then, as in the future, Mrs. Drewitt had to fight out her fight alone.
+From the first hour in which she set foot in her husband’s house she
+kept her trials to herself; she made up her mind not to worry him about
+trifles, and before long she came to the conclusion it would be quite as
+well not to worry him about great things either.
+
+Unstable as water! Who would entrust a pearl of great price to the
+mercies of the stream, to the keeping of a river?—and yet this was
+precisely what this poor soul had done all unwittingly. Her love was her
+pearl; her happiness was her sole treasure; and she had cast both at the
+feet of a man who, never having done well for himself, was never likely
+to do well for her.
+
+Unstable as water! the streamlet ran by; unstable as water! the waves
+came and went, and ebbed and flowed, and she keeping up a brave face
+through the day, cried herself to sleep at night.
+
+She never saw her husband except in the middle of a crowd of voters or
+else at the end of a long dinner-table. The house was crammed with
+visitors. Sorely against her will she had even to move Kathleen to
+Maxwell’s old room, and give the girl’s bedchamber to a bachelor guest.
+
+“It is always like this in the hunting season, aunty; don’t mind about
+me,” said Kathleen. “I have had to sleep many and many a night on the
+floor, because they sat up so late it was no use trying to get a sofa;
+on the floor with nothing but a blanket under me, and hard work to get
+that. Maxwell did not like being turned out constantly, so he came up
+here at last. When will he be back, aunty darling?”
+
+“After the election, I hope, Kathie,” answered Mrs. Drewitt, as she
+kissed the girl and bade her good-night. “After the election.”
+
+“I wish it was over,” sighed Kathleen.
+
+She did not wish it over more than her aunt, who firmly believed that
+the contest never would have an end, for the minutes seemed to be like
+days, and the days like years.
+
+But at last the nomination day came round, and both parties girt up
+their loins and prepared for war.
+
+It was a fine morning, “God bliss it,” as the country people remarked
+one to another: no better weather could have been desired for the
+nomination of candidates. That was going to be a great day for
+Connemara, at least for that portion of it in which we are at present
+more particularly interested. The right of the Earl of Popingham to
+return his nominee was going to be fiercely disputed; there was going to
+be, at last, a thoroughly well-contested election. Hurrah! hurrah!
+hurrah! and caps and hats went flying up in the air, and “Three cheers
+for Sache,” and “None o’ that, but three times three with a will, boys,
+for Pryor,” re-echoed through the usually quiet streets of Duranmore.
+
+Hurrah! and huzza! and hooroo! Who would not yell and cheer and shout
+till he was black in the face?—for had every public-house not been open
+to the populace for weeks past? and was not every “free and independent”
+drunk? and had not each man amongst them who was wavering in the least
+pocketed his five, or ten, or twenty pounds? and was not Irish
+enthusiasm and Irish excitement worked up by whiskey and party feeling
+to fever-point on that glorious August morning when Geoffry Pryor was to
+be seconded by Maxwell Drewitt?
+
+The town was fuller than a fair; the electors were drunker than
+fiddlers; the canvassers were busier than ever; the candidates were in
+an agony of suspense; the windows opposite the hustings were crowded
+with ladies; the inn-yards were a sight to behold, crammed full of
+carriages. There were opposition bands playing, and flags waving, and
+ribbons fluttering, and people jostling, and boys shouting, and women
+screaming, and children being crushed to pieces, and police plunging
+through the crowd. Two companies of horse occupied one side of the
+market-place, ready to charge the populace at a moment’s notice; and,
+altogether, Duranmore was a great and cheering sight, for in the days of
+which I am now writing elections were no child’s play. Lives were lost,
+men trampled under foot, ridden down by the soldiers, kicked, stoned,
+cudgelled. Heads were cracked, limbs broken. Donnybrook, at its worst,
+was a peaceable sort of scene in comparison to an Irish election at its
+best, where men of station and of standing sacrificed fortune,
+character, position, truth, honour, honesty, their fellow-creatures’
+happiness, and, in many cases, their fellow-creatures’ lives, to return
+for their representative in Parliament perhaps as great a vagabond as
+ever cheated the sheriff.
+
+Duranmore and West Connemara was, for various reasons, considered by the
+landlord interest in that part of Ireland a stronghold of considerable
+importance; and the interest of the approaching contest consisted in the
+fact that it was to be a kind of fight for independence. Was the seat
+virtually to belong to the Earl of Popingham, or not? Were the Roman
+Catholics going to let the sworn enemy of their church return his
+nominee again?
+
+The priests had been busy; the priests had their crow to pluck with the
+Earl, and were going to make the election expensive to him at any rate.
+Whilst the landlords threatened ejection from their holdings, the
+priests threatened exclusion from heaven. While the Earl of Popingham
+said, “Vote for Sache—or notice at November,” the proprietors of snug
+little locations in the next world whispered, “Vote for Pryor—or
+everlasting damnation.”
+
+It was a nice fix for men to be placed in. Starvation in this world, or
+hell fire in the next—a lively prospect either way; so cheerful that we
+can scarcely wonder that in many cases the tenants preferred facing the
+danger which was furthest off, and chose rather to fall into the hands
+of the devil than into those of their landlord.
+
+It is of many and many a year ago I am talking, I pray you bear in mind.
+If the landed proprietors of those days were not unexceptionable, their
+successors have doubtless made all up to the generation of tenants that
+pay rents now; and as it is not very graceful to cut down into old
+sores, I will only add, there was not a place in the United Kingdom
+where party feeling ran so high, where bribes were so heavy, where such
+an amount of virulence and animosity was displayed, as it was in that
+out-of-the-way corner of the earth where two fit and proper candidates
+were about to contest the honour of representing the people in
+Parliament.
+
+As a matter of course, there had always hitherto been some fight made,
+and equally perhaps of course the nominee had always heretofore won; but
+on this occasion the claims seemed more nearly equal than had ever been
+the case before, for it was well known that young Mr. Waller of Eversbeg
+had deserted his late father’s principles and gone over to the enemy;
+and it was reported that—instigated thereto and encouraged therein by
+Lady Emmeline Vervensoe and Mr. Maxwell Drewitt—the Vervensoe tenantry
+had turned restive on a papistical question, and were intending to vote
+according to the dictates of their unenlightened consciences for once.
+
+Altogether, Duranmore was a great and glorious sight.
+
+It was enough to make any one madly in love with our representative
+system, and with the way seats in Parliament are secured, to see the
+spectacle the town presented.
+
+For a month the place had been drunk—not figuratively, but literally—for
+weeks men had not been men, but rather casks full of spirits: they drank
+till they were blind, and then slept till they could see. The whole town
+and all the inhabitants thereof smelt of whiskey; every free and
+independent was in a state of greater or lesser incapability; every
+barmaid was frightfully active; every servant went about like a walking
+ribbon-shop; every wife was on the look-out for money: if the husbands
+were drunk, that was no reason why business should be neglected.
+
+They would see to the votes when the time came; meanwhile they would
+take care of the notes.
+
+Towards the last there was no attempt to do the thing under the rose;
+gentlemen and ladies went about buying votes—not begging them—not even
+going through the ceremony of appearing to believe open bribery could
+be, as the Countess of Popingham said, “hurtful to their sensitive
+feelings.”
+
+Rents were forgiven; fines remitted; leases promised; farms let on
+advantageous terms; money was cheerfully paid for getting voters out of
+the way; personation fees ran high—in short, neither side left a stone
+unturned, or a trick untried, likely to prove beneficial to what they
+were severally pleased to call the “good cause.”
+
+To be strictly impartial, there was not a toss up between them.
+
+“If you had shaken the Tories and Whigs up in a bag together,” remarked
+Ryan afterwards, “I do not know which would have come out first.”
+
+There were no clean hands among either party; no man was so free of
+blame that he could have thrown stones at his opponent. The game had
+been a tremendously expensive one; and “whoever wins, the people get the
+stakes,” said Mr. Timothy Ryan regretfully.
+
+What a gay sight the town presented! The windows of every house
+commanding a view of the hustings were full of women—young, well-born,
+beautiful—who exhibited red or blue ribbons, according to the side they
+affected.
+
+The fair Sacheites, headed by the Countess of Popingham, Mrs. Munks,
+Lady Marsden, Mrs. Hickman, Mrs. Drewitt, and a bevy of other county
+notables took possession of the assembly room, which chanced to be Lord
+Marsden’s property; whilst conspicuous among the ladies in the Liberal
+interest, who occupied the Court-house, appeared in white dress and red
+ribbons the still beautiful though somewhat _passée_ Lady Emmeline
+Vervensoe, who having openly deserted her husband’s colours, had gone
+about canvassing, in company with Mr. Waller and Maxwell Drewitt, to the
+intense mortification of her husband and the extreme scandal and disgust
+of the Popingham faction.
+
+Lady Emmeline had come of great people; she was an heiress in her own
+right, she had condescended to marry a commoner; further, she was a
+poetess and had written some very charming lines to the cuckoo, and a
+few verses of a highly laudatory character concerning Duranmore Bay—for
+all these reasons Lady Emmeline did as she pleased, and suffering no one
+to say her nay, sat on the opposition benches, smiling in conscious
+loveliness, the observed of all observers.
+
+The town was like a garden; every flower-bed for miles round having been
+rifled of its treasures to deck the houses, horses, and hustings.
+
+Triumphal arches of red and white dahlias, long festoons of evergreens
+relieved by flowers formed of blue calico and tied with floating
+ribbons, branches of oak, sycamore, and elm, yards of ivy, hearts,
+stars, mottoes formed of every imaginable flower hung fading in the sun.
+
+Blue flags and red flags danced in the light breeze; the opposition
+bands played at one and the same time Garry Owen and God save the King;
+full-length caricatures of Sache and Pryor were exhibited on every
+available yard of wall; election ballads were chanted at the extremest
+pitch of the human voice; there were drums, there were horns, there were
+Jew’s harps, there were penny whistles, there was every imaginable
+instrument, there was every imaginable noise.
+
+Sache’s supporters drove into town, their servants dressed in blue and
+silver liveries, and their carriages decorated with blue hammer-cloths,
+edged with silver lace. Pryor’s friends—for the most part young
+bachelors who affected different opinions from those their fathers had
+held—came galloping into the market square with their saddles and
+bridles ornamented in red and gold.
+
+Such splendour! such misery! such evidences of wealth! such signs of
+poverty! such sleek, well-groomed, gaily-caparisoned horses! such
+under-fed, dirty, half-clothed men and women!
+
+Ah! reader, how can I ever hope to show you the violent contrasts that
+were presented to view within so small a space—contrasts that would have
+been shocking, had they not been ludicrous also?
+
+The candidates were so spruce, the constituents were so shabby; the hats
+of the first were faultless, the head-gear of the latter wretched: the
+blue or red colours of the gentry showed to advantage over glossy
+broadcloth, over snowy waistcoats; the rosettes of the electors were
+pinned on tattered garments, that had been patched and patched till they
+were like unto the coat of many colours that brought Joseph so much
+ill-will.
+
+But though poor, they were merry; they were, as the Earl of Popingham
+said, perpetrating an execrable pun, “full of spirits;” and fuller of
+whiskey than they had ever been of food, laughing, jeering, jesting,
+yelling, shouting, they shoved and pushed and fought their way up
+towards the hustings.
+
+Mr. Sache was not popular among the lower orders, and he knew it. He was
+no hero—morally and physically he was a coward; and though he had drunk
+brandy enough to have, as Lord Marsden contemptuously told him, brought
+colour into the cheeks of a corpse, yet when he appeared on the hustings
+he looked the very embodiment of terror and despair.
+
+Gazing down upon the sea of upturned faces, listening to the jeers and
+menaces of the crowd, in mortal dread of dead cats, rotten cabbages, and
+still more rotten eggs, he thought a seat in Parliament hardly worth
+passing through such an ordeal to gain.
+
+“What the deuce brought me here?” he said to Mr. Munks, and his lips
+were white and his body all of a tremble while he spoke.
+
+“What the deuce brought you here, is it?” asked Mr. Munks; “why, we did,
+and damned idiots we have been, I consider, for our pains. But now you
+are here, there is no help for the matter; and if you show the white
+feather, by —— I’ll shoot you dead!”
+
+And then Mr. Munks faced round on young Waller of Eversbeg, who was
+mocking Mr. Sache, and laughing at the creditable figure cut by the
+Conservative candidate; turned round, and asked him how _he_ would like
+to have his account settled, “in cold steel or hot lead?”
+
+Whereupon Mr. Waller demanded if Mr. Munks wanted to make his will.
+“Because,” he went on, “Ryan can draw you out a draft, and Mr. Pryor
+would give an opinion on it, and I dare say make no charge under the
+circumstances.”
+
+“Get to business—get to business, Munks,” whispered Mr. Drewitt,
+impatiently, “for heaven’s sake let us have it over;” and thus exhorted,
+Mr. Munks, whenever the cheering and groaning consequent upon the
+appearance of the candidates had in some measure subsided, commenced,
+“Gentlemen——”
+
+“Three groans, my boys, and don’t listen to him. Hiss——” and there came
+a storm of yells and hisses and execrations, accompanied by a smart
+shower of missiles, most of which fortunately fell short of the target.
+
+“Gentlemen,” again essayed Mr. Munks, who, whatever other virtues he
+lacked, certainly was game to the backbone. “Gentlemen——”
+
+“Who raised the rints last half——?”
+
+“Who broke the leases?”
+
+“Who put Dick Benton to the dure?”
+
+“Who took the roof off the Widdy Martin, and her down in the favar?”
+
+“Och! ye murthering villain.”
+
+“Och! ye blackguard thafe.”
+
+“Put a praty in yer ugly mouth; here’s one for ye.”
+
+“Gentlemen——”
+
+“Hould yer tongue.”
+
+“He couldn’t do it. He’d slobber his chin.”
+
+“Gentlemen, I beg to——”
+
+“Beg of somebody, then, that doesn’t know ye.”
+
+“Och, can’t ye let the man spake? Shure his wife never lets him have the
+chance at home.”
+
+“Go away and send up Betty!”
+
+“In her ridin’-habit!”
+
+“That she is goin’ to be buried in!”
+
+“Come, come, my lads, this won’t do!” yelled out Ryan, in a stentorian
+voice, which was distinctly audible even above the din. “Fair play is a
+jewel. Never refuse to listen to anybody. Hear Mr. Munks—you don’t know
+what he may be going to promise you.”
+
+“Talk’s chape!” shouted out a refractory voter. “Fine words butther no
+parsnips!”
+
+“Ye can’t boult the dure wid a boiled carrot!”
+
+“Be quiet, will you!” vociferated Ryan, “and attend to the gentleman’s
+speech;” and thus exhorted the crowd permitted Mr. Munks to commence.
+
+He said he hoped they would return Mr. Sache, that he was no stranger,
+but a resident in the neighbourhood, and known to every one of them.
+
+“A d——d sight too well!” hiccupped a tipsy tailor; at which remark the
+hubbub began again with twenty times greater vigour than ever.
+
+Hissing, yelling, hooting, cheering, cries of “Go on, Munks!” “Go in and
+win!” “Speak up, man!” “Make haste or you’ll be late!” “Are you afraid
+of Betty? Lord, man, we won’t let her touch you here!” with peals of
+laughter and volleys of oaths, compelled Mr. Munks finally to give up in
+despair.
+
+“It is of no use,” he exclaimed; “they won’t listen to us; there is a
+conspiracy; the crowd is packed.”
+
+On this Maxwell Drewitt came hurriedly forward. “If you won’t hear Mr.
+Munks,” he cried, “hear my uncle. We are on opposite sides, but I am
+sure he will tell you a great deal you would not willingly miss. Now
+three cheers for Archibald Drewitt, who never defrauded the poor man
+yet! Cheer like Irishmen, and not like a set of over-fed, beer-drinking
+Saxons. Cheer, you rascals, cheer!”
+
+Thus exhorted, the rascals did cheer, till they were hoarse, for
+Archibald Drewitt, for Maxwell Drewitt for Waller and for Pryor; but
+somehow Mr. Sache’s seconder did not seem much elated by the applause.
+Pushing his nephew aside, he said, the moment a lull in the tempest
+permitted his words to be heard——
+
+“I need no one to claim a hearing from me. I am not afraid of your
+refusing any request of mine. You will give a patient hearing to your
+old friend Archibald Drewitt—(tremendous cheering and cries of ‘That we
+will!’) We are old acquaintances, and do not need to be introduced to
+one another by anybody. We have not always agreed about politics, it is
+true, but we have agreed to disagree. Some amongst you go with me, and
+others do not; but to one and all my advice is—Return Mr. Sache! [Uproar
+and yells of ‘No, we won’t!’] Yes, gentlemen, you will. He is as honest
+a man as you’ll find. [Interruption, and a remark that ‘Honest men must
+be scarce!’] Yes, my friends, I admit that they are scarce, and for that
+very reason you ought not to let Mr. Sache slip through your fingers. He
+will do you justice in Parliament! [Great confusion.] He knows your
+wants, and you know his principles. [‘To be very bad!’] He is a
+gentleman who will never deceive you.” [‘No, faith, we know him too well
+to let him do that. He was cut out for a gentleman, but the devil ran
+away with the patthern!’] And then came another burst of yelling,
+hissing, and fighting.
+
+“Now, now, my friends,” said Mr. Drewitt, “I asked you for a peaceable
+hearing, and I thought you would have done that much for me. It is not
+so often I make a speech that you should interrupt me when I do. Just
+give me five minutes to tell you why you should return Mr. Sache, and I
+will promise not to detain you longer. [A prolonged howl, and cries of
+‘We want to hear nothing about him.’] Very likely; but I want to tell
+you something about him. His political views are sound; if you do not
+approve of them, it is not because they are bad, but because you cannot
+see what is good for you. He is an Irishman, has an interest in the
+soil, loves the country of his birth, will speak up for your rights——”
+
+“Arrah! hear that. The man can’t say boo to a goose. Him spake up!” And
+ironical cheers and perfect shrieks of laughter drowned the remainder of
+Mr. Drewitt’s sentence.
+
+“Well, gentlemen,” he resumed, when a partial lull enabled his words to
+be heard, “I suppose if I appeared before you a candidate for the honour
+of representing you in Parliament, instead of trying to second Mr.
+Munks’s statement, that Mr. Sache is a fit and proper person to fill
+that office—in that case also, I suppose, you would refuse to hear a
+syllable I had to say?”
+
+“No, we would not; we’d return you and send you up to London flying.
+Propose yourself, Archibald Drewitt, and we’ll second you. Hurrah!”
+
+He had them on the hip now, and pushed his advantage.
+
+“Then it is to Mr. Sache himself and not to his political principles you
+object. They cannot but be to your liking, because you say you would
+have me for your member, and my views are identical with his. My
+friends, you are acting at this minute much like children who strike a
+hard table when they have knocked themselves. You think you will hurt us
+by returning Mr. Pryor, and in reality you will only hurt yourselves.
+Mr. Sache wishes to serve you; but as you do not happen to like him, you
+cheer and shout for a man who will not serve you at all. Mr. Pryor, a
+very estimable young gentleman no doubt, is not fitted to be your
+representative. What interest has he in the country? Though an Irishman,
+I believe, by descent, he is yet English by birth, education, and
+residence. He is a stranger, a lawyer, a mere boy.”
+
+“Fifty times betther man than Sache, the dirty spalpeen! We won’t hear a
+word against Pryor. We’ll gag the first that cheers for the hardhearted
+landlord.” Which speech being accepted as a challenge, gave rise to a
+regular shindy, that diversified and enlivened the proceedings. Heads
+were cracked, shillelaghs waved, lips cut, an arm or two broken: the
+police had finally to interfere to restore order, and then Mr. Waller
+came to the front, and was greeted with tumultuous acclamations from the
+one side and by hisses, groans, cabbagestalks, bad eggs, and rotten
+fruit from the Sacheites.
+
+“Gentlemen.”
+
+“Three cheers for Lady Emmeline! Three times three!”
+
+And Lady Vervensoe, who had drawn public attention to herself by waving
+a crimson scarf out of the window, now rose and bowed right and left to
+the crowd in acknowledgment of their compliment.
+
+With her white dress and red ribbons, with her chip hat and plume of red
+feathers, her grace and beauty, she created quite a furore; and during
+the excitement attendant on this demonstration Mr. Waller managed to
+move the election of his cousin, Mr. Pryor, as a fit and proper person
+to represent Duranmore and West Connemara in Parliament.
+
+“It is my turn now,” whispered Maxwell Drewitt to Ryan. And he came
+forward, and leaning over the rails, and jauntily holding in his left
+hand a brand new hat, began—
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII.
+                        The Result of the Poll.
+
+
+“Electors of Duranmore and West Connemara—for I am not going to call
+you, for a purpose, gentlemen, which you are not, nor friends, because I
+see a good many faces below there which belong to my enemies—but
+Electors of Duranmore and West Connemara. I want you to listen to what I
+have got to tell you about the way elections have been previously
+managed in this part of the country, and of how we intend that they
+shall be managed in future——”
+
+Cheers from the Reds, hisses from the Blues.
+
+“For shame, Maxwell Drewitt!” cried one.
+
+“Siding against your uncle.”
+
+“Is it to the likes of you we’re going to listen, do you think?”
+
+“Go home, boy! out o’ that”
+
+“Home is it?” shouted another; “has he not been turned out of the only
+one he ever knew?” And at the words Archibald Drewitt turned sick.
+
+“Isn’t it himself ought to be at the ould place now instead of them that
+owns it?”
+
+“No, it is not,” answered Maxwell Drewitt, whose face was scarlet, but
+not with pain. “It is not; Archibald Drewitt came into Kincorth fairly.
+Long may he keep it!”
+
+“Ye wish it, don’t ye Max?” cried some one among the crowd. And then
+there came shrieks of laughter and cheers and hisses.
+
+“Make it up with him, man; it’s not too late yet.”
+
+“Why didn’t ye quarrel till he married?”
+
+“Why could ye not have let somebody else put in the spake for Pryor?”
+
+“Because I wanted to tell you what nobody else will tell you: because my
+family affairs have nothing to do with anybody in Duranmore: because I
+see no reason why I should wear my uncle’s political opinions, if they
+do not chance to fit me, any more than his clothes. Conservatism is
+stationary. Liberalism is progressive. Toryism may suit those who have
+had their way made for them, but those who have to make their way for
+themselves see that the Whigs have the best of the argument.
+
+“I am now in the same boat with the poorest man amongst you. He wants to
+rise, so do I; he wants to make money, so do I; he does not want to be
+ground under the carriage wheels of the upper ten thousand, neither do
+I. We are all of one mind in this matter; we want butter to our bread,
+and ham and eggs to our breakfast, and clothes to our backs, and good
+roofs over our heads, and something to lay by against old age. Here is a
+man to get what we desire for us. Three cheers for Geoffry Pryor.”
+
+And the people cheered, and the people shouted, while Maxwell Drewitt
+took breath; and some cried out that it was all true, and others told
+him to go home—that he was a humbug, and that they would have nothing to
+do with him.
+
+“Am I a humbug?” he yelled, almost cracking his voice in his efforts to
+make himself heard. “Am I a humbug? If I am, then humbugging must be a
+devilishly unprofitable trade. And as long as you have chosen to
+introduce this subject, I may say that I have given you as good proofs
+as any man can, that, let my principles seem bad or the reverse in your
+eyes, I at least have adopted them in sincerity of heart—with integrity
+of purpose. All of you know that I had not much to give up, but still I
+have given up the little I had, and stand before you a man who, having
+relinquished everything for what he conscientiously believes to be the
+good of his country, has a right to claim from you, at any rate, a calm
+and impartial hearing.”
+
+“Go on, Max; we’re listening.”
+
+“We’re as quiet as mice in a meal bag.”
+
+“Go on, man. Go on, go on, go on.”
+
+“I know I am not so popular as my uncle,” began Maxwell.
+
+Cries of “Yes, yes, you are.” “No you are not.” “Finish your speech, the
+schoolmaster could not have laid it off better. Who wrote it for ye,
+Max?” “Go on, and don’t keep us here all day. Go on, go on.” And the
+crowd shouted and yelled and laughed, and Maxwell cursed the crowd in
+his heart while he proceeded.
+
+“I am going on, if you will let me. I was saying that I know I am not so
+popular as my uncle.”
+
+“We mind that. Ye said it afore.”
+
+“He is a man who deserves all the love and respect you can give him, and
+I am sorry we should stand this day on opposite sides.”
+
+“Why don’t ye go over till him then? He’s near enough to ye.”
+
+“Why don’t I go over to him? That brings me to the point I was wanting
+to reach. Let me ask you a few questions, and give you honest answers to
+them, and then you will see if you can still blame me for deserting the
+‘Dirty Blues.’
+
+“Do you want to have a man of family representing you in Parliament?
+Yes. Then surely Mr. Sache cannot be your member!
+
+“Do you want a gentleman? Mr. Sache can lay no claim to such a
+distinction!
+
+“Do you want a person clever and fluent, able to lay your grievances
+before Parliament, and insist on their being redressed? Alas! my
+fellow-electors, Mr. Sache is no orator!
+
+“Do you want a man of mind, capable of grasping facts, of comprehending
+the necessities and wishes of his fellows? Mr. Sache is not possessed of
+a second idea; his only one, and that a very small one indeed, being
+himself!
+
+“Do you desire to do credit to yourselves by sending a good man, an
+independent man, a man of talent and character, into the British Senate?
+If you do, you must never return Mr. Sache!
+
+“Do you want a man—handsome, energetic, fearless? Look at your would-be
+member, voters of Duranmore—electors of West Connemara—look at your
+landlords’ nominee! Look at the poor, frightened, incapable creature
+your tyrants want to compel you to select, and say if I, Maxwell
+Drewitt, were not right to choose a more energetic leader—one able and
+willing to battle out your cause against the United Kingdom, and to
+state your grievances to the world. Look at him, I say, and cheer that
+poltroon if you dare!”
+
+It was probably the very audacity of this address which had kept his
+audience silent, for whenever Maxwell Drewitt, with hand stretched out
+towards Mr. Sache, with finger pointed at him, paused for a moment in
+his speech, there burst out upon the air such a tumult of laughing,
+cursing, joking, yelling, cheering, hissing, shouting, that the
+unfortunate object of the younger Drewitt’s tirade looked wholly
+stupefied and bewildered.
+
+Lady Emmeline was so delighted that she clapped her little hands
+together with might and main; she waved her eternal scarf over the heads
+of the multitude, and flung a bouquet towards Maxwell, which, falling
+short of the hustings, was caught by a man, who took off his battered
+and brimless hat, and said, “Thank ye kindly, my lady.”
+
+If anything had been wanting to make Colonel Vervensoe boil over, this
+would have settled the matter. Absolutely quivering with rage, he shook
+his fist in young Drewitt’s face, and threatened him with condign
+punishment on the spot.
+
+“Only lay a finger on me,” said Maxwell, “and I pitch you head foremost
+into the crowd, who will soon make mincemeat of you. Stand back, sir,
+stand back!”
+
+“If you say another word, Maxwell, you shall never darken my doors
+again,” foamed Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“Time enough for you to shut your doors when I show my face at them,”
+retorted Maxwell. “Be quiet,” he shouted, addressing the electors, “for
+I have still to tell you how your members have been returned hitherto.
+By bribery and corruption—by threats and intimidation—by turning the
+screw on poor men, who had, for the sake of their families, to put pride
+and self-respect and independence, ay, and common honesty in their
+pockets. You have been treated like slaves instead of like Irishmen. Why
+was O’Shane not successful? Because honest men were put out of the way,
+while rogues voted in their names; because refractory electors were
+kidnapped and carried off to Arran and Achill, and in one or two cases
+even to America; because men were made drunk and stripped naked, and
+left without a stitch to their backs, till the polling was over; because
+dead men were brought to life again; because tenants were threatened
+with expulsion; because Government posts were promised to the sons of
+the shopkeepers and small gentry; because the landlords formed a league
+against the men who enable them to live; because there was not an atom
+of honour or honesty amongst the friends and supporters of your
+taskmasters’ nominee.”
+
+“Maxwell, I command you to be silent!” exclaimed Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“My uncle commands me to be silent,” persisted the young man, “but my
+conscience commands me to speak. As a boy I saw these things done, and
+held my peace; as a man I remember what I saw, and choose my side
+accordingly.
+
+“How does the Earl of Popingham expect to win this election? By
+intimidation, by dead cats, such as this” (and he dexterously caught one
+by the tail, and pitched it back in the face of the man who had thrown
+it at him), “by the strong arm, by the might of rank, and power of
+money, and the majesty and omnipotence of landlordism. The things which
+have been done by the Conservatives are almost past my telling.
+Popingham’s pets are among you now with orders to keep the reds back
+from the polling booths; they are wearing red rosettes; but you will be
+able to pick them out for all that when the time comes. As I rode into
+town this morning a lad told me Marsden had offered him half-a-crown to
+pelt the reds, but that he was willing to pelt Marsden himself for
+eighteenpence. Will you have this, fellow-countrymen? It only requires a
+vigorous effort on your part to free yourselves from the yoke. A long
+pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether, and we will stand a
+respectable and independent body of electors, with a better man than any
+lordling’s nominee representing us in Parliament.” And amidst a Babel of
+cheering, groaning, clapping, and hissing, Maxwell concluded his speech.
+
+“Now, Sache,” whispered Lord Marsden.
+
+“I have not a word to say. I—I couldn’t do it.”
+
+“But you shall do it,” said Mr. Munks. And he and Mr. Drewitt shoved him
+up to the front of the hustings.
+
+What he said, however, or whether he ever said anything, nobody had the
+slightest idea. His speech appeared in the county paper, but it was
+generally supposed that the reporter wrote it himself.
+
+He had the worst of the day’s storm. Imprecations were shouted out
+against him. He was pelted, insulted, reviled. “How much does the Earl
+give you?” asked one wag.
+
+“Doesn’t the divil take care of his own, Sache?”
+
+“Why don’t you speak up like a man?”
+
+“Couldn’t they have got anybody betther than you?”
+
+“Abbott wouldn’t do their dirty work any longer.”
+
+“And it’s betther to sup with a cutty than want a spoon.”
+
+“Spake up, man, spake up.”
+
+“They’ll niver pay ye for the job if ye don’t work for yer money.”
+
+“Go out o’ that.”
+
+“Betther be a coward than a corp, Sache.”
+
+“Ye dirty blackguard.”
+
+“Who ate up Dan Joyce’s crock o’ butther?”
+
+“Who counts the very chickens as they’re chipping the shell?”
+
+“Let him alone, can’t ye? What’s the use of pouring water on a drownded
+rat?”
+
+“Don’t look so scared, Sache; niver howl till ye’re hurt.”
+
+“We won’t hear ye; we’ll bate ye black and blue. Go out o’ that or there
+won’t be an egg left in Duranmore.”
+
+“How do ye like it?”
+
+“Do like the women: say no and take it” And at every sentence there
+arose a howl, and then came a shower of dirt and filth of all
+description.
+
+“I never heard anything to equal this,” said Mr. Pryor to his cousin.
+
+“You’ll have to run the gauntlet in a minute or two,” answered Mr.
+Waller.
+
+“It’s good for the tailors, that’s one comfort,” observed Maxwell
+Drewitt.
+
+“We want Pryor: go back and send out Pryor. Take him away, Munks, he’s
+no credit till ye. I wondher ye’d be seen out with him. We’re run short
+o’ eggs, and we’ll have to fall to the pavin’ stones next. Take him out
+o’ that. Pryor, Pryor; three cheers for Pryor, and three more for
+Butler, and a good one for Waller, and keep your best and longest for
+Lady Emmeline.”
+
+“Are you going to give me a hearing, my friends?” asked Geoffry Pryor,
+coming forward as Mr. Sache, who by this time presented a pitiable
+spectacle, drew back.
+
+“No we’re not. Yes we are. Ye’ll be served worse than he was. Why did ye
+put on your best coat? ye might as well take it off and give it to me.
+It ’ud look mighty purty turned up wid yellow. See that now!”
+
+“An there’s a flower for your buttonhole.”
+
+“Have ye nearly done?” he demanded.
+
+“No, we havn’t begun. Why don’t ye go on? Ye’re as bad as Sache.”
+
+“Had you not better hear me first, and then speak yourselves
+afterwards?”
+
+“No, we hadn’t.”
+
+“Shall I not speak at all?”
+
+“If it’s any pleasure till ye, ye may.” And then the people laughed and
+cheered and shouted, and Geoffry Pryor went on to tell them how they
+were an oppressed and injured race; how justice had never been done to
+them; how the English knew nothing of the way in which the Irish lived;
+how everything was wrong in the management of the country; how he
+pledged himself to advocate the poor man’s right; how he would miss no
+opportunity of letting the English know of their manifold grievances.
+
+“Every labourer is worthy of his hire,” proceeded Mr. Pryor, “and the
+man who tills the ground should eat of its produce: you ought to have
+your land at such a rent that you can live off it, and not starve on it.
+Politically I am a thorough reformer; in religion I am for letting every
+man go to heaven his own road; and, in conclusion, I can only say, if
+you return me I shall try to serve you faithfully; if you do not return
+me I shall try to be content. I would entreat each man among you to vote
+according to his conscience: not for Sache or Pryor, not for red or
+blue, but for the right and the principle that is in him. And whatever
+the result of the contest may be, Mr. Sache,” he added, turning towards
+his opponent, “I hope we shall be enemies only in public, never in
+private life; and I should like, though I suppose such a proceeding is
+not usual on the hustings, to shake hands with you in token that ours is
+an amiable warfare.”
+
+And Mr. Pryor stretched out his hand to Mr. Sache, who had been, he
+felt, roughly dealt with. Perfectly stupified, however, with brandy and
+terror; bespattered from head to foot, with his cheek cut, and one eye
+closed up, Lord Popingham’s nominee made no movement to take his
+opponent’s offered hand till he was pushed forward by Mr. Drewitt, who,
+having lost patience with everybody, was in no very gentle or forbearing
+mood.
+
+“The show of hands is in favour of the Reds,” he said to Mr. Munks. “We
+must demand a poll.”
+
+And a poll was demanded accordingly; but the result was the same as the
+sheriff had declared the show of hands to be, viz., in favour of Geoffry
+Pryor.
+
+In the days of which I am writing there was no earthly reason why an
+election should not have lasted for ever. Government had not then put
+any limit to the period over which the innocent amusement of breaking
+heads should extend. On the contrary: as there was but one town in each
+county or portion of a county returning a separate member where votes
+could be legally polled, government seemed rather to have erred on the
+side of humouring the popular taste a little too far, than of
+considering it too little. Those were the palmy days of electioneering;
+those were the days of delightful uncertainty—of charming fluctuation.
+You were getting on to-day—you were far behind to-morrow; from hand to
+hand the political ball went tossing; now the Tories had it—now the
+Whigs. Now it was all up with the Reds—now the Blues had not a chance.
+As for trade! nobody even tried to transact any business while the
+election lasted, unless, indeed, the owners of public-houses and the
+landlords of hotels.
+
+They took the business of the town and did it. If you had not a pair of
+shoes in the world, do you think any cobbler in the parish had leisure
+to attend to your wants? Was the rain pouring in through your roof, or
+your house falling down; were the spokes in the wheels of your gig
+rattling like castanets, or every pane of glass in your windows smashed?
+If you were not a glazier, wheelwright, bricklayer, or slater yourself,
+why, windows, and wheels, and houses, and roofs must remain as they were
+till the members were returned—till the free and independent were sober
+and hungry once again.
+
+It was carnival time—a time not of sweetmeats and bouquets, but of
+whiskey and fighting, of rotten eggs and blackthorn shillelaghs; a time
+when family feuds were established that would last rival houses for
+life, and be handed down as heirlooms to their posterity; when even
+sober men—sober and discreet—lost their heads and got drunk with
+political excitement; when wrongs were done that never could be righted
+subsequently; when words were spoken that never could be forgotten; when
+insults were uttered that could never be forgiven.
+
+If the elections of those days were relics of the “good old times,” we
+may fervently thank our stars that such times have passed away for ever.
+
+Canvassing had seemed to Mrs. Drewitt a sufficiently weary season; but
+what was canvassing to making sure of the promised votes, to keeping the
+electors up to the mark?
+
+Mr. Drewitt worked himself into a state of frenzy, and he and Colonel
+Vervensoe and Mr. Munks and Lord Marsden and the Earl of Popingham, and
+a host of other influential Blues, went about the country like so many
+madmen, hunting up voters and bringing them to the polling-booth _nolens
+volens_.
+
+If anything had been wanting to egg the Blues on to greater exertions,
+Maxwell Drewitt’s speech would have proved a whip powerful enough to
+lash them to fury.
+
+If Mr. Sache were not returned, every tenant should be ejected—every man
+who had a vote sent adrift; the cottages should be unroofed; the land
+might remain untilled; children might starve; women might die! From time
+immemorial have not the innocent suffered with the guilty? has not the
+house of Ahab always suffered for the sin of Ahab, from the time of
+Elijah until now.
+
+Most of the landlords were kindly men—not proud, not uncourteous, not
+unfeeling; but they were like the rest of us, weak on one point, and
+that point was politics. There is a savage in most which only requires
+waking to be dangerous. Spite of all our civilization we are forced at
+times to admit we must have come originally of a rude stock, that we are
+closer to Jael, that we are nearer to Jehu than we would willingly
+confess.
+
+The most delicate taste cannot distinguish between port and sherry in
+the dark; and in the same manner there is a mental darkness in which the
+tenderest conscience fails to discern the difference between right and
+wrong.
+
+That was the state to which politics reduced men in the days of which I
+am writing; that is the state to which politics would reduce men now but
+for the extra vigilance of civilization, but for the coolness and
+calmness of the fourth estate, which will have none of it, which insists
+on pouring light in on darkness, of calling a spade a spade, let the
+implement so named be used by peer or peasant.
+
+With the landlords I have mentioned the case was different—the savage
+was roused in them: blinded by passion, they stood, with the noon-day
+sun shining on them, in darkness.
+
+It had become a question of might _versus_ right—of lord against serf—of
+Protestant against Catholic—of “You shall” against “I shall not;” and
+such a question can never be solved except by the result of the battle
+of man against man.
+
+I am not advocating one side or another. God knows,—God who knows all
+things—that though the profession of each was different, there was not,
+long ago, a turn of the scale in favour of either Whig or Tory. Drewitt
+of Kincorth would have served his own father with notice to quit had his
+father voted against Sache. Waller of Eversbeg would have ejected every
+man on his estate had every man not chanced to want to return Pryor.
+There was no choice between them. It was war to the knife on both sides:
+and when war of any kind is being waged, men are not apt to be too
+particular.
+
+Day by day the fight got fiercer, the combatants angrier. In the race
+each side strained every nerve for victory: all stratagems were
+allowed—all tricks were resorted to. It was a Derby where every man was
+trying to bribe his neighbour’s jockey; where he was slyly trying to
+loosen his girths, to unbuckle his bridle, to lame the favourite. It was
+a boat-race where people strove not only to row their best, but
+endeavoured to prevent others rowing at all. If you can fancy a
+three-mile heat, with the riders standing in their stirrups and lashing
+one another back; if you can imagine a rowing-match where, when hard
+run, the crew rose up and battered their opponents with their oars; if
+you can picture a battle without any order or regularity; if you can
+crowd into your mental canvas everything hopelessly unfair, dishonest,
+brutal, mean, you may perhaps form some idea of Duranmore during the
+time which elapsed between the nomination and the return.
+
+There was many a purse filled—there was many a spirit broken. Many a man
+thought of the children at home, and the tract of wretched land that he
+had done his miserable best to till; thought of how the children would
+cry for want of their potatoes; thought of the empty pot, of the lonely
+hill side, of the deserted cabin; and voted against his conscience. His
+opinions might not be right—more than probable they were all wrong—but
+they were not more wrong than those held by many of his betters; and his
+betters were able to vote as they liked, while he had to vote for the
+man he detested.
+
+“If the masther ’ud just let me be, ma’am,” said one poor fellow to Mrs.
+Drewitt, “it’s meself ’ud niver go to the poll at all at all. I’d vote
+for Mr. Pryor if I could; but as it’s not plazing to Mr. Drewitt, I’d
+rayther not vote for aither.”
+
+He had been artful, this uneducated Irishman: he had thought to get at
+the soft side of Mr. Drewitt through his wife; and Mrs. Drewitt herself
+imagined that so reasonable a request might be granted.
+
+“He will never force Byrne to vote against his conscience,” argued Mrs.
+Drewitt.
+
+Wouldn’t he though? Mr. Drewitt soon showed his wife the reverse of the
+picture; and the reverse was not pretty.
+
+Byrne should vote or give up his lot.
+
+“Then,” said Byrne, “I will give up my lot; but if I do I’ll vote for
+Pryor.”
+
+And he did.
+
+After that Mr. Drewitt desired his wife not to allow any of his tenants
+to speak to her on the subject of the election. He knew she did not go
+with him in his ideas; that in fact she was getting perfectly bewildered
+with the strife of contending opinions; for which reasons he bade her
+send all reluctant voters to him.
+
+“I understand them, and you do not,” he said. “I know how to manage
+them; and they think they can manage you.” And thus, happily for
+herself, Mrs. Drewitt was withdrawn from the political arena, and only
+permitted to look on at the fray.
+
+What a fray it was!
+
+“I have not been in bed for a week,” said Maxwell Drewitt to Mr. Waller,
+on the morning which was to decide the result.
+
+“Nor have I,” answered the owner of Eversbeg; “but to-day will, I hope,
+repay us for all.”
+
+That was what the Blues were saying as well. They were sanguine of
+success also; so sanguine, that Mrs. Munks, and Lady Marsden, and a
+number of other ladies—Mrs. Drewitt amongst them, by her husband’s
+special desire—took possession of the Assembly Room, to hear the
+earliest tidings concerning the winner.
+
+Not to be behind on such an occasion, Lady Emmeline and her staff
+occupied the opposition benches. She and Colonel Vervensoe had not
+spoken to one another for a month previously, and it was currently
+reported that if Mr. Pryor got in he would never speak to her again. If,
+on the other hand, Mr. Sache were returned, people believed that she
+would never speak to her husband.
+
+There can be no doubt that the attitude assumed by this lady added
+greatly to the excitement of the election. In the Hickman family brother
+was against brother; among the Drewitts uncle and nephew were bitter
+opponents; but all this was nothing to husband and wife openly
+supporting different sides.
+
+It was the flavouring to the soup; the sauce to the fish; the lemon to
+the punch. Without that element the election would have been, to a great
+extent, like other elections: as it was, in the memory of the oldest
+inhabitant there had never been such fun in Duranmore.
+
+On the last day of the poll the town presented a perfectly indescribable
+scene of riot, misery, and contention.
+
+Everything which had made the nomination rather a grand affair, tended
+to make the final combat wretched and squalid.
+
+The wreaths were faded, the evergreens had turned brown, the arches were
+partly broken down, the flowers were dead, the banners were torn, the
+rosettes were crumpled and soiled, the instruments of the respective
+bands having been used as weapons of offence and defence had come to
+grief, the leading men on both sides looked worn-out and jaded, the
+voters had hardly a whole coat among them; they were tired of fighting,
+they were weary of being dragged hither and thither, they had passed
+through every known stage of drunkenness, and many of them were by this
+time in a state of sickly sobriety.
+
+Altogether the ball had lasted too long: the soldiers, the police, the
+musicians, the voters, the candidates—all were alike exhausted. No one
+seemed so bright as on the first day, excepting the ladies; and even
+some of them looked a little drooping.
+
+Not so Lady Emmeline, however: whether she slept well or rouged well it
+is not for me to say, but the colour in her face was brilliant as the
+dye of her scarf.
+
+“If we do not win I shall die,” were her parting words to Maxwell
+Drewitt.
+
+“We shall win,” was his last answer. Every half-hour he despatched a
+messenger to tell her the state of the poll: every half-hour Geoffry
+Pryor’s chances seemed to brighten, while the anxiety of the Sacheites
+increased.
+
+As the day wore on and the excitement became more intense, rioting
+began, and the fighting and pushing which had hitherto been confined to
+the neighbourhood of the polling-booth, spread through the crowd, till
+the row became general.
+
+There could be no mistake about the matter now. The affair was growing
+serious, the people were getting earnest and dangerous. The Reds were
+cudgelling the Blues, and the Blues were paying back the Reds with
+interest. The authorities were beginning to be alarmed. There was a yell
+for the military, and every soldier settled himself more firmly in his
+saddle, and gathered up his reins, while he waited for the order to
+charge. Every spectator was holding his or her breath, waiting for “what
+next?” when suddenly a piercing scream rang out over the heads of the
+crowd, and a cry of “Save him!” issued from the windows of the Assembly
+Room.
+
+For a moment the play of shillelaghs ceased in the centre of the
+market-place square, and Geoffry Pryor, in the very heart of that
+surging, seething mass of human beings, could just distinguish two men
+struggling over a voter.
+
+The fellow’s coat was torn off his back, and Maxwell Drewitt, with his
+head bare, with clenched teeth, and with his face flushed and furious,
+was dragging him by one arm, while Mr. Drewitt was tugging him away by
+the other. The elder and more powerful man seemed to be getting the best
+of it, when, quick as thought, a stick whizzed through the air and came
+down on Mr. Drewitt’s skull. He dropped on the instant, and as he
+dropped there was a rush of the rabble to one side, and right over his
+body rode a company of hussars.
+
+Then the light left Geoffry Pryor’s eyes; a deathlike sickness came over
+him, and he fainted away.
+
+The whole scene, which it has taken me so long to describe, was acted
+out almost in a second; and next moment eager hands were raising the
+owner of Kincorth from the ground.
+
+“My God, he’s dead!”
+
+“Och, docther, dear, say that the life’s not out of him!”
+
+“Bleed him, docther darlint.”
+
+“For the sake of the blessed Vargin, lift him aisy.”
+
+“Oh, swate father! what is this at all at all?”
+
+“Keep the craythur back. Shure it’s the young wife he married only the
+other day.”
+
+But Agnes Drewitt would not be kept back. Unmindful of the crowd,
+heedless of danger or difficulty, she made her way towards the knot
+collected round her husband.
+
+“Doctor,” she said, “you must bring him back to me. He is not dead: tell
+me he is not dead.”
+
+“Carry him to my house. I can do nothing here,” was all the answer he
+made; but he pulled Mrs. Drewitt forcibly from her husband’s side, and
+keeping her hand in his, followed close behind.
+
+The doctor’s house was not fifty yards distant, but to Agnes Drewitt it
+seemed fifty miles.
+
+The mob closed up again as they passed through, and, as in some terrible
+dream, she heard loud shouts and continuous yells and oaths and threats
+and curses.
+
+Very vaguely it seemed to her as though she had crossed into a frightful
+eternity in which the tumult of earth was still distinctly audible.
+
+Behind her lay the great battle-field of the contested election, where
+her husband had fought for what he thought the right so gallantly and so
+long. To her it was all gone and past: gone with its excitement, its
+sorrow, its shock, its trouble.
+
+She felt stupified, she felt stunned. As she crossed the threshold of
+the doctor’s house, she scarcely heard a prolonged howl of anger and
+disappointment that rent the summer air.
+
+“What’s that?” cried Lady Emmeline, starting up; but next moment she sat
+back in her seat, clenching her hands together and beating her little
+foot in impotent rage against the floor.
+
+“It’s lost! it’s all over!” she shrieked out. And she was right. At the
+eleventh hour every one of the tenants she had promised Mr. Pryor were
+marched up to the polling-booth by her husband, where they recorded
+their votes for Mr. Sache.
+
+They turned the fate of the day.
+
+“That settles it!” muttered Ryan, with a fearful oath; and he was right,
+for Geoffry Pryor was beaten, and the Earl of Popingham’s nominee had
+won!
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII.
+                               Not Dead.
+
+
+If there be one thing under heaven for which more than another the lower
+order of Irish have a passion, it is for offering medical advice; and
+accordingly, whenever the eager crowd who had hustled and shoved their
+way after the “body,” as they called Mr. Drewitt, beheld him safely
+deposited on Doctor Sheen’s bed, they opened fire on that gentleman in a
+style which set at defiance the knowledge of Apothecaries’ Hall, and
+might have made the whole College of Surgeons stand aghast.
+
+“Lay him down there,” growled the doctor. “Gently, gently—do you
+hear?—and not as if he was a sack of potatoes: and now be off, everyone
+of you; I don’t want you here.”
+
+“But, Doctor dear——”
+
+“Open an artery. Och! see if the blood’ll come. Sweet father, what’ll we
+do at all—at all? Musha—oh! Wirrastrue.”
+
+“Jist touch him in the arm”—improved another—“a bit above the
+elbow—where Sergen Brabsen—long life till him—put the lance in me and
+brought me back after I died of the squinazy.”
+
+“Could ye not put a dhrop o’ spirit down his throat, Docthor darlint?”
+suggested a fourth; “it might lift his heart again.”
+
+“Do, an’ may the heavens be yer bed: we’ll dhrink ye’re health night and
+day, an’——”
+
+“Come, be off!” interrupted Doctor Sheen. “I can’t do with you crowding
+about me, yelling enough to pull the house down.”
+
+“If ye’d put a feather till his nose,” broke forth the first speaker
+with greater vehemence than ever, “I can catch one of the hens in a
+minit, or let me hould a bit av a lookin’ glass afore his mouth.”
+
+“An’ fit his arm straight in place: see how it hings.”
+
+“An’ look if the skull’s knocked in entirely, an’ pick out the broken
+bits afore they get down intil his brains.”
+
+“Pick them up with the pincers, and then join them cleverly.”
+
+“An’ sen’ for ould Peggy Magore; shure she has dhrinks made out o’ herbs
+that would entice a corpse to speak, if it could only be made to swally
+them.”
+
+“An’ docthor, wouldn’t ye let his head down a bit?”
+
+“An’ lift his feet on a pillow?”
+
+“And feel if there’s a ticking in either of his heels?”
+
+Which last speech bearing, as it did, on the idea that before death a
+pulse may be felt in the heel, produced such a wailing and mourning—such
+laments over the man who had been taken from them—such tributes to his
+virtues—such regrets for his untimely end—that at length Doctor Sheen
+fairly lost his patience, and shoving the loudest of the talkers out of
+the room, and ordering the rest to follow, he locked and double-locked
+the door, and found himself alone with his patient, Mrs. Drewitt, and
+his assistant.
+
+Without, there was noise and riot and shouting and fighting: within,
+there was silence like the grave: without was life; within, the shadow
+of the angel of death.
+
+No one in the room spoke a word while Doctor Sheen felt Mr. Drewitt’s
+pulse, opened his coat, waistcoat, and shirt, and placed his hand on his
+heart; but when at last he looked up doubtfully, Mrs. Drewitt said—
+
+“Doctor, he shall not die?”
+
+“Very well, ma’am,” answered the doctor, and pressed his fingers on Mr.
+Drewitt’s wrist once more.
+
+Then Doctor Sheen whispered something in the assistant’s ear, to which
+the assistant replied:
+
+“No, only stunned.”
+
+“Do you think so?”
+
+“I am sure of it,” answered the other; “haven’t I had dozens of them
+here just as bad?”
+
+“But not with that,” said Doctor Sheen, still speaking in so low a tone
+that his words could not reach Mrs. Drewitt, and pointing as he spoke to
+Mr. Drewitt’s head, “but not with that.”
+
+“And what’s that?” inquired the assistant contemptuously; “he’ll be all
+right again in a week;” and he took the injured arm, and began
+manipulating it, as though he were playing a tune on a piano.
+
+“There you are,” he said. “Harder, sir, harder; his pulse is not in his
+skin; give him time, there’s no hurry; he’s coming as fast as he can.
+Now I’d give five shillings,” added the young man, stepping back and
+surveying Mr. Drewitt, “I’d give five shillings to know where he has
+been.”
+
+“Where who has been?” asked Mrs. Drewitt, turning her face, which was
+wet with tears, towards the speaker.
+
+“Where your husband has been, ma’am; all our anatomy won’t teach us
+that; it’s a good quarter of an hour since he went away, and he is only
+coming back again now—here he is,”—and as he said the word Mr. Drewitt
+opened his eyes.
+
+With a little cry of thanksgiving his wife fell on her knees beside him.
+She had been afraid to say she feared before; but now the very excess of
+her joy proved how great had been her previous dread.
+
+“I will be quiet,” she said, as Doctor Sheen tried to draw her from the
+room; “I will be quiet—you need not be afraid of me again—I won’t say a
+word you may trust me, indeed—indeed you may.”
+
+“I am going to set his arm,” persisted Doctor Sheen, “and see to this
+cut in his head, and——”
+
+“And there is no one so fit to stay here as I am,” she interposed
+eagerly: “you would wish me to remain, you would like me to be near
+you—would not you, Archy?”—and she looked into the scarcely conscious
+eyes half hidden by a weight of heavy eyelid while she waited for an
+answer.
+
+Archibald Drewitt could not answer her; she had not been accustomed to
+illness, poor soul, or she might have known better than to expect it;
+but he made a vain effort to turn towards her—a faint attempt to move
+his uninjured arm and clasp her hand in his.
+
+It was too much; a more ghastly pallor came over his face, the eyelids
+closed again, and——
+
+“He’s dead! he’s dead!” exclaimed his wife, starting up and endeavouring
+to throw herself on the body, but Mr. Murphy prevented this.
+
+“Dead, ma’am!” he said, still keeping a firm hand on her shoulder:
+“dead, ma’am! he’s worth a dozen dead ones yet. Now—now”—and Mr. Murphy
+patted her back, apparently under the delusion that she was a baby
+choking—“do be reasonable and just leave him to us. He’s not dead, and
+isn’t going to die. So far as this goes, he may live to bury you;” and
+without any more ceremony the young man walked Mrs. Drewitt out of the
+room, and sat her down in the surgery, where he left her alone, after
+having procured for her a well-thumbed copy of “Clarissa Harlowe,” which
+would, he said, “serve to divert her mind.”
+
+“And keep yourself easy, ma’am,” he finished, “for Mr. Drewitt will be
+about again, in no time.”
+
+“You should be more careful, Murphy,” remarked Doctor Sheen that same
+night, when he and his assistant were seated together over their
+respective tumblers of punch. “I did not exactly like your saying to
+Mrs. Drewitt that her husband might bury her. Some of the English don’t
+take those kind of things.”
+
+“Well, wasn’t I right?” demanded the other; “mayn’t he bury her? isn’t
+he going on as well as a man could go on? and won’t he live to have sons
+of his own, please God, and keep Maxwell out of the estate?”
+
+“He has been here three times this evening to ask after him,” said
+Doctor Sheen, reflectively.
+
+“And did he seem sorry when he heard it was for Kincorth, and not for
+the Abbey, his uncle was bound?”
+
+“No, he seemed glad.”
+
+“Did he now?”
+
+“And he says he did not strike the blow.”
+
+“Who ever thought he did? He had not a stick in his hand at all.”
+
+“His aunt did not know that, for she went on at him, and he could not
+edge in a word till she was tired; but then he began, and told her this,
+that, and the other, till he got round her completely: she’s as soft as
+salve, and she begged his pardon, and they are now as thick as thieves.
+Oh! faith,” added the Doctor, “and it’s Master Maxwell Drewitt that can
+wile the bird off a bush when he likes. It’s a wonderful tongue he has:
+to hear him sometimes, you would think butter could not melt in his
+mouth.”
+
+“And to hear him at others you would know cheese would not choke him,”
+said Mr. Murphy, who had his own reasons for disliking Maxwell.
+
+“Still it’s a great pity of the young fellow,” said Doctor Sheen, mixing
+himself another tumbler of punch, “for he ought to have had Kincorth.”
+
+“It would have been a greater pity of other people if he had had it,”
+remarked Mr. Murphy; in which opinion, however, he chanced to be wrong.
+
+No man could have done worse for other people than Archibald Drewitt,
+who, spite of Mr. Murphy’s hopeful predictions, lay between life and
+death for more than a month at Doctor Sheen’s, during which time the
+house was besieged with visitors and inquiries.
+
+“You must pull him through, Sheen,” said the Earl of Popingham. “We
+cannot afford to lose Mr. Drewitt.”
+
+“You need never show your face at the Hall again if he is not able to
+ride to the first meet this season,” chimed in Colonel Vervensoe, while
+Mr. Pryor, Mr. Waller, and all the Reds were, if possible, more eager in
+their anxiety, more impatient for good tidings, than the Blues.
+
+“But he will get through it, won’t he, Murphy?” asked Mr. Waller one day
+when he had met Doctor Sheen’s assistant on the road near Eversbeg, and
+insisted on taking him up to the house for lunch. “There is no fear now,
+is there?”
+
+“No; he is out of danger; that is, he is out of danger now, so far as we
+know. He will do, if he takes care of himself. His arm is the worst; we
+can’t make a good job of that at all. It was a beautiful case, and a
+splendid fracture; but it will never be a good arm again.”
+
+“Will it hinder his hunting?” asked young Waller, who thought anything
+that stopped a man’s course across country the most grievous misfortune
+possible.
+
+“Hinder his hunting? Is it the like of that would keep Mr. Drewitt back,
+do you think? If that was all, couldn’t he ride with the bridle in his
+teeth, like a gentleman I knew down in Tipperary? You may believe me or
+not, Mr. Waller, just as you like,” proceeded Mr. Murphy; “but he had
+neither arms nor legs, and yet he hunted as regularly as you do.”
+
+“I’d go from here to there to see him,” was Mr. Waller’s only reply.
+
+“And, indeed, it’s himself would make you welcome,” answered Mr. Murphy;
+“that is, if he’s alive; there was not a funnier fellow nor a harder
+drinker in the county.”
+
+“My cousin was round seeing Mr. Drewitt the other day,” remarked Mr.
+Waller.
+
+“Yes, but he did not see him,” said the assistant. “He had a long talk
+with Mrs. Drewitt. We’re glad of anybody that will keep her out of the
+sick room; and Mr. Pryor wanted to get speech with some of them.”
+
+“Yes,” said the other, “he was going back to London, and wished to
+express his regret and all the rest of it. Upon my conscience, I never
+was so frightened in my life. He went down—Pryor, I mean—as if he had
+been shot. Fainted dead away.”
+
+“He ought to take three tumblers of punch every night going to bed,”
+observed Mr. Murphy; “it would strengthen his nervous system.”
+
+“He was delighted with Mrs. Drewitt—came home here in perfect raptures
+about her. She did not strike me as being anything remarkable.”
+
+“Miss Susan Drewitt is a handsome woman,” answered Mr. Murphy; “but Mrs.
+Drewitt is more of a woman—do you understand me, sir? She has not much
+spirit, but she has a sweet temper. She is pretty, to my taste; and for
+a woman, I consider her uncommonly sensible—uncommonly,” and Mr. Murphy
+drained a bumper to her health, after which he suddenly recollected that
+Dr. Sheen would be expecting him, and rose to take his departure.
+
+“When do you think of moving him?” asked Mr. Waller.
+
+“In about a week’s time, if he goes on well,” said Mr. Murphy. “We are
+to have down a mighty easy carriage from Lord Marsden’s, and I think it
+won’t hurt him. It must be uncomfortable for Mrs. Drewitt staying at Dr.
+Sheen’s, though we do our best; and this much I’ll say for her,” added
+Mr. Murphy, “that an easier-pleased or an easier-served lady I would
+never wish to see. She makes no fuss and she gives no trouble, and, for
+my own part, I wish she was to live in the house for ever.”
+
+As for Mrs. Drewitt herself, she was Mr. Murphy’s friend for life. What
+she would have done without him during that illness she never knew. He
+did not seem to know the meaning of the word despondency.
+
+“It was a doctor’s business to cure, to be sure it was. When a doctor
+could not cure, send for the nurse, and a coffin, and a lawyer to make
+the will; but till Mrs. Drewitt saw the lawyer, at any rate, she ought
+not to give way.”
+
+He went up to Kincorth for her. He did her errands; he posted her
+letters; he kept watch while she slept; he told her stories; he listened
+to her while she talked about England.
+
+“That’s the place I’d like to go to,” he said. “What chance has a man in
+a place like this? a man that is a man, I mean, and has any push in him.
+What do you see in a place like this, but broken heads and fever, and
+children being born, and old men and women dying? Except, may be, an odd
+case of cancer, middle-aged people never die of any out-of-the-way
+disease. A child could prescribe for them. And as for work, ma’am,
+nobody in London would credit it! Doctor Sheen is the dispensary doctor,
+you know. Well, if we were earning ten thousand a year each out of it,
+there could not be more expected from us. They come in the middle of the
+night here, and ring—ring—ring, just as if one ought to be standing
+behind the door waiting to answer it, and then, ‘It’s the misthress is
+taken ill, and ye’re to come at wanst,’ and then we’ve to go through the
+rain and the snow and the wind to find the woman. ‘Sorry to have given
+us the thrubble, but when she sint she was very bad, entirely.’ I’d like
+well to go to London, I would. Perhaps I might be there before I’d die.”
+
+“But you must remember, Mr. Murphy,” Mrs. Drewitt was wont to say, “that
+the streets are not paved with gold there, though I know many country
+people imagine they are.”
+
+“True, ma’am; but they must be full of patients. I have always fancied
+that there must be some place on the face of God’s earth where, if men
+are willing to work hard, they may gather abundantly; but let that place
+be where it will, it is not Duranmore.”
+
+All of which set Mrs. Drewitt thinking, and wondering more and more what
+Maxwell was to do. Would he come back to Kincorth, she marvelled? Would
+her entreaties avail now? After what had happened, would he listen to
+her? Give her the opportunity and she would try. And Maxwell gave her
+the opportunity by asking if he could assist her in any way when she was
+removing his uncle to Kincorth.
+
+“Can I help—may I help?” he said eagerly; but Mrs. Drewitt answered—
+
+“I am afraid to let him see you for the present. I do not wish to speak
+to him about you; about the election, I mean, for a little while. But I
+should like you to return to Kincorth. I know he will be glad, when he
+is better, to hear you are under the same roof with him. I can take so
+much on my own responsibility, Maxwell; and I do take it, and ask you
+most earnestly to come back to us once more.”
+
+“I have started on my road,” he said, “and I may not retrace my steps;
+but I thank you all the same. Whenever he is strong enough to see me,
+tell me to come, and I will come to Kincorth, though not to stay there.”
+
+“I wish there was not any Kincorth standing between us,” answered Mrs.
+Drewitt, very truthfully, “and that we could all live at peace
+together.”
+
+“Perhaps we may, some day,” was Maxwell’s reply. He was thinking of the
+vow he had made to himself, of the time when he was to be rich and his
+uncle poor.
+
+Would there be peace then? When the tables were turned—when he was the
+benefactor, could he afford to let bygones be bygones; could he then be
+generous enough to say, let there be peace between us at last?
+
+That was what he was wondering while Mrs. Drewitt stood silent and
+looked in his face, and marvelled what made its expression change so
+swiftly and vary so often.
+
+There came a day when she knew all, when she hated Maxwell more than he
+had ever hated his uncle; when she spurned his proffered kindnesses,
+when there was war waged between them, war to the death, which ended but
+with life.
+
+Had anyone told Mrs. Drewitt then that she could ever learn to prefer
+strife to peace, she would have declared it was impossible; and yet as
+time went by the impossible grew possible, and the possible came to
+pass.
+
+But at that early stage of her married life Mrs. Drewitt had no strong
+interests blinding her, no feeling in favour of this person or against
+that, warping her judgment and leading her astray.
+
+She loved her husband, who owned Kincorth; she was sorry for Maxwell,
+who did not own it; but at the same time Mr. Drewitt, whom she loved,
+was master for life, while his nephew had not a penny.
+
+Reverse the cases, and how would Mrs. Drewitt have felt? That, my
+reader, is what we shall find out when the tale of the years is
+completed—when the story of the years is told.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX.
+                       Mrs. Drewitt understands.
+
+
+It was winter—winter on the grand sea-coast—winter among those
+everlasting hills; and Agnes Drewitt came to understand how the season
+might be more endurable in the country than in London; came to see how
+the breakers dashing on the rocks—how the waves rolling up on the
+shore—how the mountains covered with snow—how the swelling streams, and
+the roaring torrents might be less monotonous and depressing than the
+fine perspective of a London street, or the exhilarating spectacle of a
+yellow fog.
+
+She was beginning to like Kincorth. Home—be it ever so homely, ever so
+lonely, ever so uncomfortable—has a great charm for a woman like Mrs.
+Drewitt; and though her lot was in many respects not an enviable one,
+still she was becoming reconciled to it. She was growing to know the
+people and to like them; she was contriving how to get her household
+into more orderly ways. She had talked with her husband, and got him to
+consent to see Maxwell. Altogether, on the particular afternoon of which
+I am speaking, Mrs. Drewitt did not feel unhappy.
+
+She was going out for a walk, a long walk, all by herself; and after
+long confinement to the house, after constant attendance on an invalid,
+the idea of fresh air, of a little pilgrimage beside Duranmore Bay, all
+round Eversbeg Head, and so on nearly to Eversbeg Abbey, did not prove
+unpleasant.
+
+She had been rather a prisoner since her arrival in Ireland, and freedom
+seemed sweet. She had never been round Eversbeg Head, which she could
+see so plainly from her bedroom windows. She had never been very near
+the Atlantic, for she did not call Duranmore Bay the Atlantic; and she
+wanted to dip her hand in it for once, and write to her sister, “I have
+touched the great ocean.” She longed to stand on some point of land
+whence she could see thousands and thousands of miles away. She had some
+vague notion, I fancy, of getting a glimpse of America; but be this as
+it may, she intensely enjoyed the idea of the walk, and meant to make
+the most of it.
+
+“There is a much nearer way you know, Auntie,” said Kathleen, “thrau the
+road by Eversbeg Head; but if you wish to get a good view of the
+Atlantic, you must go by the coast. It is not a nice clear day, though.
+You ought to have seen it in fine weather.”
+
+“Oh! I think it a lovely day,” answered Mrs. Drewitt, and as she walked
+along, while the wind drove the clouds before her, she repeated to
+herself that it was lovely—that she had never enjoyed anything so much
+in all her life before.
+
+The election had long been over. Mr. Sache and his family were in
+Dublin, and the “Castle,” as he somewhat pompously called his house—a
+building all wings and turrets and loopholes and weathercocks—was left
+in charge of servants.
+
+Duranmore had subsided into its state of normal dullness. Fishermen
+mended their nets, labourers went about their accustomed work, the
+shopkeepers did their usual small amount of business. There was no more
+fighting in the streets, the public-houses were emptied of the crowds of
+drunken men that had once filled them full to overflowing. The Earl and
+Countess of Popingham were in France, Lord Marsden in Rome, Mr. and Mrs.
+Munks in London, and thus Mrs. Drewitt had, after a fashion, the country
+to herself, to enjoy thoroughly and completely, if she liked.
+
+And she did like. She loved to look at the mountains with the clouds
+flying fast over them as though hurrying, hurrying away. She loved the
+wild hills, the distant ravines, the rivers that came bounding down from
+the far-off heights and went rushing to the sea. She loved the bay when
+the waters were dark like the sky, when the waves came up towards
+Duranmore, that was now so quiet and orderly. She loved to pause and
+look at the whitewashed cottages, at the pretty, picturesque children,
+who hung their curly heads abashed as the lady passed by. She loved the
+salutation of the country people, some of whom “made bould to ask her
+how the masther was.” She was not a stranger among strangers now. She
+was taking root in the soil, and learning to love the very shamrocks in
+the grass.
+
+She left Duranmore behind her, and still went on. Spite of recent rains
+the granite road was hard and dry beneath her feet. Above her head the
+high wind drove the clouds before it. “You are going to England,” she
+thought, “but I do not wish to be travelling there with you now.” The
+western breeze blew a colour into her cheeks, and disarranged her hair,
+and lifted her veil, and kissed her sweet face caressingly.
+
+“I love the wind,” she thought; “it is fresh and pure, and it comes from
+travelling over the great sea, instead of bringing the taint of large
+cities on its breath;” and she turned, even while she was thinking this,
+round Eversbeg Head, and the wide Atlantic and the full force of the
+western breeze burst upon her at once.
+
+Thousands of miles! Millions upon millions of tossing billows! Oh! thou
+great God Almighty! who can look across the restless ocean and not think
+of Thee! Who can forget, while standing by the sea and watching the
+great waters come thundering upon the shore, that Thou hast set bounds
+to the waters and said, “Here shall thy proud waves be stayed”—who,
+looking over the trackless expanse of ocean, but must feel that all
+unseen the feet of the Most High have traversed it?
+
+When we see this work of the Lord, His wonders in the deep; when we
+perceive how at His command the floods arise, and how at His word the
+storm ceases; when we remember that though the waves of the sea are
+mighty and rage horribly, still that the Lord God who dwelleth on high
+is mightier; when we think that he holds the waters in the hollow of his
+hand, do we not seem for a moment, amid raging tempests and foaming
+billows, to catch a glimpse of the Infinite? Looking over the waste of
+waters, does not our weak mortality appear able to grasp for an instant
+the idea of immortality? Can we not imagine that no material horizon
+bounds our view—that we are gazing away and away across the ocean into
+eternity?
+
+Thousands of miles, friends! Which of us has not at one time or other
+let his heart go free over the waters? Who has not stood by the shore
+silent, while his inner self—his self that never talks save to his God
+and his own soul—has gone out from his body and tossed with the billows,
+and answered the sullen roar of the waters, and risen and sunk with the
+waters as they rose and fell, rose and fell, and felt the breaking of
+the foam, the sobbing plash of the great ocean, as it rolls up on the
+sands and over the rocks and stones and shells of earth, while depth
+calleth unto depth and the giant floods clap their hands together?
+
+And oh! with what a terrible sadness does that second self come back to
+us! It has been out listening to strange voices, hearing strange sounds,
+learning solemn truths. It has been out on the billows, on the foam,
+among the spray and the clouds and the tempest—out and away to the very
+confines of the invisible world. It has been restless like the ocean,
+and it comes back to be set within the bounds of flesh; it has been
+free, and behold it must return to chains and fetters; it has been
+telling of its troubles to the ocean, and the ocean has lifted up its
+mighty arms and mourned out its sorrowful reply.
+
+Mourning—mourning—never silent, never still—now lashing itself up into
+fury—now tossing hither and thither as it seems to us without plan or
+purpose; now wave following after wave, as man follows after man in the
+ranks of a vast army; now flinging its waters on the shore—now striving
+to climb the steep sides of some rugged rock; fretting itself as we fret
+ourselves—moaning as we moan—toiling as we toil—restless as we are; now
+receding—now advancing—but never at peace; in its strong moods wild and
+tumultuous—in its calmest moments stirred by the ground swell, ruffled
+by the lightest breeze!
+
+Well may man love this deep, inexplicable, unfathomable ocean, for as it
+through the ages has gone on sobbing and mourning and struggling, so man
+through the years of his life goes mourning and struggling too.
+
+Some thoughts like these passed through Mrs. Drewitt’s mind as she stood
+at the base of Eversbeg Head, and looked out over the Atlantic. She had
+never seen anything like it before; the ocean had never filled her heart
+and saddened it till now.
+
+Though not much of a traveller, she had, like most people, known the sea
+in its quieter aspect. She had visited Brighton; she had been to
+Hastings; she had seen the flat Norfolk coast, and beheld the mud banks
+in the Essex Hundreds; but the sea in any of the places I have mentioned
+was not like the sea that broke over the rocky headlands of the wild
+West; neither was the desolate shore she stood on like unto the
+civilized shores she was once familiar with, where bathing boxes were
+drawn up on the shingle, and men and women walked upon the parade, and
+the bare windows of lodgings to let looked out above the calm blue
+waters.
+
+An unromantic lady—middle-aged, shall we say—and with no particular
+beauty of face or figure, who pursues the even tenour of her unexciting
+life, is of the same genus, doubtless, as Lady Macbeth, Joan of Arc, or
+Mary Queen of Scots. Naturalists would declare them to be all women
+together; but then they were different women, and not much alike, we may
+suppose, in personal appearance.
+
+It is thus with the sea: we have now the respectable matron, and anon
+the queen of tragedy; we have the smooth face, the well-established
+conventionalities; the world’s customs in one place, in another we have
+anger and passion, and wild beauty and rugged grandeur; and, above all,
+thousands of miles of ocean, millions of tossing billows.
+
+She had never seen anything like it—never seen such a sea under such a
+sky before; never seen a vessel out before in rough weather; never
+thought to look upon such an expanse of angry waters as now met her
+view.
+
+She turned and looked towards Kincorth. There, secure on the hill-side,
+it stood in its tranquil beauty; she looked further north still, towards
+Duranmore Point, and saw it gloomy and impassable, stretching out into
+the sea. Far and far out she could tell where the sunken rocks lay—she
+knew by the sheets of white, foam that broke upon them; to her left, on
+the other side of Eversbeg Bay, she saw a low green hill—green even
+under that wintry sky, which looked calm and tranquil, though the wild
+waves were dashing round and about it. Up the bays the water rolled dark
+and sullen, but still calm by comparison with what they looked out to
+seaward.
+
+Among the billows a ship was labouring and striving, and when Mrs.
+Drewitt reluctantly pursued her onward way, she left it making with
+caution for Duranmore Bay, putting in there out of the way of the coming
+storm.
+
+“‘And so He bringeth them into the haven where they would be,’” murmured
+Mrs. Drewitt, as she neared her own destination.
+
+Did she ever forget her first view of the great Atlantic, do you
+imagine, my reader? Did the stormy ocean, those foaming billows, those
+restless waves ever fade out of her memory as the years went by?
+
+When she passed, in a far different place, to the haven which God had
+appointed for her, was not the roar of those mighty waters still in her
+ears? did she not feel like that reeling vessel, weary of the struggle
+with the winds and the waves? and was she not glad to turn into any
+harbour where she might be at rest?
+
+Thinking of the boundless Atlantic, she continued on her way, till she
+came to a tract of poor, barren land, on the very edge of Eversbeg Bay,
+which tract of land was Maxwell Drewitt’s sole inheritance.
+
+A child whom she met on the way gladly turned back and showed Mrs.
+Drewitt which was Headlands Cottage.
+
+Headlands Cottage! Headlands Hovel would have been nearer the mark, she
+thought, as she knocked with her knuckles at the door, which, for a
+wonder in that description of house, was shut.
+
+Maxwell Drewitt answered her summons in person, and requested her to
+enter his poor habitation with all the courtesy of a grand seigneur.
+
+The cabin—for it was nothing better than a cabin—contained but two
+rooms, in one of which Maxwell slept, whilst he lived, read, ate, wrote,
+and planned in the other.
+
+He had an old woman who came in and “did for him,” so he explained to
+his aunt, and who, being at that present moment in a kitchen which he
+had extemporized out of a cow-shed, would be happy to make Mrs. Drewitt
+a cup of tea if she wished for it.
+
+“But in any case,” finished Maxwell, “I will tell her to bring it in;”
+and he left the room to do so, while Mrs. Drewitt looked round at her
+leisure.
+
+There was a blazing turf fire on the hearth, and near the fire stood a
+common deal table covered with books, papers, and plans. The apartment
+boasted two chairs, and Mrs. Drewitt occupied one of them.
+
+The floor was of earth, swept clean; the walls were whitewashed; the
+roof was unceiled, and between the blackened rafters she could see the
+thatch. Besides the table and chairs, the room boasted no other
+furniture of any kind, sort, or description, except a writing-desk and a
+hair trunk. The walls were decorated with pistols, guns, riding-whips,
+and fishing-rods. It was in a place like this Maxwell Drewitt had
+elected to make his first start in life, and Mrs. Drewitt could not help
+admiring him for it.
+
+I wish I were able to sketch that room for you. I should like to show
+how the firelight fell on Maxwell’s dark face; how the shadows lay on
+the floor while the gloom of the winter evening gathered, deepened and
+deepened, out of doors.
+
+There was no false pride about Maxwell Drewitt. He had that virtue, at
+any rate. If the king had called, in passing, the young man would have
+felt no shame about receiving royalty in the only house he owned; and
+for this reason Mrs. Drewitt found that it was impossible for her to
+speak about the place in which she found him. She could as soon have
+remonstrated with an Indian on the inconvenience of living in a wigwam
+as she could have talked to her nephew concerning his abode.
+
+It was his, and he was a gentleman, and he had chosen it for himself.
+She had no more right to come there and pity him for his earthen floor
+and his scant furniture than royalty would have to find fault with the
+dinner-service at Kincorth.
+
+Headlands Cottage was Maxwell Drewitt’s castle, and being his castle,
+Mrs. Drewitt respected it.
+
+“She had come to speak to him about many things,” she said. “First of
+all, your uncle is much better—almost well again, thank God, and he is
+able and wishful to see you. I thought, perhaps, you would come back
+with me this evening,” she hesitated; “but in case you were unable to do
+so, I told one of the men to walk a little way on this side Duranmore to
+meet me.”
+
+“I have an appointment for this evening,” answered Maxwell, “but I will
+walk back with you as far as the lodge gates.”
+
+“And when will you come to Kincorth?” she asked.
+
+“To-morrow, if it be convenient to you,” he said.
+
+“As if any time were inconvenient!” she exclaimed; “as if I should not
+be only too glad to see you back there, for good and all, I mean.”
+
+“I have got so far on my road,” he replied, “I am not likely to try
+another now.”
+
+“But, Maxwell,” she inquired, “what are you going to do? Forgive me if I
+seem impertinent; but how are you going to live? Do you mean to stay
+here? What do you purpose doing for money?”
+
+“I purpose to work for it,” he answered, “and I mean to obtain it. I
+know you only ask what my plans are, out of kindness, and I, therefore,
+cannot consider any question impertinent. You must not, however, think
+me rude if I reply that men are not like women; they do not act from
+impulse; they do not commence to build without counting the cost; they
+do not start on a journey without knowing something of the land towards
+which they are travelling. To speak more plainly still, I did not leave
+Kincorth without sketching out a plan for my own future, and I mean to
+perfect that plan if I can. When I have perfected it, you shall see the
+result. Meantime, be satisfied,” he added, with a smile. “I have food, I
+have raiment. I have a roof to cover me, and I have a fire at which to
+warm myself withal. More than this,” he went on, “it is all mine own;
+that is, mine, so long as I pay my rent punctually. If you came round
+Eversbeg you must have passed some land which is mine without paying
+rent at all, and in another year I mean to have it in my own hands. This
+farm joins my land, so I have my territories close together, and there
+is a small house on my freehold which, when once Blake gives up
+possession, I mean to have put into thorough repair, and where I hope
+you will come and see my improvements.”
+
+“Then you never mean to return to Kincorth?” she said. “Never?”
+
+He looked at her, and then he looked into the fire, and then he flung on
+a few more peats before he answered—
+
+“I may, perhaps, but you ought not to wish me to do so.”
+
+“Why?” she asked; and as he only laughed in reply, she went on. “You
+always speak in riddles, Maxwell. What do you mean?”
+
+“You really wish to know?”
+
+“I do; of course I do.”
+
+“Then I will tell you before you go. Now, what else did you want to
+speak to me about?”
+
+“About your sisters—about twenty things. First about your sisters. They
+are a great care to me, Maxwell. I do not know what I ought to do. I do
+not know if I can do anything.”
+
+“What is the particular emergency?” inquired Maxwell.
+
+“Their position is not what it ought to be,” she explained, “and I
+cannot make it different. If Susan and Wilhelmina would do their parts,”
+she continued, “things might be better; but they seem to take a delight
+in thwarting all my plans. Wilhelmina rides from morning till night. She
+visits with people your uncle does not seem to know and that I have
+never seen. She will not read or practice, or improve herself in any
+way: and as for Susan—” but here Mrs. Drewitt paused.
+
+“Well, what about Susan?” he asked.
+
+“There is a Captain Ellenham who is always about the house,” said his
+aunt; “always with Susan,” and she stopped again.
+
+“He is possibly in love with her,” remarked Maxwell, with a smile,
+“though it does not say much for his taste.”
+
+“But if he were in love with her,” argued Mrs. Drewitt, “should he not
+want to see her uncle, to see me, to ascertain how her family were
+likely to receive him? There is a secrecy about it which puzzles me. I
+do not wish to speak to your uncle, but I thought that you—”
+
+“I do not wish to have anything to do with Susan’s affairs,” answered
+Maxwell, shortly; “I think my uncle is the proper person to interfere.”
+
+“And Wilhelmina?”
+
+“Wilhelmina will not hurt, unless she gets her neck broken some of these
+days.”
+
+“And Kathleen?”
+
+“What about Kathleen?” asked Maxwell, raising his head and looking at
+Mrs. Drewitt.
+
+“Nothing, only your uncle wants her to be sent to school: now, Maxwell,
+ought I to let her go? I can teach her all she needs to learn; I can see
+to her when she is ill; and she is such a comfort to me, I am so fond of
+her—so fond!”
+
+“But still, would it not be better for her to go to school?” asked
+Maxwell. “Would the companionship of girls of her own age not be
+desirable? would the early hours, the regularity, the whole discipline
+of a school not be good for her? If Susan and Willy had been sent away
+they might have been different to what they are. You will never have
+time to attend to Kathie. Altogether, if my uncle be willing to pay for
+her, it is best she should go.”
+
+“You think so?”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“But she is so delicate.”
+
+“She will be stronger out of Galway.”
+
+“And we are so fond of each other.”
+
+“That is quite another matter,” said Maxwell, and then, to his
+amazement, Mrs. Drewitt began to cry.
+
+His decision was different to what she had expected it would be, and she
+and Kathleen had agreed to abide by that decision.
+
+“I feel certain,” he said, “that you would rather do what is best for
+Kathleen’s future than what you and she would like in the present. I
+think it is a good thing for her to go to school, but of course that is
+a matter for you and my uncle to settle.”
+
+“It is for you to settle,” answered Mrs. Drewitt, “and she shall go to
+school. Now, about another thing, Maxwell. What kind of a woman is Lady
+Emmeline Vervensoe?”
+
+“You know almost as much of her as I do,” was his reply; “you saw her at
+the election. You may judge from that very much what she is.”
+
+“She has been often over to Kincorth lately,” said his aunt, “she seems
+to wish to be very intimate with me; she is very kind and very
+attentive, but your uncle does not like her much, and—”
+
+“It is not to be expected he would like her after the part she took
+against Mr. Sache,” laughed Maxwell. “So far as I know, Lady Emmeline
+has not any harm about her; she is much wiser, in my opinion, than Mrs.
+Munks, and she is a great deal prettier. I think you would get on very
+well together, and that you might find her a pleasant acquaintance. Does
+my uncle not wish you to visit her?”
+
+“He is very great friends with Colonel Vervensoe, you know,” answered
+Mrs. Drewitt; “but we cannot have him, at least I do not like having
+him, without his wife, and I thought I would ask you about Lady
+Emmeline.”
+
+“There is nothing against her, if that is what you mean,” Maxwell
+replied: “she is perfectly and unexceptionably proper, although she did
+wear a red scarf at the election and canvass her husband’s tenantry. But
+then, really they are as much her tenants as his. She has more money
+than he, and gives it to him freely enough, I believe. I have not seen
+her these two months.”
+
+“So she told me,” remarked Mrs. Drewitt; “she was asking me where you
+were and what you were doing.”
+
+“How very kind!” laughed Maxwell. “I should have thought so
+insignificant a person far beneath her ladyship’s notice,” and Maxwell
+laughed again.
+
+“I must go now,” said Mrs. Drewitt, rising to depart; “it is getting
+dusk, and Kathie will be uneasy. Now do not think of coming with me,
+Patrick is certain to be somewhere on the road; I left a message for
+him.”
+
+“You must not deny me the pleasure of being your escort for all that,”
+answered Maxwell, and the two left the heat of the blazing turf-fire and
+walked back together by the nearer road to Kincorth. As they walked they
+talked—about Ireland, about her scenery, about her people, about her
+wrongs, about her want of prosperity. Then Mrs. Drewitt told her nephew
+how fond she was getting of the country, and spoke enthusiastically of
+the view from Eversbeg Head; and pleased, almost in spite of himself, by
+her admiration for his native land, Maxwell began to wish they could be
+good friends—that no Kincorth stood between them.
+
+“Tell me,” she said, as they parted, “why you think I ought not to wish
+you back at Kincorth. I can imagine that you might be a great comfort to
+me and a great help to your uncle.”
+
+“If I tell you, I am afraid you will be angry,” he answered.
+
+“Angry! you are jesting. What is the reason?”
+
+For a moment Maxwell hesitated, then he said—
+
+“Do you remember my saying once that I did not dislike you for yourself,
+but only for being my uncle’s wife?”
+
+“Perfectly; but I hope you do not dislike me now for that.”
+
+“No, not for that,” was the slow reply; “not for that, exactly, but it
+is not in flesh and blood—at least it is not in my flesh and blood—to
+feel any great amount of attachment for a woman whose children will keep
+me out of Kincorth for ever.”
+
+She never answered him by a word. In the twilight he could see her turn
+first red and then white: he could see enough in her face to assure him
+his guess had been correct, and that there was an heir coming to inherit
+Kincorth, its woods, its lawns, its streamlets.
+
+Never hence by the strength of his own right hand, by the power of his
+own work, by the force of his own industry, might the lands of his
+ancestors return to him. The son of a younger son would possess
+Kincorth; while he, the son of the eldest son, was earning his bread in
+his barren farm by the desolate sea-shore.
+
+As for Mrs. Drewitt, she re-entered Kincorth a different woman to that
+she had left its gates. She understood her position now. She knew at
+last why Maxwell and his two elder sisters detested her.
+
+“Not for myself, but because of the sons I may have,” she thought; and
+it seemed to her that everything which was strong and evil in her weak
+and tender nature sprung to life and prompted her to do battle for the
+sake of her still unborn child.
+
+Had he measured her character accurately, would Maxwell have spoken to
+her as he did? I doubt it—doubt whether willingly he would have turned
+her friendship into enmity, and taught her to guard the inheritance of
+her children with a jealous watchfulness.
+
+It was not for herself—it was for no benefit she ever expected to have
+out of the property that Mrs. Drewitt vowed Maxwell Drewitt should never
+own Kincorth—never if she had a living son.
+
+Who can sow good grain as fast as the Evil One can plant tares? who can
+learn to cleave to the right, even in twenty times the space which it
+takes him to adopt the wrong? In the garden of Eden the serpent speedily
+beguiled Eve into eating of the tree; but through all the centuries that
+have passed, with their sorrow, away since then, the Maker of the
+universe has never been able to induce his children to cast that evil
+and cursed fruit from them.
+
+A moment for the one—thousands of years for the other. An instant sows
+the seed—the labour of a lifetime will not eradicate the noxious plant
+the seed produces. We are strong for evil; we are weak for good. We are
+frail; we are erring. God have mercy upon us! for even the best man and
+the best woman proves, when put to the test, to be but a miserable
+sinner.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X.
+                         Maxwell’s Engagements.
+
+
+After leaving Mrs. Drewitt at the entrance to Kincorth, Maxwell slowly
+retraced his steps to Duranmore, thinking, thinking as he walked. He had
+never done thinking about his plans, his projects, his schemes, his
+hopes.
+
+As a man strives to perfect an invention, as he meets every mechanical
+difficulty, as he seeks to understand what natural law is standing in
+the way of his success—so Maxwell Drewitt worked out the design of his
+own future painfully and laboriously.
+
+It is one thing to sketch out a picture, and another to fill it in; one
+thing to draw a house, and another to build it; one thing to say I will
+do this or that, and quite another to accomplish the project.
+
+It is easy to plan; it is hard to finish. We can dream dreams, sitting
+in the firelight or lying on the green hill’s side, but if we would make
+those dreams realities, we must work hard and think hard; we must think
+till our brains are weary, we must work through the years for success.
+
+The lives of all famous men repeat the same story, but the hearts of
+most young people reject it with impatient scorn.
+
+They want the harvest and the seed-time to come together. It seems to
+them awful not to be able to gather till the autumn, to have to toil
+before they eat. Seeing the height to which others have climbed, they
+refuse to believe that the ascent can be so difficult. The successes
+which genius and labour have found it the most difficult to compass look
+to the eyes of inexperience easy and commonplace.
+
+Can anything go more smoothly along the lines than engine and tender and
+carriages and trucks? Can anything be simpler, more natural, more
+prosaic than a railway train? and yet, oh! friends, how many a man’s
+thoughts are concentrated there! how many a man’s work has combined
+together to make up the sum total which you see!
+
+It is thus with everything in life, be it small or be it great—the
+result seems to bear no proportion to the labour expended to produce it.
+
+Time, thought, industry—we must give all these before, weary and worn,
+we can hope to reach the goal of such success as our souls desire. We
+must do what Maxwell Drewitt did—spare no pains, repine at no hardships,
+grumble at no obstacles on the road.
+
+And yet there was one thing he lacked if he desired to compass such
+success as might not only give him competence and station, but happiness
+and content.
+
+He was labouring for riches and position, but he forgot that, even in
+this world, riches and position, though much, are not everything. What
+are the daintiest viands, the choicest wines, to the man who can bring
+no appetite to table? What are lands and houses, what are fields and
+trees, if the eyes that look over them are dim with weeping, heavy with
+care?
+
+“Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.
+Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
+
+“It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread
+of carefulness.”
+
+I wonder how many young men believe these words to be true? I wonder how
+many, walking in the dim light through which all, rich or poor, must one
+day pass, would be able to say it was false?
+
+The words which we listen to with careless ears at one time of our
+lives, thinking they were addressed solely to men who spent their
+strength for nought and disquieted themselves in vain thousands of years
+since, we come finally to understand hold a meaning within them which is
+and will be eternally true this year and next, and through all the years
+that are to come—true for the man who is toiling for fame, for the
+merchant who is heaping up wealth, for the woman who is labouring to
+secure a good position, as it was for Maxwell Drewitt walking though the
+gathering darkness by the shore of Duranmore Bay.
+
+He was planning, plotting, scheming. He had youth, strength, hope,
+resolution. There was no reason why he should not have made a good thing
+of life, a good thing for himself and for others, save this—that in the
+city of his heart he would not suffer that sentinel of the
+Lord—conscience—to keep watch; that he was selfish, unprincipled,
+unfeeling; that he did not care whether the car of his progress crushed
+men and women under his wheels; that he was overconfident in himself;
+that he believed, if we exhaust the matter completely, man to be
+stronger than his Maker—the creature, than the Creator.
+
+I am not attempting to write a religious novel, I am not trying to
+interleave my book with sermons, but there is no author who can tell the
+story of a man’s life truly, and not speak of the mistakes he made, of
+the errors he committed.
+
+If it be but an extract out of the volume of existence that we profess
+to give—but the account of this one’s love-making, of the disappointment
+of his friend—if we stop short when we find the record becoming
+troublesome to ourselves, or likely to prove displeasing to our readers,
+we may dispense with much minutiæ which is indispensable when we are
+tracing a human being’s footsteps from the cradle to the grave.
+
+When we take a man’s life, and write his biography, indifferently it may
+be, but still as well as we are able, we must tell where he went wrong,
+and how that wrong brought forth bitter fruit in the future. We must
+tell not only of the crimes of which the law of the land takes
+cognizance, but also of those other transgressions which are not
+punished with fine or imprisonment, but by the heavy hand of the Lord
+God himself. It is useless to try to tell a story and be bound to steer
+clear of this matter of eternal truth, of eternal justice. I might as
+well lay down my pen at once were the subject beyond a novelist’s
+province; for the sum total of Maxwell Drewitt’s mistake in life was,
+that he thought the will of man paramount—that—as many a reader will
+scoff over the few last pages—he scoffed at the idea of retribution, of
+repentance.
+
+He built his house, but the Lord had no hand in it; he made his fortune,
+but the blessing of God was not upon it; he became a prosperous man, but
+the day came when he acknowledged with bitterness that prosperity is not
+always happiness.
+
+In the spring-time of youth he reared his life’s edifice on the sands;
+when the winter came—the winter with its storms, its rain, its snows,
+its frosts—he saw the work of years scattered to the four winds of
+heaven.
+
+It was just; but it was terrible. To me there is something too mournful
+for words to utter in the idea of that man walking on through the
+darkness—planning, plotting, scheming—for the end that I shall yet have
+to tell. Strong to work, willing to labour, independent enough to
+achieve, he had yet the seeds of ultimate failure in him—he was walking
+on blindly to meet his doom.
+
+As he walked along, with the wind raising the hair from his forehead, he
+was thinking—how Kincorth should yet be his—how the day would come when
+his homeward steps would lead him thither, and not away from its gates;
+and he was thinking of something else, too—of something he was going to
+meet that very night—of a girl he had tried to make love him, and not
+without success.
+
+He passed Ryan’s cottage slowly, passed it and stopped to listen; then
+he leaped over the ditch that divided the lawyer’s little meadow from
+the road, and made his way round to the place where his friend’s hay was
+stacked. A stream went brawling by to the sea, and beside the stream
+Jenny Bourke was waiting for him—poor little girl! poor foolish child!
+
+From the hour Ryan warned Maxwell Drewitt off this ground, Maxwell vowed
+to win her heart. He did not know then whether she were pretty or ugly,
+sweet or sour, able to take care of herself or guileless as an infant;
+but it was all one to Maxwell. He would pay Ryan out, let his sister be
+what she pleased. He knew he was handsome; he knew he was a favourite
+with women; he knew he could soon make the girl fond of him. When he saw
+her he discovered something more—that the girl made him care for her. He
+had not quite contemplated this possibility, and it complicated matters
+a little; but the fact was so, nevertheless.
+
+The only woman Maxwell Drewitt ever loved was Jenny Bourke; and the
+reason that he loved her was probably because she was so diametrically
+opposite to himself.
+
+When he lay a-dying he thought of her; and thought then, what I believe
+to be true, that a prettier creature than Jenny Bourke never walked on
+the face of God’s earth—pretty and soft and gentle; and faithful to him,
+at any rate. Oh! sweet Jenny Bourke! why did you ever go out to meet
+such a man? why did you disobey your brother’s commands? why did you lay
+your lovely face on his breast, and say that it was long since you had
+seen him—long that he had kept away?
+
+Fair, sweet Jenny! there was never a rose in the kingdom lovelier, never
+a lily purer, when Maxwell Drewitt first cast his dark eyes upon you.
+Let me try to sketch the face he saw—the saucy piquante face that, in
+the time of his tribulation, in the time of his wealth, in the hour of
+death, was still framed in his memory.
+
+Would she appear before him in the day of judgment, I wonder? Maxwell
+Drewitt said not. He said, as solemnly as he said he believed he was
+dying, that Jenny Bourke would be true to him in the next world as she
+had been in this, and that she would never turn informer.
+
+Dark-brown hair; clear white and red complexion; large eyes, that now
+seemed brown, now grey, now black—eyes that varied with the light, with
+her thoughts, with her feelings, with her words; lips that were as red
+as cherries; teeth white and even, but not too small; a somewhat short
+nose;—these were the features; but then it was not her features, it was
+the expression of her face; so joyous, so innocent, so pure!
+
+I do not know how a man could ever make such a woman cry and forget
+seeing her tears. I cannot imagine how Maxwell Drewitt, fair and false,
+and hypocritical and remorseless though he was, could ever take such a
+girl to his heart and teach her to nestle there, knowing all the time he
+never intended to marry her; that the hour must come when he would have
+to cast her out from her abiding-place.
+
+“I thought you never were coming,” she said, with her sweet Irish voice,
+soft and low and plaintive as music over the waters—as the low wind
+sighing among the trees. “I thought you had forgotten me—that I never
+was to see you again—that—”
+
+He stopped her words with kisses; but she laughingly released herself,
+and went on.
+
+“That you were caring more for the grand ladies you are so intimate with
+than for me.”
+
+“As if any one of them could compare with you,” he answered; “as if
+there were any creature on earth equal to you. How many hundred times am
+I to tell you that I love you, and you only; that you are dearer to me
+than life or station or anything else in the world? But you say these
+things to try my temper,” he added; “you say them to make me contradict
+you—to make me punish you,” and he kissed brow and cheeks and lips till
+Jenny’s face was as red as a rose; till she was glad that the darkness
+hid her blushes from his admiring gaze.
+
+“I cannot come out to meet you again,” she said at length, timidly and
+hesitatingly.
+
+“Nonsense, Jenny; there is no such word as cannot in the whole of love’s
+dictionary.”
+
+“Well, will not then, if you like that better,” she answered, more
+firmly. “Indeed, indeed,” went on the girl, “I cannot deceive Timothy
+any longer; I am getting that I am afraid to look him straight in the
+face; that I dread every sentence he speaks; that I am frightened of
+every question he puts. Let us part,” and as she made this terrible
+suggestion Jenny began to sob. “Let us part if you cannot have me tell
+Timothy; if you will not speak to him yourself.”
+
+“The first day I ever saw you, Jenny, what did your brother say to you
+after I left the house?” But Jenny remained mute.
+
+“Did he not tell you, to keep out of my way; to give me no
+encouragement; to show me no favour? Did not he tell you that, although
+I might be a fit acquaintance for him, I was none for you? that I was a
+bad man; a bad nephew; a bad brother; a bad friend? Did he not give me
+the worst character you ever heard given to an unfortunate fellow out of
+favour with fortune? Did not he do all this? I know he did, Jenny; I
+know it as well as if I had been sitting in the parlour listening to
+him.”
+
+“Maybe you were near it,” suggested Jenny.
+
+“No, I was not; but he spoke those words, or something very like those
+words, to me before you ever came to Duranmore. He said, ‘I had rather
+put the child in her grave than give her to you.’ That was his summing
+up. I hear it tingling in my ears yet.”
+
+“I wonder you ever looked near me after that!” remarked Jenny.
+
+“Ah, Jenny!” said Maxwell Drewitt, “who could ever see you and not look
+after you?” and the young man stole his arm round her waist, and drew
+her nearer to him—nearer still.
+
+“But if he knew the way things were now, don’t you think he might change
+his mind?” she coaxed. “If he thought that you—that I—”
+
+“If he thought you loved me, is that it, Jenny?” he finished. “No, that
+would make no difference; it would only make him bitterer. I am a poor
+man you see, dear; and a poor man is always a bad man: you must take
+patience and wait a while. When I am able to drive here in my carriage
+and ask him to give me his sister, he will then perhaps beg me to step
+inside; but till then I must see you as I have seen you, on the quiet.”
+
+“I cannot go on with it,” she said. “It is not right; and I have heard
+that good can never come out of evil.”
+
+“If it be wrong,” he answered, “let the punishment fall on me.”
+
+“But oh!” said the girl, “we must each bear the burden of our own
+faults.”
+
+“When we come to faults, it will be time enough to discuss that
+question,” he impatiently retorted.
+
+“It is wrong, though,” she persisted.
+
+“If you think it wrong then you do not love me,” he said. “You are not
+willing to suffer anything for my sake; you are ready to desert me
+because I am poor and in difficulties. Had I been still at Kincorth I
+should not have been forced to beg so hard for so small a favour; but
+let us part, Miss Bourke, as you wish all to be at an end between us. I
+cannot force you against your will. Give me one kiss, Jenny, and bid me
+good-bye. I am used to being scurvily treated. I will go back to my
+wretched home, and forswear love for ever. One more—forgive me, it is
+the last time. Now, good-bye. Let me go.”
+
+But Jenny would not let him go; she hung about him, she sobbed, she
+asked forgiveness, she told him how she should die if he left her in
+anger, left her in grief.
+
+He knew her every mood, her every thought almost, and he could manage
+her as easily as he might a child. She had her little qualms of
+conscience every now and then about her brother; she had her little fits
+of strength when she made all kinds of resolutions and declared her
+intention of keeping to them; she had her instincts too, which perhaps
+warned her that in concealment there is mostly danger—that though stolen
+waters may be sweet they are generally unwholesome; she had her hours of
+sadness, her times of bitter self-reproach;—but Maxwell had long known
+how to deal with her in every mood: he was her master and she his slave;
+and the end of all such conversations invariably was that Jenny promised
+to be guided by her lover’s advice; to do what he told her; to meet him
+when he asked her; to keep the fact of their engagement secret.
+
+He called it an engagement, but whether he wilfully deceived her or
+resolutely blinded himself it would be hard to say: Jenny Bourke
+implicitly believed that he would marry her whenever he had enough money
+to do so, and her only trouble was lest her brother should withhold his
+consent.
+
+As for Maxwell’s intentions! He was very fond of Jenny, and that is all
+he ever told even to himself.
+
+He was very fond of the girl: all the worse for her. That love was the
+whole of her life: it was then but a part, a small part, of his. He had
+other aims, other objects, other wishes. He had plans into which she
+never entered, projects of which she formed no part: there were whole
+days when he never thought of her, or at least never thought save
+casually. There was not an hour, there was not a minute, when Jenny did
+not think of him.
+
+When they parted after a few such stolen minutes as those I have spoken
+of, he could put her out of his memory, he could thrust her out of his
+head, he could forget the sweet face, the pleading voice, the twining
+arms, the clinging manner, and turn him to his plots and his schemes
+again; nay, he could do more—he could part with the sister and go to
+meet the brother; he could make an appointment with Ryan likely to keep
+him out of the way while he talked to Jenny, and then he would tell some
+lie to account for being late, and be as mild and gentle as a south wind
+during their interview.
+
+There are not many men in the world, more particularly not many of
+Maxwell’s age, with consciences so elastic as to permit such stretches
+as these. It is not usual even for Christians to seethe the kid in its
+mother’s milk, and I fancy there are few who would like to think that
+they had offered a man hospitality to the end that they might
+clandestinely make love to his sister. Human nature, though not at all
+times over-nice or over-particular, will turn squeamish occasionally
+about trifles; and if Maxwell Drewitt had been at all like other people
+it must have cut him a little to think, after he left Jenny, that her
+brother was waiting for him at Headlands Cottage, wondering where the
+deuce Maxwell could have got to.
+
+“Had to see madam home,” was that young gentleman’s explanation. “I
+think I must be a devilishly nice sort of fellow when ladies take to
+visiting me in an elegant mansion like this,” and Maxwell threw himself
+into one of the two chairs his ménage boasted, and after expressing a
+hope that Ryan had seen to the kettle, began to rattle on about Mrs.
+Drewitt’s visit, about her pressing invitation to Kincorth.
+
+“I suppose you will soon go back to the old place now, then,” suggested
+Mr. Timothy Ryan; “you must be pretty well tired of this,” and the
+lawyer glanced contemptuously round the cabin.
+
+“I would thank you not to sneer at my house,” answered Maxwell; “I hope
+to have a better some day, but it is the best I have at present.”
+
+“Just so,” argued Ryan; “and as I was saying, you must be pretty well
+tired of it.”
+
+“You should think! well, you are not me, that is the whole thing.”
+
+“But are you not tired?” asked Ryan.
+
+“No; I have not even thought of being tired yet. Time enough for that
+when I see a better place to go to; time enough for that when I have
+made my fortune!”
+
+“And how the devil,” asked Mr. Timothy Ryan, “do you propose making your
+fortune here?”
+
+“I mean to set up a private still,” answered Maxwell; “I mean to turn
+alchemist; I intend to discover the philosopher’s stone.”
+
+“You have your work cut out then,” was the reply.
+
+“I mean to make the howling wilderness a smiling plain,” went on
+Maxwell, unheeding the interruption; “I mean to see corn growing where
+corn has never grown before; I mean to live in advance of my age and to
+make money in Connemara.”
+
+“You won’t make much,” said Ryan, by way of encouragement.
+
+“That depends,” answered Maxwell: “meanwhile, the certainty before us is
+punch. Let us drink that and be happy,” and he pushed the whiskey-bottle
+over to Ryan, with the remark that the contents had never paid the King
+a halfpenny.
+
+“It is all the better for that,” remarked Ryan; “but, not to seem
+personal, here’s ‘Long life to him.’”
+
+“Amen,” said Maxwell Drewitt, and the two men took a pull at the punch
+together.
+
+“And here’s to ‘Ireland: long life to her,’” observed the lawyer.
+
+“Amen,” repeated Maxwell, and the pair emptied their glasses.
+
+“Don’t spare the potheen,” urged Maxwell; “don’t make the creature so
+weak that it won’t be able to get into your mouth. Remember the good old
+Irish receipt for making punch: first the sugar, then the whiskey, and
+then every drop of water after that spoils it.”
+
+“So it may, but I have to get home to-night,” remarked Ryan.
+
+“The more reason you should recruit your strength for the walk,”
+observed Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“So you won’t go back to Kincorth,” said Ryan, after a pause devoted to
+whiskey and water.
+
+“No; I am better off here. I have food and shelter in this cabin—as I
+suppose you would call it. At Kincorth, excepting a horse, I had nothing
+but the run of my teeth. I had no chance of making money; I had no
+feeling of independence. In Headlands Cottage, on the contrary, ‘I am
+monarch of all I survey, and my right there is none to dispute.’ I have
+land; I have a house; I have bog beyond Eversbeg, I have sea-wreck on
+the shore. I have a future; I have hope; I see my way. I mean yet to be
+a rich man. When you, Mr. Timothy Ryan, my worthy creditor, are blacking
+your fingers over deeds of settlement and iniquitous wills, I, at
+present your humble debtor, will be a great man; able to make your heart
+glad by appointing you agent to my estates. Mix again, man. We shall
+have many a talk in years to come about this old cottage, about these
+winter nights.”
+
+And Maxwell laughed, and the turf-fire—the bright upheaped turf-fire
+shone on his dark face; and Mr. Ryan, looking around the room, wondered
+what made the young man so merry; what he could see in his prospects or
+his surroundings to inspire him with such hopes.
+
+“I confess,” he said, at length, “that I do not see how you are to do
+it.”
+
+“My friend,” answered Mr. Maxwell Drewitt, “do you know anything of the
+science of agriculture?”
+
+“No further than that it reluctantly pays rent,” was the reply.
+
+“Do you know anything of the rotation of crops?”
+
+“I have not the faintest idea what you are talking about,” answered the
+lawyer.
+
+“Do you know anything of the nature of soils?” persisted his host.
+
+“No more than I know of Arabic,” was the reply.
+
+“Have you ever thought much about manures?”
+
+“Damn it, I am not a farmer.”
+
+“Well, I am; and I have thought about manures; I have studied the nature
+of soils; I can tell you all about the rotation of crops; and I mean to
+make money. I mean to turn up these grass lands, that grow nothing but
+moss and rushes. I mean to manure them; I mean to crop them. Harder than
+ever you read to be a lawyer, I have been reading to be a farmer. Pryor
+has been very good; he has sent me over books about soils. Turner is a
+trump; he has introduced me to an eminent English agriculturist with
+whom I correspond. I have ploughed and sowed half my farm already; I
+shall get the remainder ploughed, so that the frost, if any frost come,
+may eat into the ground. I have collected sea-weed. I intend to keep
+stock after this year. The great mistake in Ireland is the neglect of
+stall-feeding. I mean to try it. If you exhaust the secret of England’s
+prosperity, it is beer, beef, and manure; and I think I ought, as a
+simple matter of justice, to have put manure first. Let us see what
+sea-weed and stall-feeding will do in Connemara—what perseverance and
+resolution can effect anywhere.”
+
+“I hope I shall not see you ruined,” was the reply.
+
+“A beggar cannot be ruined,” said Maxwell, calmly; and the conversation
+reverted to general subjects, till Mr. Ryan rose to take his leave, when
+Maxwell lighted him to the door and out into the night with a dip
+candle.
+
+“Wishing it was wax for your sake,” he said, with a laugh; and then he
+went back to his sitting-room, and remained there reading and writing
+and thinking for a couple of hours.
+
+Next day he paid his promised visit to Kincorth.
+
+“You will stay for dinner?” said Mrs. Drewitt, whose manner was, as
+Maxwell noticed, colder than usual.
+
+“Do, Maxwell,” urged Kathleen.
+
+“Of course he will,” chimed in Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“Thank you,” said Maxwell, “but I am engaged—that is, I have an
+engagement.”
+
+“You have always engagements now,” pouted his sister.
+
+“Shows what a great man I am,” answered her brother, as he left to keep
+another appointment with Jenny Bourke—pretty, trustful, foolish Jenny!
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI.
+                                Warned.
+
+
+In the days of which I am writing there were two kinds of lawyer extant
+in Ireland—the wholly disreputable and the eminently respectable.
+
+Among the disreputable every kind and description of man might be found,
+providing he was decidedly clever and not over-scrupulous; the
+respectable, on the contrary, were mostly of one pattern, men of
+standing, having characters to lose, who were socially quite on an
+equality with their clients, and who were as far above the stock
+attorney of Irish novelists as an honest merchant is above a swindling
+adventurer.
+
+The worst of the respectable lawyers was that they were a little slow;
+the best of the disreputable lot was that they were decidedly sharp and
+shrewd.
+
+Drawn as a rule from the lower middle class, the latter had all the
+quickness of the lower orders of Irish society, all their acuteness of
+perception, all their rapidity of jumping to conclusions. In guerilla
+warfare the regular army had no chance with them; they were down on a
+point of law like a terrier on a rat; they had every Act of Parliament
+at their fingers’ ends; they were perfect scourges in court; they were
+the terror of witnesses, the detestation of magistrates. If there were a
+flaw in your title, woe betide you if one of them got scent of it. They
+were clever, well up in law, impertinent, impudent, vulgar; they were
+always talking about the people’s rights; always for the man who had
+shot his landlord or his landlord’s bailiff from behind a hedge; always
+against the Crown; always in favour of the Roman Catholics and against
+the Protestants.
+
+Unless a landlord had very dirty work indeed on hand he seldom left his
+family solicitor to seek advice from one of these gentlemen; and it was
+rarely indeed that any of them so far deserted his original flag as to
+serve under the enemy. In politics they were Liberals; in religion much
+the same. As a rule, they had been articled without the regular fee, and
+came into the profession by the back stairs. They were the hope of the
+vagabond population; they were the deliverers of many a man from the
+grievous terrors of the law; they fought so long as there was a rag of a
+chance left to them. If ever they got very rich they settled into men
+who upheld the constitution and the government; but so long as they
+remained poor—and that was generally for ever, because they spent as
+recklessly as they earned easily—they were for the people: for the women
+who went about barefooted; for the men who lounged through life with
+their coat-tails trailing the ground, with their battered hats worn on
+one side, with their hands in their pockets, and short pipes in their
+mouths.
+
+Of this class Timothy Ryan was a favourable specimen. He might not have
+much principle, but he had a heart. He was known to forgive men their
+costs, though he was also known to have done many a thing which his best
+friends could scarcely consider honest. He was not a hard agent, though
+he was certainly not an honest man. His conscience had never stood in
+his way, but his feelings had. He was immensely popular with the lower
+orders, but he had not the entrée into any of the gentlemen’s houses in
+the neighbourhood, except into that of Waller of Eversbeg, whose agent
+he was, and to whose table he was often invited.
+
+For the rest, he had little society save Mr. Murphy, Dr. Sheen’s
+assistant; the parish priest, and a retired sea captain who lived on the
+Duranmore side of Eversbeg Head. With Maxwell Drewitt, whom he had known
+for years, his intimacy was entirely of a business character, and yet
+Ryan was proud of the acquaintanceship, such as it was. He felt it gave
+him a certain standing knowing a Drewitt of Kincorth, even although that
+Drewitt had not the remotest chance of ever owning Kincorth. He knew he
+owed Waller’s agency—a tremendous lift for him—to Maxwell having brought
+the owner of Eversbeg into Inchnagawn Cottage to shelter during a storm;
+he was well aware young Drewitt could benefit him still more if he
+chose; for all of which reasons, Ryan cultivated Maxwell; whilst, for
+various sufficient reasons of his own, Maxwell cultivated Ryan.
+
+Jenny Bourke was Ryan’s half-sister. They were children of the same
+mother; Mrs. Ryan having changed her name for that of Bourke within two
+years of her first husband’s death.
+
+Of the Ryans’ union there had been many sons: one, Timothy, the eldest,
+settled at Duranmore as a lawyer; another ran away to sea; a third
+enlisted; a fourth emigrated; and so at last poor Mrs. Bourke departed
+this life in despair of ever seeing them reunited, and left her only
+daughter to the care of her sister and to the guardianship of Timothy.
+
+As for Mr. Bourke, he had long before deserted his wife and married a
+younger and more attractive-looking woman in England; indeed, rumour
+said that Mrs. Ryan was by no means his first essay in matrimony. He had
+a way of winning widows and securing their little fortunes, and then
+disappearing like a flash of lightning.
+
+Some people declared Bourke was not his name at all; but be this as it
+may, Jenny had never been called by any other, and she never hoped to be
+called by any other, unless indeed it might some day happen that Maxwell
+were able to make her his wife.
+
+Mr. Murphy had something more than a liking for the girl, but Jenny
+turned her coldest shoulder on the assistant when he called.
+
+“It’s that blackguard Maxwell at his tricks again,” thought Mr. Murphy;
+“I am sure he sees her somehow:” but Mr. Murphy was a wise man and kept
+his own counsel. He did not frighten Jenny by spreading a net in her
+sight, but he drew back and watched who threw the crumbs, he felt
+confident, the girl came down to pick up.
+
+“I’ve my eye on you, my boy,” he would remark to himself when he met
+young Mr. Drewitt and exchanged bows with him; “I have my eye on you.
+Give you rope enough and you will run it into a noose for yourself, or I
+am greatly mistaken. Good-morning, sir; fine weather this for the
+country.” And he would ride off on his rough pony, while Maxwell trudged
+over the Connemara roads on foot.
+
+His uncle had offered him leave to take a couple of horses out of the
+stable at Kincorth, but Maxwell declined the gift.
+
+“Not one of them shall give me a lift up,” he said to Ryan, and Ryan
+applauded his spirit even while he wondered at it.
+
+“Where the deuce does he get the money from?” considered the lawyer:
+“where can he get it? for a man is not able to live for nothing, even in
+a cabin; and he pays wages, and buys implements, and hires horses, and
+draws sea-weed. I should like to know who is backing him. Can it be
+Turner? It is not impossible.”
+
+And Maxwell took every pains to foster this idea, and to make Mr. Ryan
+think not only that Turner was backing him, but also that Mr. Waller and
+Mr. Pryor were willing to help him in his endeavours.
+
+In reality, however, he did not for many a long day receive the
+slightest assistance from any of his male acquaintances, whether Irish
+or English.
+
+It was Lady Emmeline Vervensoe who helped him into the saddle; it was
+Lady Emmeline who, when she heard he had left Kincorth with the
+intention of trying to push his way on in the world, gave him a
+considerable sum of money, saying significantly as she pressed it into
+his hand: “Secret service money for the election; you need not give me
+any account of it, Mr. Drewitt.” And Mr. Drewitt did not give her any
+account, and when he found that his farming operations required more
+capital he asked her ladyship to make him a further advance.
+
+He and Colonel Vervensoe had never healed up their old wound. So they
+passed each other when they met without speaking, and Maxwell was never
+by any chance now asked up to Cragantlet, even in the hunting season.
+
+But yet the servants at Cragantlet knew that Mr. Drewitt of “The
+Headlands,” as he was beginning to call his new property, occasionally
+rode up to the house when Colonel Vervensoe was from home; and a man who
+was in the habit of attending Lady Emmeline when she drove in her
+phaeton, or rode out on horse-back, could have told tales of many a
+meeting, not accidental, between the pair.
+
+There was nothing wrong in the affair; there was no breaking of the
+seventh commandment, nor idea of breaking it; but still Lady Emmeline
+liked Maxwell so much, and Maxwell found her ladyship so extremely
+useful, that neither thought of discontinuing the acquaintance
+altogether.
+
+To be strictly truthful, however, the young man had thought at one time
+of persuading her ladyship to go off with him—not because being his
+neighbour’s wife made her seem any nicer in his eyes, but simply because
+her husband had insulted him, and she had a large fortune.
+
+I am afraid, seeing Lady Emmeline was not over-prudent, had Maxwell been
+sure the game was worth the candle, that he would not have proved
+over-scrupulous in the matter; but as it was, Maxwell had a long head,
+and a clear head, and he reflected that, if he ran away with Colonel
+Vervensoe’s wife, that gallant officer would either shoot him or ruin
+him.
+
+Her ladyship, at a certain price, might not be dear; but her ladyship,
+with a bullet in some part of his body, or with heavy damages from the
+Ecclesiastical Courts, was quite another matter.
+
+Mr. Maxwell Drewitt thought that game not worth the candle, and so
+abandoned it, and accordingly Lady Emmeline Vervensoe’s character was as
+safe in his keeping as though she had been as ugly as one of the witches
+in Macbeth or as repulsive as Sycorax.
+
+Nevertheless, it was her money that ploughed his fields, paid his
+labourers, bought his seed; and, to do Maxwell Drewitt justice, no money
+was ever more judiciously laid out.
+
+He was prudent, he was economical, he did not encroach on her kindness;
+he knew when to hold back his hand and say “enough.”
+
+He required money and she lent it to him—gave it to him, she said but
+Maxwell preferred the other way of putting it. Once he had got the
+start, however, he worked manfully to keep it: he wanted to show Lady
+Emmeline, and to convince himself, out of what small beginnings even an
+Irishman may make a fortune; and so he laboured on, bringing first one
+piece of land and then another under cultivation, till people finally
+began to talk of Maxwell Drewitt as a wonder, and to marvel how he did
+it; while pretty Jenny Bourke thought within herself, “He will soon be
+rich enough to ask Timothy for me now;” but she never ventured to say
+this to him again, although she still stole out to meet him, either by
+the stream, or on the shore, or up in the mountain gorge that lay at the
+back of Inchnagawn Cottage.
+
+“That is a mighty nice walk on a summer’s evening,” remarked Mr. Murphy,
+pointing up this gorge, as he and Mr. Ryan stood looking inland one fine
+morning in June.
+
+“Is it?” said the attorney, carelessly.
+
+“I like to listen to your innocent talk,” replied Mr. Murphy. “‘Is it?’
+he says, just as simple as a lamb.”
+
+“Well, is it?” repeated Mr. Ryan. “How should I know anything about the
+place; I never was up the stream in my life!”
+
+“Never were out with any young woman either, I suppose?”
+
+“I have not been this many a year, at any rate,” returned the other.
+“The only girl I ever was to say sweet on was not sweet on me; and
+somehow I never fancied another since.”
+
+“Well, it is mighty queer,” remarked Mr. Murphy.
+
+“What is queer?” asked his friend.
+
+“Why, the lies men will tell when women and money are concerned. It was
+no later ago than last night that I followed a pair of lovers from the
+top of the gorge down to that big rock; you see it there, don’t you?”
+
+“Yes. You followed them; what then?”
+
+“Why then, Mr. Timothy Ryan, as I did not want to be seen, I stopped
+behind that lump of granite and watched; and I saw them in the darkness
+come down, down, down. The young woman wore a light dress; and I am
+positive that dress, at any rate, went round your haystacks and in by
+the back gate.”
+
+“You did not think it was me, Murphy?” said Ryan; but his voice sounded
+hoarse as he asked the question.
+
+“You in the light dress? in course not; but if the man wasn’t you, who
+was he?”
+
+“You are sure you had not been drinking?”
+
+“I’ll swear it for you, if you like.”
+
+“And you are certain you were not mistaken?”
+
+“Sure and certain.”
+
+“The man was not as tall as I am?”
+
+“He might not have been.”
+
+“Was he anything like Maxwell Drewitt?” inquired Ryan.
+
+“They could have passed for twins,” replied Mr. Murphy.
+
+“That’s enough, Murphy, thank you,” said Ryan, and he drew a long, deep
+breath. “It’s warm to-day,” he observed, lifting his hat off his head,
+and letting the light wind fan his temples. “I must be getting towards
+Duranmore now,” he added abruptly; “are you going to walk that way?”
+
+“I can walk any way,” was the reply. “Trade is mighty dull just now.
+There has not been a child born this week, I think; and only one
+accident, and he was carried home dead as a doornail. It’s a cursed
+place at the best of times,” proceeded Mr. Murphy; “but the like of it
+this June nobody would credit. I have made up all our calomel into pills
+and powders, just for want of something to do; and I have been trying
+how much nux vomica I could take without bringing on tetanus, for the
+sake of whiling away the time. I don’t think there is another such hole
+in the entire of Great Britain or Ireland. Whenever my mother dies, and
+she can’t last long, poor old girl, I shall cut Ireland altogether, and
+make for London. That’s the place, my boy—that’s the chance for men like
+me.”
+
+And Mr. Murphy rattled on after this fashion all the way to Duranmore,
+leaving it quite optional with his companion whether he answered him or
+not.
+
+Ryan elected not to answer him, and not to speak till they were shaking
+hands at the door of his office in the High Street; then he said—
+
+“They did not see you, did they?”
+
+“Does a corpse see the sexton when he is shovelling the mould in on the
+top of him, do you think?” asked Mr. Murphy.
+
+And with that they parted.
+
+For many a night afterwards Mr. Ryan kept watch; many a time he
+pretended to go away from home, and kept guard in the gorge, in the
+twilight, in the starlight, in the moonlight—all in vain.
+
+He would not speak to his sister nor to Maxwell. He bided his time, and
+he waited without result until one evening when he was returning, a day
+sooner than he had expected to be back, from an outlying portion of Mr.
+Waller’s property, among the wildest part of the Joyce country.
+
+There he had bought a new horse, a young, handsome creature, bay with
+black legs, leaving in exchange his old white mare and a not
+unreasonable number of pound-notes.
+
+He was proud of his new purchase: it had a long easy trot, and had
+brought him by bridlepaths up hilly roads, through lonely valleys,
+thirty Irish miles without turning a hair; and he was so careful of this
+good steed that he stopped at the top of the hill above Eversbeg in
+order to lead him down the steep descent.
+
+With his arm passed through the bridle and his hand on the horse’s
+glossy neck, Mr. Ryan paused at a turn of the road, and looked at the
+view spread out before him.
+
+Nestling at the foot of the hill, huddled up among its woods, stood
+Eversbeg, and nearer to him still were the ruins of Eversbeg Abbey. He
+could see the pointed windows half concealed by ivy; he could see the
+grave-stones and the crosses and the monuments; he could see away over
+Eversbeg Bay, out to the great Atlantic; and he could discern, like a
+speck in the distance, Maxwell Drewitt’s cottage lying away near
+Eversbeg Head.
+
+There was a great hush and calm over everything—over the sea and the
+land, the mountains and the valleys—and Ryan could not help feeling
+subdued by that virtue of stillness, by that calm which seems oftentimes
+to follow the sun’s setting, as though nature were lying quiet ere
+falling to sleep for the night.
+
+After this pause he went on, descending the hill by a winding road,
+which soon shut out from his view Eversbeg and the Abbey and the
+Atlantic, but brought him at a sharp turn within sight of Kincorth and
+Duranmore and Duranmore Bay, which was more like a lake than like an arm
+of the sea, and his own white cottage close to the shore, where Jenny
+would not be expecting his return.
+
+As he thought of this, Ryan pulled up short. He had twisted his hand in
+his horse’s mane, he had lifted his left foot half way up to the
+stirrup, but on the instant he unwound his fingers from among the coarse
+black hair, and stood beside his steed, while the animal lifted up its
+head and looked out over the bay, too, as though he had been a
+Christian.
+
+While he stood irresolute, Ryan saw a man leave the shore road, and,
+after looking round, follow the course of the stream I have spoken of as
+flowing at the back of Inchnagawn Cottage.
+
+It was Maxwell Drewitt. Though it was getting dusk, though there was a
+considerable distance between them, still Mr. Ryan recognized the man he
+had been waiting for.
+
+When there are not a dozen gentlemen within a circuit of twenty miles it
+is not easy to mistake the identity of any of them, and Ryan felt that
+he was not deceived—Maxwell Drewitt was going up the stream to meet
+Jenny, and he might catch them yet; and he would catch them, “he would,
+by——.”
+
+He flung the reins to a lad who stood at a cabin-door by the wayside,
+and bidding him take care of the horse, Ryan left the main road and
+dashed down what remained of the hill, across bog and river, among
+brambles and heather, home. He had his riding-whip in his hand, and
+involuntarily he shortened his hold of it as he drew nearer—nearer
+still.
+
+Every now and then he stopped, for there was a noise in his ears like
+the raging of distant waters. It was his passion—it was the tumult in
+his breast which sounded to him as the roar of the sea.
+
+He came on—on; he gained the high road; he stole round by the back of
+his own house; and there, by the stream, were the pair still talking.
+
+“Timothy!” shrieked Jenny—and she had reason: in a moment he held
+Maxwell by the collar, and showered down blows upon him.
+
+“Villain! scoundrel! coward!” he said, and he literally ground his teeth
+with rage.
+
+“Hands off, fool!” shouted Maxwell, and he clasped his own round Ryan’s
+throat.
+
+There was an awful struggle for a moment, but then Maxwell tripped his
+opponent up, and putting his knee on his chest, tore the whip out of his
+grasp, and sent it flying among the weeds and rashes that grew on the
+other side the stream.
+
+“Who is villain, scoundrel, coward now?” he asked, with a sneer; with
+his face black with rage, with the veins in his forehead swelled, with
+the devil that was in him looking out of his eyes. “Who is a spy and a
+listener? I won’t thrash you, because you are her brother; I won’t shoot
+you, because you are not worth the trouble; but I’ll leave you to think
+what you have made by this move;” and Maxwell released his adversary,
+picked up his hat, which had fallen to the ground, and saying to Miss
+Bourke, “I will see you another time, Jenny,” was about to walk off,
+when Ryan called out, “Stop!”
+
+“You shall never see her to speak to again. Only let me catch you near
+the house—only let me hear of Jenny ever looking to the side of the
+street where you walk, and I will shoot you like a dog.”
+
+“Have you finished?” asked Maxwell; “because in that case I may wish you
+good-morning.” And he lifted his hat to Jenny, whose face was as white
+as the cottage walls, and was gone.
+
+Within a week Ryan took a house in Duranmore next door to his office,
+and moved his furniture and himself and his sister away from the pretty
+cottage by the shore.
+
+But the waves came rolling up the bay for all that: though there was no
+human ear to listen to their music, they still rippled over the stones
+and sand—the shutters of the cottage-windows were closed and fastened,
+but the fuchsias bloomed the same as ever—no Jenny now stood by the
+stream, singing her love songs, dreaming her love fantasies, but the
+stream went dancing over the stones to the sea none the less
+joyously—there were none to look up at the everlasting hills, but the
+summer’s sun shone on them, and the winter’s snows lay on them, as the
+sun had shone and the snow had lain since the beginning of time.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII.
+                             Son and Heir.
+
+
+Meanwhile there had been changes at Kincorth, such changes as the birth
+of a son and the management of a careful and educated woman were likely
+to produce; but the greatest change of all had perhaps been that wrought
+in Mrs. Drewitt herself, who, looking back twelve months, could not help
+marvelling if the Agnes Drewitt who sat nursing her child in her bedroom
+at Kincorth were the same with the new-made wife who had wept bitter
+tears in that self-same chamber, who had grieved over Maxwell, who had
+wanted to keep him in the house at any sacrifice, at any cost.
+
+Since those early days, Mrs. Drewitt had grown very jealous for her
+son’s inheritance, very watchful over the interests of her baby. Maxwell
+had opened her eyes and taught her to discern between good and evil; and
+with all a woman’s quickness of perception she had seen that there would
+be war between her children and the children of the elder brother; that
+Maxwell wanted the estate, and was resolved some day to have it.
+
+“But he shan’t, darling, shall he?” and Mrs. Drewitt kissed every one of
+her son’s toes in succession as though he had been a pope.
+
+There is no accounting for tastes, or otherwise one might wonder at the
+fancy mothers have for this form of refreshment. Pink and plump and
+pretty the creature’s toes looked peeping from under the long white
+robe, but there was no earthly reason why she should have kissed them
+for all that.
+
+She did perform the ceremony, nevertheless, rapturously, and then she
+lifted her eyes and looked out over the waving woods and the sunny
+fields that went sloping towards the sea.
+
+It was a fair property. I have said what Maxwell thought of it as he
+stood gazing up at Kincorth on the summer’s afternoon when you, dear
+reader, were introduced to him, and it was perhaps natural that Mrs.
+Drewitt longed a little greedily to secure it for her boy.
+
+Women nursing babies are all alike. They think nothing good enough for
+the new king, and they expect every created being to fall down and adore
+the autocrat as they do.
+
+Women whose children are growing up get, as a rule, more sensible and
+fairer dealing year by year. They see their white crows throwing out
+black feathers, they begin to understand that other people have children
+too, and that the meadow-lands of existence cannot be kept clear so that
+their young lambs may browse over them undisturbed.
+
+But a baby!—there is so much left to the imagination about a baby. It
+may grow up to be as handsome as Apollo, as wise as Solomon, as eloquent
+as Demosthenes, as just as Aristides, as holy as George Herbert.
+
+It is so delightful to be able to sit in the sunlight, as Mrs. Drewitt
+was doing, nursing a two months’ old monarch, and picture for him a
+reign long, glorious, and triumphant. If mothers did not mercifully
+forget these dreams, how could they ever live and face the downfall of
+all these airy castles? How could they bear to see their sons and
+daughters grow up, not as the polished corners of the temple, but
+sometimes no better than other folks’ sons and daughters—oftentimes much
+worse?
+
+A baby!—a monarch, a pope, a little god, a lord mayor for a year and a
+day, and then another lord mayor rides in gilded coach to fortune, and
+inhabits his brother’s grand chateaux en Espagne.
+
+The king is dead, long live the king! and autocrat No. 2, No. 3, No. 4,
+as the case may be, appears on the daïs for the household generally to
+bow down before and worship.
+
+A baby!—well, well, Maxwell Drewitt had been a baby once, and perhaps
+his mother dreamed such dreams for him as Mrs. Drewitt of Kincorth was
+doing for her baby now.
+
+There are some things in nature which we shall never understand on this
+side eternity, and one of them, I think, is, why having a child born to
+her should make a woman unjust for the time being.
+
+I know there will be an outcry of indignation at this assertion; but it
+is true for all that. Beyond her baby, a woman has at first no sympathy.
+Nay, I go further, and say she has no liking save for those who serve,
+honour, and obey her Moloch.
+
+There are men who are worse than women in this matter, but not many,
+thank God! If there were, the shop of the world might be shut up, and
+human nature would have to retire from business altogether.
+
+Her baby!—there came a day when Mrs. Drewitt turned from her first
+allegiance and worshipped another baby. All her life long she was
+somewhat of an idolater, and her gods did nothing for her, as is the way
+with the gods we rear for ourselves—only brought trouble and sorrow to
+that gentle breast.
+
+But sitting in the sunshine, kissing the fat toes of her first-born,
+Mrs. Drewitt was happy, and she was all the happier perhaps because she
+felt no sorrow for the man whom the birth of her son cut out from
+Kincorth for ever.
+
+If we exhaust the matter, the young mother thought in her heart it ought
+to be a pleasure for Maxwell to stand out of the way of the new king’s
+progress; and as she felt sure it was no pleasure to him to do anything
+of the kind, she began to entertain a very sincere dislike for her
+husband’s nephew.
+
+Holding her baby from her at arms’ length—laughing when it laughed,
+clasping it to her heart, touching its little fingers, its little hands,
+its meaningless face, with a delight ever strange and ever new—something
+even in that happy moment came over Mrs. Drewitt that made the tears
+start into her eyes, and caused her face to change and sadden under the
+sunlight.
+
+She was sorry that she did not feel sorry for Maxwell, that she did not
+like him, that she was not so glad to see him as formerly, that she
+could not care for Susan and Wilhelmina. She had resolved to do her
+duty, and this was the end of it. Human nature is stronger than duty,
+and it was impossible for Mrs. Drewitt to help her feelings. The child
+she had brought into this world was nearer to her than any other
+person’s children could be.
+
+It was natural she should long to secure Kincorth for the baby—that she
+should dislike any one who seemed to stand in antagonism to her son.
+
+The child had changed her, and it was the consciousness of this change
+having taken place that made Mrs. Drewitt’s eyes fill full of tears.
+
+As for Mr. Drewitt, he had received the new arrival just as such a man
+usually does receive such donations—ecstatically!
+
+To have heard him talk, any stranger might have thought that Mr. Drewitt
+only held the property in trust until his son should come of age. If his
+bailiff spoke to him about cutting down a tree, he hesitated. He would
+grant no lease for more than seven years.
+
+The expenses must be curtailed, the household expenditure retrenched.
+His agent must see that the rents were paid more punctually. When Brian
+came of age it would not do for him to find the tenants all in arrear.
+He trusted those girls would marry, or that if they did not, Maxwell
+would have them to live with him. “I must try to make him an allowance
+for their maintenance till they all come of age, when I can perhaps
+manage to settle a certain sum on each,” said Mr. Drewitt to his wife.
+“I should not like Brian to marry one of them, and if they grow up
+together who knows what might happen?”
+
+Who indeed? but meantime the state of mind in which Mr. Drewitt went
+about the house, and walked round the shrubberies, and exchanged
+greetings with his friends, and answered the congratulations of his
+acquaintances, was involved and ridiculous beyond description.
+
+“It is a far cry to Loch Awe,” Maxwell observed drily, when Wilhelmina
+told him, with shrieks of laughter, how her uncle was doing everything
+with an eye to the pleasure and advancement of the young heir. “What
+kind of a creature is it?”
+
+“What kind of creatures are all babies?” inquired Miss Susan Drewitt,
+scornfully. “Though to be sure, to hear the way they go on about it,
+anybody might imagine it was not a baby at all, but an angel. Nannie
+says it is like its papa, and the doctor says it is like its mamma; but
+for my part, I think it is a cross between a star-fish and a lobster.”
+
+“You really ought to be in the house with uncle,” remarked Wilhelmina.
+“He won’t let a window be open for fear of the brat catching cold. He
+won’t let any stranger touch it for fear the said stranger should have
+any dreadful and communicable disease. He was going to put Mr. Murphy
+out of the hall-door, the other day, because the poor man said, after
+uncle had quite worn him out, ‘Tut, tut, tut, Mr. Drewitt, the egg is
+all very well, but it is not worth the cackling you make over it.’ I
+really thought I would have died, Maxwell. I had to put the whole of my
+pocket-handkerchief into my mouth, or I should have laughed outright.
+
+“‘Sir!’ says my uncle, and he drew himself up like a grenadier.
+
+“‘You need not be offended, Mr. Drewitt,’ says Murphy. I do love that
+man, it is so hard to put him out of countenance. ‘A hen with only one
+chicken always makes ten times the fuss she would if she had a good
+clutch to go about with; and by the time you have a dozen, I’m thinking
+you won’t be caring so much whether a few of them should catch some
+infection or not. Excuse a jest, sir, it is only my way. The baby is a
+fine baby. I don’t know that ever I saw a handsomer.’
+
+“And as he said that he looked over at me, and you know, Maxwell, what
+his looks are.”
+
+“He is an impudent scoundrel,” remarked her brother. “If I hear of him
+looking at you at all, I will wring his neck for him—and glad of the
+excuse too,” added Maxwell, _sotto voce_.
+
+“You never saw a man make such an idiot of himself in your life,” said
+Susan, laying a true Hibernian emphasis on the last word in her
+sentence. “He ought to build a little chapel and have a shrine made, and
+let people only look at the brat from a distance. And that reminds me,
+Maxwell—do you know Kathie has never gone back to school yet? She is not
+well enough to go, Sheen says, and my uncle wanted her to keep away from
+the heir, seeming to think it might be something of consumption, and
+that the young gentleman would take it from her.”
+
+“And Kathie cried, till I told her she was a greater idiot than uncle
+and a bigger baby than the heir,” put in Wilhelmina. “Mrs. Drewitt would
+not listen to such nonsense, though; she said Kathie should be with her
+and Brian if she liked. That is one thing I will say for Mrs.
+Drewitt—that she is good to Kathie. Give the devil his due, her own
+mother could not be better to her.”
+
+“But do you think Kathie ill, seriously ill, I mean?” asked Maxwell: if
+the young man had ever loved any of his own flesh and blood, it was
+Kathie, and he put the question anxiously.
+
+“Well, you know she never was strong—she was always, as Nannie says, the
+‘crowl’ among us,” answered Wilhelmina, who looked both strong and
+handsome, and had a rich colour in her cheeks with walking to Headlands
+Cottage; “she ought not to have gone to school, and it was not with Mrs.
+Drewitt’s good will she went, but you and uncle would have it. You know
+it was your doing, Maxwell, and she got a cold, and the cold got worse,
+and you should see for yourself how she looks.”
+
+“What are they doing for her?” he inquired.
+
+“Dr. Sheen has sent her some medicine, and Mrs. Drewitt tries to coax
+her to eat,” Wilhelmina replied; while Susan added—
+
+“I think they have an idea of sending her abroad. I am sure I heard some
+one talk of letting her spend the winter with the Dyaks, if money for
+her travelling expenses could be raised.”
+
+Then Maxwell Drewitt rose up, walked across the room, took a cigar out
+of a paper lying on the table, lit it, and began to smoke. When he had
+puffed away for a little time he said—
+
+“Kathie shall not go to the Dyaks. I won’t have my sister eating the
+bread of a dependent in the house of any of Mr. Drewitt’s relations. If
+she needs a milder climate I will find somebody to take charge of her,
+and I will find the money too, which the great people up at Kincorth
+seem to think a thing so devilishly hard to raise.”
+
+“That’s right, Maxwell. Go it,” exclaimed Wilhelmina, clapping her
+hands. “Send us all abroad, and come yourself—we’d make our fortunes at
+_rouge-et-noir_. Wouldn’t it be capital sport?”
+
+“You seem to think so, at any rate,” remarked Susan, shortly.
+
+“And you—ten thousand pardons. I forgot. You would not like to leave——”
+
+“Whom?” asked Maxwell, as his sister stopped abruptly.
+
+“The baby, I suppose,” laughed Wilhelmina; whereupon Maxwell made some
+remark about the baby which did not sound like a blessing.
+
+“What the deuce is their fancy for calling the young beggar Brian?” he
+inquired. “Is it Brian Boroïhme they have gone back to, or is it some of
+her people, or what?”
+
+“There was a good Drewitt once,” answered Wilhelmina; “at least, so
+tradition says, though I believe there is not a syllable of truth in the
+story. There was a good Drewitt once—good and wise, and his name was
+Brian. There is a long rigmarole about him on some old stone in the
+abbey, and Nannie told Mrs. Drewitt a great history about what grand
+people the Drewitts were in his day, and about what a pious man he was,
+and how he repaired the abbey, and how he planted that huge yew-tree in
+the churchyard, and that hollow ash, and that rotten beech on the lawn
+at Kincorth. And Nannie told her, too, how a child always strains after
+the person it is called after, and how luck follows names, and worked
+her up to such a pitch finally, that nothing would do her but the young
+gentleman must be called Brian—and accordingly Brian he is—Brian
+Archibald. It is not an easy name to make fun out of; so all I can do is
+to call him Brin Baldy. It’s a pretty conceit, is not it? as Lady
+Emmeline would say, and it has the great advantage of being
+unintelligible. I have ventured to talk about Brin Baldy to Susan before
+uncle, and he had not the remotest idea of whom I was talking.”
+
+“I shall come up to see Kathie,” said Maxwell, when his sister stopped—a
+little irrelevantly it is true, but still in consequence of some train
+of thought he had been pursuing during her sentence.
+
+“I am sure _we_ ought to be grateful,” remarked Susan. “Get up and make
+a courtesy, Willy.”
+
+Which Willy accordingly did, observing, at the same time, she thought
+somebody ought to come and see Kathie, and rouse her up.
+
+“Talk about peaches! You should have seen the peaches the Countess gave
+me the other day to take home to Kathie,” she went on; “they were as
+big—oh! as big as Susan’s head—four times as big as any I ever saw grow
+at Kincorth, and do you think she would touch them?—not a bit of it.
+
+“‘You little ungrateful wretch!’ I said, ‘and I have brought them all
+the way from Laddenwell home for you, and it was as much as I could do
+to keep from eating them on the road. You _shall_ take them!’
+
+“So she took one, and tried to swallow it, but she did not like peaches,
+she told me.
+
+“‘Will you have grapes, then?’ I asked her, but she would not have
+grapes. At last I worried out of her what she could eat, and what do you
+think it was, Maxwell? I will give you six guesses.”
+
+“Don’t be childish, Willy; go on.”
+
+“Crabs!” exclaimed that young lady. “Now you know crabs are things uncle
+can’t bear the sight of, and that he thinks nobody else ought to be able
+to bear the sight of either; so I had to get one smuggled up for her.
+But when it came, would she touch it? I don’t know what to do with
+Kathie,” finished Wilhelmina, in despair.
+
+“She ought to take a good canter every day of her life,” said Susan,
+“and keep out of the nursery. There is nothing the matter with Kathie
+except the mopes.”
+
+“Do you know what your mother died of, Susan?” asked Maxwell, a little
+sternly.
+
+“She died when Kathie was born. I suppose it was of that,” answered Miss
+Drewitt.
+
+“She would not have died of that if she had not been in a decline
+beforehand,” said Maxwell; “and from what you say, I’m afraid it is
+consumption Kathie has got. I will come up and see her,” he repeated. “I
+will walk back with you.”
+
+When Maxwell passed through Duranmore, on his way from Kincorth to
+Eversbeg, he stopped at Dr. Sheen’s, and not finding that gentleman at
+home, spoke to Mr. Murphy about his sister’s health.
+
+“Had not you better step round when the doctor is within?” asked the
+assistant.
+
+“I have got something else to do than dance up and down from Eversbeg
+here, after him or anybody else,” answered Maxwell, with that
+graciousness of manner which distinguished his treatment of any one he
+considered beneath him in station.
+
+“It is not my place to talk about Doctor Sheen’s patients,” persisted
+Mr. Murphy.
+
+“What the devil is the use of your getting on in this way to me? She is
+my sister, and I must know, and I will know, what is the matter with
+her.”
+
+“And how should I know what is the matter with her?” demanded the other.
+“Sure we never know for certain what is wrong with man, woman, or child,
+unless we open them, and I suppose you don’t want me to do that?”
+
+“Will you tell me, as far as you do know, what ails my sister, or not?
+If you do not choose to do so, I must take her to somebody who will.”
+
+“I would rather you would ask Dr. Sheen. I am only his assistant, and I
+have not had his experience; and to be plain, the doctor and I don’t
+agree about the case. Ask him; or if you like, I will tell him to write
+to you.”
+
+“I want your opinion,” persisted Maxwell. “All you say I shall consider
+as spoken to me confidentially, if you wish, only tell me exactly what
+you think is wrong with Kathleen.”
+
+“I do believe you are fond of her,” said Mr. Murphy, with a vague wonder
+in his voice.
+
+“What the deuce is it to you whether I am or not? Tell me your opinion,
+without beating about the bush any longer.”
+
+“Do you want me to tell you the truth or a lie?”
+
+“I want the truth, whatever the truth may be,” was the answer.
+
+“Because,” went on Mr. Murphy, “there’s many a one says he wants to hear
+the truth, and then is angry at the man who tells it to him.”
+
+“Whatever you think, out with it,” exclaimed Maxwell, impatiently.
+
+“Your sister is very far from strong.”
+
+“I can see that without the help of any doctor’s eyes,” answered the
+young man; “but is she likely to get worse? Will the medicine she is
+taking cure her?”
+
+“Doctor Sheen thinks it will,” was the reply.
+
+“But what do you think, Mr. Murphy?”
+
+“I consider Miss Kathie to be in a very bad way,” said the assistant.
+
+“Will it be life or death?” asked Maxwell.
+
+“Don’t ask me. What is the use of it? Sure you know yourself.”
+
+For a minute there was silence—for a minute the thought of the only
+enemy that in youth a man like Maxwell Drewitt is afraid to face cowed
+him. Then he said:
+
+“Would a warmer climate, Mr. Murphy——”
+
+“Save her, I suppose you mean. You can try it.”
+
+Slowly and reluctantly, Maxwell turned to go.
+
+“One thing more, Mr. Murphy,” he said. “Was the cold she caught at
+school the cause of this?”
+
+“If she had not caught a cold there she would have caught it some place
+else,” was the answer. “You can’t keep a person shut up in a band-box
+for ever; and the fire was always ready laid in her, to be kindled some
+chilly winter’s morning. But people invariably like to attribute disease
+to accident: they think if they could guard themselves against that they
+would be immortal,” added Mr. Murphy.
+
+Maxwell went out into the air. He walked home round by Eversbeg Head,
+from whence he had a view over the wide Atlantic, looking under the
+summer’s sky like a glassy lake. He saw the ships going past with their
+white sails shining and glistening in the sun; he beheld the ocean at
+peace with man—the land kissed softly and gently by the waves; he saw
+his own fields looking rich and cultivated, in the warm glow of the
+afternoon light;—but there was a sorrow in his heart, the memory of
+which the peaceful scene could not chase away.
+
+Many a feeling which passes through our breasts to-day we forget
+to-morrow; we fear, and with a new sunrise the dread is gone. We settle
+down to think: something comes to prevent our doing so, and the
+impression made, fades away and is forgotten.
+
+Could Maxwell Drewitt have stereotyped in his memory all the feelings
+which saddened him when he stood, that day, looking out over the great
+Atlantic, I think—I believe—he would have gone through the rest of his
+life a better man.
+
+But as it was, they were merely as words spoken to the air—as letters
+traced on the sand.
+
+The next wind of passion bore them far beyond his reach and his
+recollection; the next wave of life, rushing up on the shore of his
+existence, obliterated their meaning.
+
+Life and death, friends—life and death!—are these two not ever walking
+through this world hand in hand together?
+
+The tide that brings a fresh soul into existence on its flow, bears a
+pale corpse out to the great sea as it ebbs.
+
+There was a child born—there was a girl dying: there was a son and heir,
+over whose birth exulting parents rejoiced—there was an orphan waiting
+to rejoin her father and mother also.
+
+There was life in the boy, who crowed and shrieked in the nursery: there
+was death in Kathleen, who walked about the grounds and through the
+rooms at Kincorth—who had learned her last lessons, who was never to go
+back to school any more—who was never to have lovers, never to be
+married—never to be anything except a slight, dark-eyed, loveable,
+delicate girl—who cooed and fondled the baby as long as she had strength
+to do it, and who delighted in the newcomer, even although he did cut
+Maxwell out from the property.
+
+“And Maxwell was always kinder to me than he was to anybody,” sighed
+Kathie to Mrs. Drewitt; “I wish he was out of that cottage—I wish he was
+back at Kincorth!”
+
+But when her wish was fulfilled, when Maxwell did return to Kincorth, I
+think it was best for Kathleen that she could not see him there—that she
+had then been sleeping for twenty years in Eversbeg Abbey, away from all
+the sinful jealousies and wicked passions which make the world so often
+seem only like a battle-field, where man stands up to war against man.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII.
+                        Maxwell’s Improvements.
+
+
+Three years passed away—slowly enough, for in a place like Duranmore
+time’s flight is never very rapid; and during the course of those three
+years the novelty of having a son had worn off, and Mr. Drewitt cut down
+trees, and renewed leases, and took fines, and raised money without the
+slightest reference to his heir’s interests. In the house matters were
+better managed; out-of-doors, worse. Every day the property was going
+more surely to the dogs; every day money seemed more difficult to be
+had, more impossible to be kept.
+
+When Brian lay in his cradle, Mr. Drewitt proposed building a house on
+the farm he had settled on his wife before her marriage. “It will
+increase the value of the place,” he said; “and if I live till Brian
+grow up and marry, he can reside there and be independent of us
+altogether; while, on the other hand, should you, dearest, ever have to
+leave Kincorth, it would be a home for you.”
+
+All in vain Mrs. Drewitt remonstrated. All in vain she entreated him to
+wait, observing that it would surely be time enough to build a house for
+Brian’s wife when Brian was put into jacket and trousers. She pointed
+out that money was not very plentiful; that workmen would have to be
+paid; that somebody must live in the house if it were finished; and that
+it would be a continual expense and worry.
+
+Mr. Drewitt overbore all her objections. He insisted that the thing,
+being proper to be done, should be done at once; that a dower-house
+ought immediately to be erected; that the expense would be nothing, the
+advantages incalculable; and straightway he had granite quarried and
+drawn to the farm, chose a site, set labourers to dig at the
+foundations, and neglected every other concern of his life in order to
+ride over each day and see how the work progressed.
+
+“Where are you drawing those stones to?” Maxwell asked one of his
+uncle’s men who was driving a cart and horse across the hills.
+
+“To Analore, yer honour,” was the answer.
+
+“What for?” pursued the young man.
+
+“To build a house for Masther Brian. The masther is greatly taken on
+with the notion entirely.”
+
+“Fools build houses,” thought Maxwell, “and, my God, what a fool he is!”
+
+Twelve months afterwards Maxwell rode over to Analore, and tying his
+horse to a gate walked leisurely up the hill to see how Brian’s castle
+was getting on. Analore lay inland; it was, as Lady Ebbutt had said, a
+mountain: the farm was nothing more than a sheep-run. Nature had not
+made it a garden, and Art had left Nature’s handiwork alone. Over the
+short grass Maxwell picked his way: there were boulders, there were
+brambles, there was bog, there was morass—Maxwell rounded them all,
+still keeping up the hill to the site Mr. Drewitt had chosen.
+
+It was a winter’s morning, bright, clear, and bracing; but there was
+nothing of elasticity in Maxwell’s step—nothing youthful about his
+movements.
+
+Every now and then he stopped and looked about him; not that the place
+was unfamiliar, for the young man knew every rood of his uncle’s
+property much better than his uncle did himself. He was scrutinising the
+land professionally; he surveyed it as a jockey might a horse. He was
+contrasting it with Headlands, and thinking he had made a mistake in
+choosing a farm by the sea. He dug up the turf with the heel of his
+shoe, and taking a piece of the earth in his hand examined it minutely.
+
+“Curse him!” said Mr. Maxwell Drewitt as he threw the mould away, “this
+soil is better than mine,” and he pursued his walk up the hill, thinking
+while he walked, till he reached the place where Mr. Drewitt had thought
+to build his house.
+
+It was a lovely site. “A property in such a situation, within twenty
+miles of London, would be worth a king’s ransom; the view alone would be
+a fortune,” thought Maxwell, while he looked over lake and valley, over
+gorge and mountain, and then he laughed, to see nothing but the
+foundations built up, no sign of bricklayer or labourer at hand. There
+were cartloads of granite on the ground; there were heaps of sand and
+marks of where mortar had been mixed; there was the earth that they dug
+out of the foundations wheeled away on one side, and in this state the
+edifice was left.
+
+“If he had given this to me instead of settling it on her; if he had
+said, ‘Maxwell, you have been hardly done by, and it is not much I can
+give you, but there is Analore, take it, for you and your heirs for
+ever;’ if he had made it over by any binding legal document and helped
+me to raise a thousand pounds upon it, or lent me a thousand himself, as
+he might readily have done, I should not have cared to call the king my
+cousin,” were the thoughts that chased one another through Maxwell
+Drewitt’s mind. “I could have built a house of those boulders; I could
+have drained this land; I could have grown potatoes here till the ground
+was fit for oats; I could have made a fortune out of the place, and so
+might he, if he were not what he is—a purposeless idiot, a thickheaded
+ass.”
+
+All the world over, the man who has got hold of a new idea abuses the
+man who sticks to the old: in Ireland, as in England, the man of
+business hates the man of pleasure; the worker detests the idler.
+
+Mr. Drewitt might be a fool, an ass, an idiot; in some things, indeed, I
+am afraid he was all three; but had Maxwell been born to a great estate,
+he would scarcely have seen his uncle’s shortcomings so clearly; he
+would not have looked so closely after soils himself.
+
+Give a property to a man whose eyes have once been opened and he can see
+clearly enough how to improve it; but till necessity has sharpened their
+inventions, I think few people notice everything which is lying within
+their ken. It was his uncle’s marriage that sharpened Maxwell Drewitt,
+that enabled him to see exactly to what extent the rent-roll of Kincorth
+might be increased.
+
+“If it were clear to-morrow it would be worth fifteen thousand a year;
+increase those mortgages, and I could make it worth forty thousand a
+year.” This was Maxwell’s calculation as he sat on a great stone,
+looking over the lake, and the valley, and the distant mountains. “I
+must try to get some land in this neighbourhood, and so make the most of
+my rights of sea-weed,” was the practical conclusion he arrived at ere
+he left Analore.
+
+“A man like this deserved to succeed,” I hear some say at this juncture;
+and my answer is, “He did succeed—he did lay house to house and acre to
+acre.” He gained all that he set out determined to achieve, and if he
+did not secure the great prize, towards which all human efforts
+aim—happiness—it was only because, thinking he should find it in wealth
+and position, in lands, in smiling fields, in verdant pastures, he
+strove to become the owner of these good things, and of these only.
+
+Knowing what need Ireland has of such men, fresh from the sight of her
+wretched poverty, her miserable management, her forlorn condition, I
+could almost wish I had chosen a different hero, and taken a better man
+to show what energy and perseverance may do for an individual as well as
+for a people.
+
+There are such in Connemara; there are little oases, formed by their
+industry and talent, in the wilderness; there are gardens in the desert;
+there are resting-places where the tired mind and the weary heart may
+sit down and take refreshment, seeing what even one man has been able to
+effect. Kincorth is one of these; but the mind that saw what Kincorth
+might be made has long ceased to fret itself with schemes, to vex itself
+over disappointment; while the man who owns Kincorth now is grave beyond
+all mortal comprehension.
+
+Let me go on with my story, friends, for I must not write of the end
+yet.
+
+All the plans of Mr. Drewitt’s life came to nothing, like the
+dower-house at Analore. All the good he purposed died in the birth, all
+the reforms he intended were never carried out.
+
+The road to ruin was the one he voluntarily chose in youth, and he
+always lacked strength of mind enough to turn back at any stage of his
+journey and try to make for fortune.
+
+For a time Mrs. Drewitt endeavoured to mend matters, urging him to look
+his affairs boldly in the face, and not to allow them to get more and
+more involved; but before she had been married two years she, too,
+learned that speaking was useless, and contented herself with entreating
+that he would not mortgage the house and demesne of Kincorth; that he
+would endure any inconvenience, practise any economy, rather than
+jeopardize _the_ inheritance of their son.
+
+Mr. Drewitt promised, and then broke his promise, comforting himself
+exceedingly the while by thinking that his wife need never know he had
+done so.
+
+Mortgaging in one class is very like pawning in another. Money is
+wanted, and a few thousands can easily enough be raised. Money is
+needed, and it is only a step to the three balls.
+
+But in either case it is the repayment that proves difficult, and with
+Mr. Drewitt repayment was simply impossible. Still on—on—along the road
+to ruin he pursued his way, riding his hacks, keeping his hunters,
+making guests welcome, running into debt recklessly as he travelled.
+
+There was plenty of good company taking the same journey with the owner
+of Kincorth.
+
+His was no isolated case—no exception to a general rule—only perhaps
+there were few who, while beggaring themselves, made so little show of
+wealth as he—few who seemed to do so small an amount of good, either to
+their families or to their friends, as this weak, amiable, purposeless,
+loveable Archibald Drewitt, who put down his misfortunes to every cause
+save the real one, who shifted the blame to any man’s shoulders rather
+than carry it himself.
+
+Much as she loved her husband, Mrs. Drewitt could not be blind to his
+shortcomings; she could not avoid seeing that different management might
+have produced different results.
+
+She heard how well Maxwell was doing, and asked his uncle whether he
+could not reclaim some portion of his own land likewise.
+
+“If I had started unencumbered as he has done,” replied Mr. Drewitt,
+with a sigh, “things might have been very different; but I have been in
+debt from the first. I had a heavy establishment to keep up. I had those
+children to maintain.”
+
+And the owner of Kincorth spoke in a tone of such sincere self-pity that
+Mrs. Drewitt had no courage left to remind him of the fact of his having
+started with eight thousand a-year clear, spite of the mortgages. She
+held her peace, and Mr. Drewitt still continued traversing the road that
+for him could have but one end.
+
+Three years passed away. Kathie was dead, Susan had eloped, Wilhelmina
+rode as fast, as far, and as fearlessly as ever. There was another child
+at Kincorth—a daughter named after its paternal grandmother, Geraldine.
+There was a third infant coming, and Mrs. Drewitt’s face was beginning
+already to tell tales of sorrow and anxiety. Poor lady! four years of
+married life, of an irregular household, of a dissatisfied family, of
+regret, of sickness, of struggle, had rubbed some of the beauty of youth
+off her countenance, had altered and saddened her expression.
+
+She had mourned for Kathleen, she had wept over the girl in the watches
+of the night; she had kept her with her so long as human love and human
+care could avail; and when at length Kathleen floated out from the river
+to the sea, Mrs. Drewitt watched her as she drifted towards the great
+ocean with eyes dimmed by crying, with a heart bowed down by grief.
+
+Though she had her baby, though she did now own that great and powerful
+king, still she missed the friendship and the companionship of the girl
+who had taken to her so kindly.
+
+She had never feared to talk to Kathie about her perplexities, her
+difficulties, and now she knew that through the years to come she must
+live entirely without sympathy, and without assistance.
+
+If anything had been wanting to fill her cup of sorrow at that time, a
+remark of Maxwell’s, which through the officiousness of an acquaintance
+came to her ears, would have caused it to overflow.
+
+He said what he knew to be false, that if Kathie had been properly
+attended to when she first returned from school, she need not then be
+lying in Eversbeg Abbey.
+
+It was not true; and Mrs. Drewitt herself chanced to be aware that no
+care or attention could have saved Kathie at any stage of her disease;
+but the blow went home for all that.
+
+She reproached herself; she thought she had not noticed Kathie’s malady
+so soon as she might; she remembered that she had mistaken the flush on
+her cheeks for strength—the brightness of her eyes for health.
+
+She knew she had been taken up with herself and the baby; for a time she
+remembered she felt so ill that exertion of any kind was a trouble; and
+then she was so happy about the birth of her son, that she did not pay
+much attention to any one save the young autocrat.
+
+She had put the boy first (this was what she thought), and, being her
+own, she ought to have seen to poor motherless Kathie, even before
+thinking of her child. Heaven help her!—many a time that winter the baby
+went a little to the wall, while the sick girl was nursed and tended.
+
+If Maxwell had exhausted all his ingenuity in trying to make her
+wretched, he could not have succeeded better.
+
+She had been selfish, she had been absorbed, and it was wrong for her to
+be either, though nothing could have saved Kathie, though no help of man
+could have averted the decree of death.
+
+She and Mr. Drewitt had both been foolish. She, gentle soul, could see
+it all clearly enough when the idol had been taken down from its
+pedestal, when its father ceased to consider its future prospects every
+moment in the day, when she found life had its duties, though she was a
+mother—when she discovered that even a baby may usurp too much
+attention, and lead with its fat toes, with its plump legs, with its
+soft, yielding body, with its clenched fists, with its meaningless face,
+its unseasonable grief, and its maniacal merriment, the wisest parent
+into temptation every day.
+
+Poor Kathie! Mrs. Drewitt mourned for her as no one of her own flesh and
+blood sorrowed.
+
+Maxwell was busy with his schemes; Susan was full of her lover; Willy
+thought the house dull, and lived as much out of it as possible; Mr.
+Drewitt had his own anxieties and troubles, and besides, he said “he
+always expected Kathie to follow her mother.”
+
+Mrs. Drewitt alone, did not forget the girl, but thought of her when the
+winter snows were on the ground, when the February rains deluged the
+earth, when the spring flowers were blooming and the summer splendour
+glorifying the hills. Nothing could be quieter than Eversbeg Abbey,
+nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, and Kathie always longed for
+peace and quietness.
+
+It was best so—it was best.
+
+The birds built their nests in the ivy that grew over the window beneath
+which the vault of the Drewitts lay. They went twittering in and out,
+chirping and singing all the day, from early morning till late at night.
+The sheep came in over the broken wall, and browsed at will among the
+graves, undisturbed by resident or stranger. The ferns grew among the
+old walls, and the grass was long and rank in the hollows between the
+tombs. Nettles tall and luxuriant flourished where the priest had once
+performed mass, where the worshippers had once knelt before the altar.
+
+There was no roof to the Abbey, save the sky. The once perfect arches of
+doors and windows were falling to decay. The evening wind lightly
+stirred the leaves of the ivy. In the stillness the ripple of the waves
+upon the shore could be distinctly heard, and it was in this quiet
+nook—quiet and neglected, desolate and beautiful—that Kathie, with her
+hands folded on her breast, slept among her kindred, far beyond the
+reach of sorrow or regret.
+
+One trouble drives away the memory of another, and Susan’s elopement
+proved even a greater trial to Mrs. Drewitt then Kathie’s death. She
+knew where the one was, but did not know what had become of the other.
+She only felt that the evil she was unable to avert had come at last.
+She had spoken to Susan, to Maxwell, to Mr. Drewitt, and behold the end
+was an empty room one morning, and a note from Miss Drewitt, stating
+that as anything seemed preferable to remaining at Kincorth, she had
+determined to cast her lot with the only man who loved her.
+
+“What lot has she chosen, Maxwell, what lot?” asked poor Mrs. Drewitt,
+as with blanched face she showed this note to her nephew, and entreated
+him to trace his sister and bring her back.
+
+“Would she stay, do you think?” asked Maxwell. “Could you or I, or
+anybody living, keep Susan here if she made up her mind to go away? But
+I will follow them to Dublin. I will see whether they are married, and
+if not, he shall marry her.”
+
+But the fugitives were gone to England, and at Liverpool Maxwell lost
+all traces of them. He could not devote his life to running after his
+sister. He had not the time, he had not the money, he had not the
+inclination.
+
+“As Susan had sown she must reap,” he remarked to Mrs. Drewitt, and he
+went back to his farm by the shore.
+
+What more could be done for Susan was done by Mrs. Drewitt, who wrote to
+her brother-in-law, Sir Everard Ebbutt, begging him to ascertain Captain
+Ellenham’s antecedents, and to give her tidings of her niece, if
+possible. Further, she asked him not to mention the matter to his wife.
+
+Sir Everard lost no time in replying to this letter. To begin with, he
+stated that Captain Ellenham could not have married Miss Drewitt,
+because he had at that moment a wife and three children living in
+London. Further, Captain Ellenham’s regiment having been ordered abroad,
+it was more than probable Susan had gone abroad with him. Should he
+obtain any further information he would let her know.
+
+“It is a blessing she has gone abroad. I hope she will die there!” was
+Maxwell’s only remark when Mrs. Drewitt communicated these particulars
+to him. “And if ever I come across that fellow, I will shoot him.
+Meantime it will be as well to say to every one that they are married.”
+Having summed up the duty of the family in which explicit sentence,
+Maxwell dropped the subject, and never, of his own free will, mentioned
+his sister afterwards.
+
+He was building a house at the time on the piece of barren land that had
+come to him from his grandfather, and he paid particular attention to
+the masons during the whole of the summer following Kathie’s death.
+
+“A bare staring place,” Mr. Drewitt told his wife, “that it made him
+feel cold even to look at. What a pity for him not to have chosen a
+better site! It is a good house too;” and then he asked Maxwell why he
+had not selected some finer position, somewhere on the side of a hill,
+and where there was more of a view.
+
+“Beggars cannot afford to be choosers,” answered the younger man;
+“besides, wait a while, sir, and you will not call my choice so bad a
+one. Further, remember the land I am laying money out on now is _my
+own_, and that I am not in a position to both build and buy.”
+
+“But money can always be raised, you know,” suggested Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“Can it?” was the reply. “That is not my opinion, and I hope you will
+never find reason to alter yours.”
+
+This little rap ended the conversation. It is not easy to talk with a
+man who has always the last word and the best word; and besides, it
+suddenly occurred to Mr. Drewitt that the house at Analore was not two
+feet above the ground, and that perhaps Maxwell might inquire why he did
+not raise money to finish it.
+
+“He must be excessively clever, I think,” sighed Mrs. Drewitt, when she
+heard in the following spring how Maxwell was buying young trees from
+Waller of Eversbeg, and planting them round his new abode.
+
+“They won’t live—they can’t live; it is impossible,” said Mr. Drewitt,
+who, although he did not exactly grudge Maxwell his success, still
+thought that such innovations ought not to be encouraged by Providence.
+“They cannot live; consider the sea-breeze—the exposed situation.”
+
+And Mrs. Drewitt, of course, was of her husband’s opinion. Maxwell had
+made a mistake at last; the trees could do no good. But the trees throve
+for all that. Maxwell had considered the matter before ever Mr. Drewitt
+thought of it. He had a south aspect; he was well sheltered from the
+north and east; he knew that the woods surrounding Eversbeg must have
+been planted by some one, and he thought he would risk something at any
+rate, and make the experiment.
+
+There is many a lovely place across the water, many a sweet nook in the
+Green Isle, but I doubt whether in its way—which, of course, is not a
+grand way, but only very quiet and enchanting—the tourist could chance
+to see a prettier spot than “Headlands” at this day.
+
+If you row across the bay from the little fishing village of Eversbeg,
+you see the house built of granite lying among the trees. The lawn
+slopes quite down to the edge of the shore, while the woods, spreading
+out like a semicircle, enclose this piece of green, which is soft as
+velvet. Down almost to high-water mark the plantations extend, and when
+the tide is in the willow, and the birch, and the spruce-fir droop their
+branches over the tide. See it on a fine day, when the bay resembles an
+opal; when the new-mown grass appears in the distance to be an emerald
+set in a darker band of green; when the rugged headland shows dark and
+steep against the calm unruffled ocean; when there is hardly a ripple on
+the sea, when there is scarcely the lightest breeze stirring among the
+treetops; when the little fishing village nestling on the side of
+Eversbeg Point looks white and picturesque in the bright sunlight; when
+the mountains look higher and nearer than usual, and rear their great
+heads towards the sky; when the ruins of Eversbeg Abbey appear close at
+hand; when the fresh-shorn sheep are climbing the hill-sides; when no
+sound breaks the stillness save the plash of the oars as the rowers pull
+across the bay, and the drip drip of the water from the blades, as they
+hold them above the sea and float gently towards the shore;—see it thus,
+I say, and you can well fancy you have beheld fairyland. It is a place
+you cannot bear to leave—that you turn back and look at with an
+indescribable emotion—that you wave your adieu to with the tears filling
+your eyes, though you could not give a reason why or wherefore.
+
+Maxwell Drewitt found it a wilderness—this is the paradise he left it.
+Think of that as you lean over the stern, and the rowers bear you away
+from the garden of Eden, and think, also, if you had such a nest on
+earth you might find it hard to leave the world, and that, perhaps, it
+is best for you to own nothing so perfect, so exquisite of its kind.
+
+Headlands is too beautiful—that is all any person can say. It seems too
+charming to be real; and when you have left Eversbeg behind you, and are
+travelling away towards Oughterard through the valley of desolation,
+through the land of a thousand Dead Sea lakes, you come gradually to
+believe that “Headlands” was a dream—that such a place never
+existed—that the lawn does not slope down to the glassy sea—that the
+trees do not overhang the water—that Maxwell Drewitt never planted the
+ground at all, but that it remains barren and sterile to this very day.
+
+Nevertheless that modern garden of Eden lies in Connemara, on the shores
+of the wide Atlantic; within sight of its tremendous billows, of its
+restless waves. Eversbeg Bay is much more open than Duranmore, which
+almost resembles a lake. On the north side of Duranmore stands Kincorth,
+well sheltered from all breezes save the south, high up on the hill, the
+house conspicuous for miles; on the north side of Eversbeg, lying low by
+the shore, is the modest mansion Maxwell reared for himself in the days
+when he was a poor and a struggling man.
+
+The trees grew and spread out their branches, the land improved and
+began to pay him well.
+
+While difficulties increased at Kincorth, everything grew smoother and
+easier at Headlands; and yet one difficulty had arisen in Maxwell
+Drewitt’s path.
+
+Colonel Vervensoe was dead; and Lady Emmeline, by consequence, was left
+a widow.
+
+It took Maxwell a few days to realize the difference that this fact
+might make in his position; and then he drew back his breath and paused,
+asking himself, “What next?”
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIV.
+                                 Next.
+
+
+If the fact of Lady Emmeline being Colonel Vervensoe’s wife, and
+unattainable, had not enhanced her charms in Maxwell Drewitt’s eyes, the
+fact of her being Colonel Vervensoe’s widow, and available, rendered her
+less desirable still.
+
+There had been a time, indeed, as previously mentioned, when the young
+man hesitated about running away with her, and settled not to do so; but
+then his future looked dark in the extreme—now it was bright and
+hopeful.
+
+If only Colonel Vervensoe had remained at Cragantlet, as any other
+Christian would, instead of dying at such an unlucky crisis!
+
+“It seems as if he had almost done it to spite me,” muttered Maxwell;
+and the young man cursed his neighbour for having departed this life at
+all.
+
+In former days Lady Emmeline’s loan to Maxwell had smoothed matters for
+him; but four years after that loan complicated his difficulties, and
+made him walk round and round Eversbeg Head, and round Eversbeg Bay,
+asking himself as he kicked the stones before him, What next—what next?
+
+The financial crisis which troubled Maxwell was this:—
+
+Suppose he did not marry Lady Emmeline—her ladyship would be certain to
+ask for repayment. He could not mortgage to repay, because his land was
+mortgaged to its full value already. Suppose he offered to marry her,
+and that they kept the engagement secret, and that he never fulfilled
+his promise?
+
+Before he was well out of his difficulties, somebody else would marry
+Lady Emmeline—she was sure to leave Connemara, because the next heir
+would require possession of Cragantlet; and if she went to Dublin or
+London, how long was it probable she would remain a widow? Suppose he
+did marry her—he would get fortune and position, but then he would also
+get a wife.
+
+“That is the devil of it!” said Maxwell Drewitt, with that charming
+frankness which characterized all his mental conversations. “That is the
+devil of it!” and he hesitated and waited on, while Lady Emmeline grew
+kinder and kinder; and, free at last to follow the bent of her
+inclination, absolutely forced money on the man who could have sworn at
+her for ever having lent him any.
+
+He had his own ideal of a wife, and Lady Emmeline did not come up to it.
+He had an ideal the reality of which was not unlike Jenny Bourke, if
+Jenny Bourke had been rich, and well-born, and accomplished.
+
+It is not fair to contrast twenty and forty-four—the bloom of youth and
+the bloom of rouge—the charms of purity and innocence and the graces of
+fashion and affectation; but, on the other hand, poverty can bear no
+comparison with wealth, low birth with long pedigree.
+
+He could not marry Jenny. Were he as rich as Crœsus, as great a man as
+the Duke of Leinster, Maxwell felt it would be impossible for him to
+marry Ryan’s sister and remain in Connemara.
+
+There are some things which to some men are impossible, and a low match
+was one of these to Maxwell Drewitt. No love, no beauty, no truth, no
+devotion could reconcile him to that.
+
+Though he had lived in a cabin, though he would not have minded working
+like a common labourer to achieve an object, still Maxwell Drewitt was
+as proud as Lucifer; and for the blood of his wife, of the mother of his
+children, not to be of the regulation colour and quality, was a thing
+terrible to contemplate.
+
+He could not marry Jenny Bourke—poor Jenny! And Maxwell Drewitt’s dark
+eyes grew darker as he thought of the girl who loved him, who was
+staying single for his sake, who managed, spite of all her brother’s
+precautions, sometimes to see him; who had got pale, poor child! pale
+and thin, because of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.
+
+He could not marry Jenny, but he could marry Lady Emmeline; and he could
+have her Connemara property, which lay among the mountains beyond
+Cragantlet, and her money to improve his own properties.
+
+He could buy, he could drain, he could till; in imagination he saw corn
+waving where the sheep now browsed. He could be wealthy and independent;
+he could soon be almost as great a man as the Earl of Popingham. He
+could pay out everybody who had ever been insolent to him. He could take
+up the mortgages on his uncle’s estates; he could make Headlands the
+wonder of Galway, the admiration of strangers, a place to be proud of
+himself. He could do all this if he married Lady Emmeline; but then,
+when he had done all, he should not be able to get rid of her: that was
+the devil of it, that was where the shoe pinched.
+
+“But then,” reflected Maxwell, “hang it! a man cannot have everything in
+life; and if he gets the best thing he must be content. Isn’t it better
+to satisfy one’s ambition than one’s love? If we fulfil our ambition,
+the gratification remains; if we gratify our love, the pleasure is
+transient. Anyhow, I am not called upon to make a choice, because,
+though I do love Jenny, I still cannot marry her—could not if there were
+no Lady Emmeline in existence. Hang marriage! it is like going through
+life with a halter round one’s neck. It is the most terrible ‘must’ in
+existence, because we seem to have some choice in it, and have, as a
+rule, nobody but ourselves to blame if it turn out ill. All experience
+is against it—all proverbs are against it. ‘Next after single a good
+wife’s best;’ but the single is better than the good wife. ‘Better marry
+late or never.’ I don’t think that is true. I fancy it must be better to
+marry young or never. I wish I had not to decide; and yet, after all,
+many a man would consider himself a deuced lucky fellow to be standing
+in my shoes. Success has spoiled me. I would have married her four years
+ago and welcome. Oh! Jenny, I wish I had never seen you.” And Maxwell
+Drewitt crossed his arms on the table, and leaning his head on them,
+thought this problem out—this wonderful problem of not loving a woman
+well enough to marry her, and yet of loving her so much that it made the
+idea of marrying another hateful to him.
+
+He could not make up his mind; he grew restless, he became soured; he
+would ride halfway to Cragantlet, and then turn back again. He was so
+young to sell himself for money; but yet such a chance might never come
+in his way again. Lady Emmeline had been thought a catch for Colonel
+Vervensoe. What would she be therefore for Maxwell Drewitt? It was
+folly, it was nonsense, it was midsummer madness; and the young man
+began to visit regularly at Cragantlet, which the courtesy of the next
+heir had left at Lady Emmeline’s disposal for twelve months till she
+should form her future plans. Mr. Maxwell Drewitt had his own opinion
+about this next heir—a distant relative of the late proprietor—which was
+not favourable. He thought he wanted to marry Lady Emmeline himself, and
+perhaps so did the widow, for after a time she began playing off Dolf
+Vervensoe against Max Drewitt. Dolf often came down to see to the
+management of the estates, and people soon commenced talking (they talk
+and chatter in Connemara the same as in any country village), and saying
+that Lady Emmeline would not have to leave Cragantlet at all except to
+be married.
+
+“She can go to Dublin and buy her trousseau, and get it all over there,”
+laughed Mrs. Munks, a little bitterly, for Cragantlet was a fine
+property, and the Honourable Mrs. Munks had daughters.
+
+“But surely,” suggested Mrs. Drewitt, “she would not marry so soon after
+her husband’s death?”
+
+“He has been dead a year nearly,” was the reply, “and I dare say Mr.
+Vervensoe would let her keep Cragantlet another for the sake of her
+fortune; besides, is there any person on earth who could say for certain
+what Lady Emmeline would or would not do? Louisa, my dear,” went on Mrs.
+Munks, turning to her second daughter, “do you remember that funny
+Scotch song Miss Macpherson so amused us with the other evening? Talking
+of Lady Emmeline puts me in mind of it. Something about a widow; don’t
+you recollect?”
+
+“Oh, I know,” exclaimed Miss Munks, holding up her riding-habit while
+she walked across the room, for as usual the mother and daughter had
+galloped over to Kincorth; “at least, I know the song you mean. I think
+I can repeat the last two verses, though of course it would be
+impossible for me to say the words anything like Miss Macpherson.”
+
+“Good gracious! Miss Macpherson! You should hear her talk, Mrs.
+Drewitt,” exclaimed Mrs. Munks, who spoke with a fine brogue fresh as
+the day it was imported from the county of Cork.
+
+Mrs. Drewitt vaguely wondered whether Miss Macpherson’s Scotch accent
+_could_ be any worse than Mrs. Munks’ Irish, while Miss Louisa began:
+
+  “‘Tam withered like a sickly flower that frae its stalk does fa’,
+  And in a twelvemonth after that puir Pate was ta’en awa’;
+  And as I laid him in his kist and closed his glazèd e’e,
+  I wonder’t if the yirth contained a lanelier thing than me.
+
+  “‘Noo I’m a waefu’ widow left, a’ nicht I sich and grane,
+  And aften in my musin’ moods when sitting here my lane,
+  There’s ae thing I’ll confess to you, ‘bout whilk I’m sair perplext,
+  I aften wonder, Janet, noo, whose lassie I’ll be next.’”
+
+“For my part,” concluded Miss Louisa, “I wonder that while there are
+more women than men in the world, widows are allowed to marry at all—I
+do indeed.”
+
+“There was a time when I thought if Colonel Vervensoe died, another
+person would try for Lady Emmeline, and try successfully; but it appears
+I was mistaken,” said Mrs. Munks.
+
+“Who was that other person?” asked Mrs. Drewitt, being naturally curious
+on the subject, for where there are few neighbours, even the quietest
+woman cannot help being interested in their affairs.
+
+“My dear, you are far too sly,” answered Mrs. Munks. “You know as well
+as I do;” and when Mrs. Drewitt declared and protested that she did not
+know, that she had not the faintest idea of whom her visitor was
+speaking, Mrs. Munks only laughed the more, and declared it would be
+better for her not to enlighten such pristine innocence.
+
+“Lady Emmeline never did flirt with any one you remember, and
+consequently there can be no person whom her marrying Mr. Adolphus
+Vervensoe will disappoint,” went on Lady Emmeline’s friend. “Colonel
+Vervensoe never did forbid any gentleman the house—never cut any
+acquaintance of yours when he met him.”
+
+“You surely do not mean Maxwell!” exclaimed Mrs. Drewitt. “Why he is
+young enough to be her son.”
+
+“Exactly so; and he is not rich either; while Mr. Vervensoe—is forty,
+though he has Cragantlet. Still I fancy your nephew will be
+disappointed. We have met him often of late riding in that direction.
+Have not we, Louisa?”
+
+“Yes, mamma,” answered Louisa, who would have said “yes,” even if her
+mamma had stated a falsehood. “But if you remember he told us he was
+looking after some land that was for sale.”
+
+“A man must say something,” remarked Mrs. Munks. “In my opinion, Lady
+Emmeline will do best to marry Mr. Vervensoe.”
+
+“I think so decidedly,” said Mrs. Drewitt, “if she marry at all. But
+from what Lady Emmeline dropped the other day about her future plans I
+should think she meant to remain a widow.”
+
+“Time will show,” was Mrs. Munks’ reply. And time did show, for Maxwell
+Drewitt proposed that very same evening, was accepted by Lady Emmeline,
+and rode home to Headlands an engaged man.
+
+The die was cast; the game played out. He had won a wife: he had made
+his fortune.
+
+In after days it was one of Maxwell Drewitt’s favourite remarks that “a
+man may get anything he wants in life if he be only willing to pay high
+enough for it.”
+
+Was he thinking then of the price he had paid for his wealth, of the
+exchange he had made for position? Who can tell? Who ever knew for
+certain what pleased or troubled Maxwell Drewitt, until that great
+sorrow came which clouded with darkness the evening of his life?
+
+One fact was sure, however, viz., that when the young man finally chose
+to sell himself for money, to follow ambition and eschew love, he flung
+his last chance of making a better thing of existence away for ever. But
+he had set out to conquer fortune, and he gained the day. He had decided
+that such a prize as Lady Emmeline might never cross his path again, and
+he determined to secure it while within his reach. He would continue to
+live at Headlands, and he would beautify and improve his property. He
+would farm Lady Emmeline’s estate, and add acre to acre, and thousand to
+thousand, till, when Kincorth did come to him, as come it should,
+Drewitt would be a name worth talking about.
+
+Better than ever the Martins were known, the Drewitts should be
+remembered. They had not sprung from any trooper of the merciless
+“Protector;” they had not kept their estates by currying favour with any
+king. The English papers should tell how a man—poor, disinherited,
+well-born—worked his way back to fortune, unassisted by his family,
+unhelped by patronage. Tourists would come and wonder to see, in the
+midst of that wild region, smiling fields and waving woods, and neat
+cottages and blooming gardens.
+
+They would go back and speak of what one individual had effected. He
+should have to give evidence on parliamentary committees: when he grew
+very, very rich, perhaps he would go up to Parliament himself. He could
+reclaim mile after mile of barren country. He would drain and cultivate
+the bogs; he would do away with the loose stone walls which divided the
+land when any division was attempted into about half-acre plots; he
+would plant trees up the mountains—there was no reason why trees should
+not grow among those fastnesses that he could understand; he would
+change the aspect of Connemara. Did he think of possessing the whole of
+it? Had he any vision about all Galway one day having but one landlord,
+and that landlord’s name being Drewitt?
+
+He reduced the 1,566,354 acres Galway contains into hundreds, and after
+deducting a certain portion for lake and mountain, calculated how long
+it would take to bring them under cultivation. He thought how useful
+those lakes would be for watering cattle, for purposes of irrigation; he
+ran over the best sites for towns and villages; he saw, in fancy, ships
+putting into each secure harbour; he saw the mines worked, the quarries
+filled with well-paid labourers, the country prosperous, the people
+warmly clad and sufficiently fed. He was doubtful whether Mayo ought not
+to figure in his programme too. As he rode out of Cragantlet gates he
+gave the rein to his imagination, and bid it conjure up before him fame,
+wealth, success. He held the bridle loosely in his hand, letting it lie
+on his horse’s neck, while he reflected on what he had just done, and on
+what fruit that act might bring forth for him.
+
+“Gold begets gold,” they say; that was what Maxwell hoped it might.
+“Money makes money” is oftentimes a great truth. Maxwell trusted it
+would prove a great truth in his case.
+
+The kingdoms of this world and the glory thereof seemed to spread out
+before Maxwell’s mind when he thought of what he had achieved on little,
+when he considered what he might effect with much.
+
+The kingdoms of this world were around him—there was land to be
+cultivated—there were the resources of nature to be developed—there were
+the hidden riches of the country to be brought to light. There was fuel
+to be had for the cutting—fish for the catching—cattle for the
+rearing—corn for the growing—wealth for the hand of industry to gather
+in. There were barren wastes to clothe with verdure—there were hills to
+plant with trees—there was granite to build houses—there was a land to
+be peopled—there was a people to elevate and civilize.
+
+It was all very fine; nay, it was more, it was glorious; and yet, as the
+moon sailed out from behind a bank of watery clouds and shone over the
+country this man was traversing, a feeling of loneliness, of desolation,
+of misery came upon him which he could neither explain nor analyze.
+
+There were the tremendous mountains, there the bare, solitary-looking
+lakes; far as his eye could see across the valley, nothing met his view
+but water, and stone, and bog: there were hills lying dark, and silent,
+and sullen in the distance. Above his head was a cloudy sky, where the
+moon kept wandering in and out like a troubled spirit. Now his way was
+dark, now light: now the moon shone clear on the lake, and the road, and
+the mountains, and then, again, she played fantastic tricks with the
+stunted bushes—with the huge boulders. She would lay a white trap along
+the highway and up the mountain-side, at which Maxwell’s horse would shy
+frightened; she would dance on the ripples of the waters; she would
+thrust her full face out of window, as it seemed, and stare down at the
+earth, and then she would plunge behind the fringed curtains of the
+night, and be invisible for a time again, after which she would come
+shyly forth and gaze upon the man who rode slowly and alone through that
+desolate portion of God’s fair earth.
+
+Is it not necessary for a person to be very sensitive or very poetical
+for a scene like this to produce a profound impression upon him. An
+individual who has not an amazingly warm heart can yet feel something
+stir within him when he looks upon a fine picture; and those who have
+lived in the country all their lives are as susceptible to the
+influences of nature’s varying moods as though her every change was
+fresh to their comprehension.
+
+All his life Maxwell Drewitt had loved scenery as he loved his country.
+All his life the sun, and the wind, and the snow, and the frost, and the
+sea, and the mountains had talked to him as they oftentimes fail to
+speak to a better man; and now, as the moon shone with a fitful
+brightness over the landscape, as her cold light fell on the breast of
+the lonely waters, as the clouds rolled up and shrouded the mountains in
+darkness, as the eternal hills returned his eager glance with a hard
+unsympathising gaze, as they looked with stony eyes down upon him as
+they had looked on others who had gone under their shadow sighing or
+singing, laughing or weeping—as he paused and listened to the dash and
+flow of the waters, as he heard the whistle of the plover and the cry of
+the curlew, some voice through the still night spoke as clearly and
+distinctly to Maxwell Drewitt’s soul as the “Preacher,” who tried all
+things, and pronounced them vanity of vanities, tells the same tale to
+us.
+
+Most probably Maxwell Drewitt had never read Ecclesiastes. If he had, he
+would certainly not have recollected any portion of it; and yet it was
+the same story as that told so many thousand years ago by the great king
+of Israel, which the night, and the clouds, and the moonlight, and the
+mountains were whispering prophetically in his ear—
+
+“I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards: I
+gathered me also silver and gold, and whatsoever mine eyes desired I
+kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy.
+
+“Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and _behold
+all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the
+sun. Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because
+I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me._”
+
+“It is a desolate place,” thought Maxwell. “It gives a man the blues!”
+and he struck his heel against his horse’s flank, and the animal sprang
+forward along the hard road, and the flints flashed fire as the iron
+hoofs dashed over them. He passed by lonely lakes, round the base of
+steep rocks, over bridges beneath which the mountain streams brawled
+noisily among the stones. He passed by silent cabins, by unroofed
+cottages, by deserted hearthstones gleaming white and bare in the
+moonlight; by a lonely chapel, by a forsaken-looking graveyard, where
+the tombs were covered with moss, where the crosses were black with
+weather, wind, and age.
+
+On, on, he rode, and as he rode he sung, either to encourage his horse
+or to reassure himself, that cheerful ballad which recounts the loves of
+King Connor and the fair Kathleen, and the sad fate of the latter:—
+
+              “‘The castle portal stood grimly wide,
+              None welcomed the king from that weary ride,
+              For dead, in the light of the dawning day,
+              The pale sweet form of the welcomer lay
+              Who had yearned for his voice while dying.’
+
+“While dying!” hummed Maxwell, and the words brought him within sight of
+Eversbeg.
+
+There was the sea, the fair, calm open sea, with the moonlight sleeping
+in it as peacefully as if he had not seen the same light wandering about
+the hills and through the valleys he had just left. There was Eversbeg
+Abbey, where poor Kathie had been lying dead this many a day. There was
+Eversbeg Head, round which Mrs. Drewitt had walked when she came to
+speak to him about Susan and Kathie and Lady Vervensoe.
+
+There was the cabin where he had received her, where they had sat beside
+the turf-fire talking; there were the woods of Kincorth high up on the
+other side of Duranmore Bay, and there close down by the bay was his own
+place, which he meant to convert into the garden of Erin. Was he
+sorrowful when he came in sight of all these things? My reader, no! the
+dark hour had passed away, and Maxwell Drewitt was a man of the world,
+in the world, loving the world once more.
+
+He was glad to have done with uncertainty, to have settled his future
+past recall, to feel no more hesitation, to have laid down a course to
+which he meant to adhere.
+
+He was glad; he had done well: he should do better. It was a good match.
+He knew half the county would say what a capital thing he had done for
+himself. He knew many a man would gnash his teeth with rage when he
+heard of Drewitt having carried off the prize.
+
+Altogether, Mr. Maxwell Drewitt was a contented man; and yet, as he came
+along the road that led down towards the bay, he stopped his horse for a
+moment, and strained his eyes away to a little cottage gleaming white
+and ghostly in the moonlight.
+
+It was a deserted cottage now, and he had made it so. There was no Jenny
+waiting for him by the stream or up the ravine. She had long been living
+with her brother in Duranmore, and many suitors had sought her hand in
+vain.
+
+“She will marry now,” was the idea that passed through Maxwell’s mind;
+and then, with a pang of remorse, he added, “Poor Jenny!”
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XV.
+                             Man and Beast.
+
+
+There is a great pathos about the life of a common man, about the story
+of any one whose wishes are moderate, whose pleasures are limited, whose
+hopes are small, whose way through existence is along the river instead
+of across the sea, adown the valley rather than over the mountains; and
+for this reason that little deserted cottage close by Duranmore Bay,
+looking white and ghostly in the moonlight, was as pitiful an object as
+Maxwell Drewitt’s eyes could have rested on.
+
+No person knew better how Ryan had loved that cottage; how he had
+delighted in the look out over the bay, in the view up the ravine. He
+had seen him pacing beside the stream and superintending the mowing of
+his little crop of hay. He remembered the various articles of additional
+furniture with which Ryan had adorned the rooms in honour of Jenny’s
+arrival; how he had planted creepers by the porch, and nailed
+trellis-work together for the honeysuckle and the clematis to clamber
+over; how he had laid out his little garden sloping towards the south,
+and filled it with London-pride and lavender, with red daisies and
+hepaticas, with cabbage roses and sweet Williams, with daffodils, and
+pinks, and southernwood, and tulips, and gentianallas, and all the
+common flowers which are so beautiful in their homely simplicity and
+sweetness.
+
+As a man plants and sows and beautifies for his wife that is to be, so
+Ryan, knowing that dream could return no more, that love could never
+come back again with its freshness, planted and sowed and beautified for
+the young sister who was going to make his house a home for him at last.
+
+All this Maxwell Drewitt remembered. He recollected also what a
+different man Ryan seemed after his sister’s return; how much more
+comfortable he appeared to be; how he used to hurry home from Duranmore
+to his little cottage; how busy he was wont to make himself with spade,
+and rake, and hoe.
+
+The simple pleasures of a common life came back to Maxwell’s memory
+separately and singly with the power of a curse. He had driven Ryan away
+from Inchnagawn; it was he who had laid the garden waste; he who had
+broken down the trellis-work and left the cottage desolate.
+
+As regarded the horsewhipping, he and Ryan had long been even; for
+Maxwell had worked on and till he got Waller’s agency withdrawn from
+Ryan and given to a _protégé_ of Mr. Samuel Turner.
+
+He had made no secret of this to the lawyer, for he knew for his
+sister’s sake Mr. Ryan would make no complaint of unfairness to Mr.
+Waller.
+
+“You’ll spy again, Ryan, will you?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, and thrash you again if I catch you meddling with her,” was the
+spirited reply.
+
+At which answer Maxwell laughed.
+
+“I owe you a good turn for your interference, though I have done you a
+bad one for meddling in my affairs. But for you, I really think I should
+have married Miss Bourke.”
+
+“I am greatly obliged for the intended condescension,” said Ryan.
+
+“You would have been more obliged to me for the actual condescension, I
+suppose?” suggested Maxwell.
+
+“I told you once I would rather put Jenny in her coffin than give her to
+you,” answered the other.
+
+“Nonsense,” retorted young Drewitt; “you only said that because you
+thought I never would ask her honourably.”
+
+“Repeat that sentence—I wish you would repeat it,” said Ryan, facing
+round on his tormentor, who, however, declined to oblige him.
+
+“You understood my meaning well enough. I need not go over the ground
+again. You are wrong. There was a time when I loved your sister very
+much; when—when I might have made a lady of her. But you cured me of my
+folly; and I vowed then to be revenged. I am revenged. Let bygones be
+bygones.”
+
+The pair had never ceased to be on speaking terms. Maxwell was too wise
+and Ryan too careful to permit the little world of Duranmore to imagine
+there was any open rupture between them.
+
+They nodded in the street, they shook hands when they met in a room;
+only Ryan did not go to Headlands, and Maxwell never entered Ryan’s
+office in Duranmore. Ryan never ceased keeping a watchful eye on Jenny,
+and Maxwell carried his pebble in his pocket, and turned it every now
+and then, biding his time.
+
+He had sworn to be revenged, and he was revenged. Did that fact comfort
+him now, as he looked down on Inchnagawn, lying white and silent in the
+moonlight?
+
+This man had owned no wide acres, no fine park, no great house. He had
+but a little patch of land, and behold he was cast out of it! He had
+been doing very well, and all at once the ground was cut from below his
+feet. Every man over whom Maxwell had any influence left him and went to
+the opposition lawyer. Poor Ryan’s conduct had not in all cases been
+above fear and above reproach; and Maxwell, having once been his
+confidant, fought and killed him with his own weapons.
+
+He had almost to commence again, and there were times when he thought of
+leaving Duranmore altogether, and seeking his fortune elsewhere.
+
+That was what Maxwell wanted to make him do. He wished to see the back
+of Mr. Timothy Ryan, and of his sister also.
+
+It was the old story of the poor man and his ewe lamb over again. Ryan
+had not much, but what he had Maxwell took from him. Maxwell was gaining
+great possessions; but, like Ahab, he longed for the vineyard of Naboth
+the Jezreelite as well.
+
+Besides, Ryan knew too much of him and of his affairs, and he desired to
+be rid of his former friend. When you have made all the use you can of a
+weapon, it is as well to break it, so that the steel may not prove
+dangerous in other hands. That was what Maxwell wanted to do. He wished
+to get Ryan out of his way, and he had not stood over-nice about
+compassing his end.
+
+Was it pleasant for him to remember these things as he rode slowly
+homeward under the moonlight? Was there nothing pathetic even to him in
+Ryan’s worn face, in Jenny’s pale cheeks?
+
+“If she will marry Connor,” was the conclusion Mr. Maxwell Drewitt
+arrived at that night, “I will try to push him on; but I cannot do
+anything for her brother. He must leave Duranmore.”
+
+And Jenny at that very moment was lying awake in the moonlight,
+thinking, with the tears in her eyes, of him; whilst Ryan was sitting in
+his office, facing his affairs and cogitating concerning ways and means.
+
+Maxwell could have made them both happy, had he chosen; but he elected
+not to make them happy, and fell asleep contented.
+
+There had been many minor changes in Duranmore during the four years I
+have spoken of. There was an opposition doctor in the town, and another
+attorney. A queer old bachelor had taken up his quarters, for a
+permanency apparently, at the “Marsden Arms.” Mr. Murphy was gone to
+London, from which place he sent occasionally notes of rare and
+exquisite cases to Dr. Sheen, who, not having the same enthusiasm for
+his profession, thought that the “good old way” seemed best after all.
+
+“I cannot help fancying,” he wrote back on one occasion to his late
+assistant, “that the operation you mention (laryngotomy) must have been
+excruciatingly painful to the patient.”
+
+“No doubt it was,” replied Mr. Murphy, in dudgeon; “but, good God, sir,
+consider how interesting!”
+
+“That is all very true,” remarked Dr. Sheen to Mr. Murphy’s successor,
+“but I never was fond of diseases out of the common;” which was all the
+more fortunate for Dr. Sheen, as he did not meet with many singular
+cases amongst his patients, and could not have cured them if he had.
+
+The most out-of-the-way ailment he ever had to puzzle over was that of
+an old lady named Connor, who lived with her son in the cottage near
+Eversbeg Head (on the Duranmore side), which, at the time Mrs. Drewitt
+first beheld the Atlantic, was tenanted by a retired sea captain.
+
+Mrs. Connor’s complaint was gastric carcinoma—a disease which was, in
+those days, to the faculty precisely what an unclassified animal or a
+strange fish proves to the naturalist. Mr. Murphy would have been
+enchanted with the case, but not so Doctor Sheen.
+
+To Mrs. Connor herself it seemed as terrible an affliction as could have
+been laid upon her. She found nothing interesting or entertaining in the
+matter. It was dying by inches. It was sinking in the ocean with help
+all around. It was wasting off the face of the earth under the influence
+of a disease more depressing than consumption, and equally hopeless—a
+disease of which science could give no account—for which skill could
+prescribe no remedy.
+
+There were no alternations in this ailment—no days of hope, no times of
+relief. It was like hiring a hearse, and driving by slow stages to the
+grave. It was not life; it was not death; but it was dying, day after
+day, week after week, month after month, with starvation for the end.
+
+Starvation, though she had plenty of nourishment, and was able to eat. A
+disease as strange and inexplicable to the spectator as perplexing to a
+doctor; a disease for which there was no cure but death, no palliation
+but patience; in which there was no stay, no pause—which picked the
+flesh off her bones, and pinched her cheeks, and exhausted her strength,
+and tried her temper—which it was hard to bear alone in that solitary
+cottage by the sea-shore.
+
+Her son could not stay with her all the day. He had to be away from
+early in the morning till six o’clock in the evening, at the marble
+quarries, where he was a kind of overseer, and both mother and son
+consequently felt very grateful when Jenny Bourke took her needlework in
+her hand, and went to pass a few hours at Duranmore Cottage.
+
+She was quiet and sad enough in these days, it is true; but she seemed
+none the less sweet and loveable for that. She would sing her plaintive
+songs, and talk to the old lady about her ailments, and lead her out in
+the sunshine round by Eversbeg Head, or up towards the mountains where
+the marble quarries were; and poor Mrs. Connor took kindly to the girl,
+and prayed her when she was gone to try and love Dennis, and become in
+due time his wife.
+
+But Jenny only shook her head.
+
+It was a few days after Maxwell’s night ride home from Cragantlet that
+Jenny and Mrs. Connor climbed to the top of Eversbeg Head—no great
+ascent after all—and sat them down there.
+
+The summer’s sun was shining over the scene—over the wide Atlantic, over
+Duranmore and Eversbeg Bays, over the old Abbey, and over the Headlands,
+towards which Jenny’s eyes turned longingly.
+
+She had not seen Maxwell for some time, and she loved him. How much?
+More than Dennis Connor loved her; more than Jenny could ever love any
+one again.
+
+The two women sat side by side, each busy with her own thoughts. Mrs.
+Connor was gazing over the fair earth, upon which she should so soon
+have to close her eyes. Jenny was looking at Maxwell’s home and wishing
+she could see him.
+
+Jenny was a good little soul, and she had a kind heart beating in her
+breast; and she was very sorry for Mrs. Connor, and very glad to help
+her to while away the time; but, yet, Jenny was not quite disinterested.
+
+Duranmore Cottage was not a great distance from Headlands, and she could
+sometimes catch a glimpse of Maxwell.
+
+She caught a glimpse of him on the day in question when he came with a
+new horse Lady Emmeline had sent him along the avenue from his house.
+
+The drive was rough and the horse intractable. So Maxwell led him up to
+the main road, accompanied on his way so far by a couple of his men, who
+were curious to see the animal in harness.
+
+The creature had been used to the saddle, and rebelled against the
+indignity of a vehicle. He had been used likewise to jib, but a pair of
+spurs prevented much harm coming of that habit, so long as he had a
+rider on his back. With a conveyance behind him, however, the case was
+different; and the moment Maxwell jumped into his tax-cart and touched
+the animal with his whip the brute began to back.
+
+All this Jenny, from her seat among the grass and the heather, was able
+to see, and she could see also Maxwell shouting and gesticulating,
+although she could not hear what he said.
+
+“Take his head, Lynch, and lead him on a bit,” Mr. Drewitt ordered.
+
+But leading him on proved a matter beyond Lynch’s capability, for which
+reason Maxwell began flogging the creature unmercifully.
+
+A jibbing horse being one of those circumstances which tries a man’s
+temper too much, is, I think, one of those struggles which a woman ought
+never to see; but Jenny, being on the height above the Headlands, could
+not help seeing, and neither could Mrs. Connor, for that matter.
+
+“What a wretch—what a brute!” exclaimed the old lady indignantly.
+
+“If the horse won’t go on, what is he to do?” demanded Jenny, ready to
+do battle for Maxwell, though she could have run down the hill and
+prayed him to cease beating the creature for her sake.
+
+For all the good flogging did, Maxwell might as well have flogged one of
+the granite pillars against which Lady Emmeline’s present had backed the
+tax-cart, and after he had lashed the thong off his whip the young man
+sprang with a curse to the ground, and, taking the reins short in his
+hand, tugged and tore at the horse’s mouth like a madman. And the more
+he tore the bit the higher the brute lifted his head, while he lowered
+his hind quarters and backed as well as he was able.
+
+It was a trial of brute strength now. There was no skill, no
+horsemanship, no science in the matter; it was whose will should be
+fiercest, whose power greatest.
+
+As I have said before, a man is not to be judged by his conduct towards
+a jibbing horse; but yet to the outsider—to the spectator whose temper
+is not tried, whose blood is not up, whose strength is not defied—the
+struggle between an unreasoning animal with a bit in his mouth, with
+harness on his back, with a conveyance behind him, and a man free to go,
+free to think, free to act, always seems cowardly and terrible.
+
+With her breath coming thick and short, Jenny watched the combat. A
+woman cannot bear these kind of struggles, perhaps because she knows
+that in the hands of man she is oftentimes but as a creature having a
+bit in her mouth herself.
+
+Which would win? Maxwell turned his whip in his hand and struck the
+horse with the butt-end again and again, with such force that Jenny
+could hear the blows, and feel each stroke go through her own tender
+heart.
+
+He sent for a heavy cart-whip and showered blows on the animal with
+that. His men took each a wheel and shoved, while he kicked and damned
+and flogged.
+
+“That man is a perfect devil!” said Mrs. Connor, solemnly.
+
+“Let us go, oh, let us go!” cried Jenny, rising; but still fascinated,
+she stood still and watched.
+
+Then she saw that which through all her after life it made her turn sick
+and faint to remember—Maxwell stoop and scoop up a handful of gravel off
+the road.
+
+“Get up,” he said to one of the men, and the man jumped in and took the
+reins.
+
+“Lash him on,” continued Maxwell, and he handed the fellow the whip.
+
+Then Maxwell thrust the gravel up the animal’s nostrils, rubbing the
+small sharp stones into the quivering flesh; and while the creature, mad
+with pain, sprang forward, he leaped to his seat, and taking both reins
+and whip, kept flogging the horse far as Jenny’s eyes could follow him.
+
+“I think, Mrs. Connor, I will go home,” she said, when she had walked in
+silence back to Duranmore Cottage, and helped Mrs. Connor off with her
+shawl and settled her in her chair by the window. “I think that horse
+has made me feel a little ill.”
+
+Mrs. Connor looked into the girl’s face as she said this, and saw there
+what she never told to Dennis, or Jenny, or any human being; only she
+sat for a long time after Jenny left her, crying all alone.
+
+Meanwhile Jenny walked back to Duranmore, heartsick, faint, and weary,
+and when she was near her own door she was met by Mrs. Sheen, the
+doctor’s wife—for among other changes, Dr. Sheen had taken unto himself
+a wife—who said:
+
+“How pale you look, Miss Bourke! What is wrong with you?”
+
+“I have walked too far in the heat, Mrs. Sheen,” answered Jenny. “I sat
+out in the sun with poor Mrs. Connor, and it has made me feel faint.”
+
+“It is no wonder Mr. Connor is fond of you,” replied Mrs. Sheen, with a
+knowing look; “but you must not overdo the thing, my dear. Even for his
+sake you must not.”
+
+“I do not know what you mean at all,” answered Jenny; but she blushed up
+to the roots of her hair, nevertheless.
+
+“I did not mean anything, of course,” explained Mrs. Sheen; “and talking
+of marriages—have you heard the news?”
+
+“News! I did not know there was ever any news in Duranmore,” said Jenny.
+
+“There is news now, at any rate,” was the reply. “Mr. Maxwell Drewitt is
+going to be married to Lady Emmeline Vervensoe.”
+
+The houses danced up and down before Jenny’s eyes, and the street went
+round and round.
+
+“Will you tell me all about it to-morrow?” she asked, while she felt
+blindly about for the wall, and held on by a window-sill. “I feel so
+sick and faint now, Mrs. Sheen.”
+
+“Had not I better bid the Doctor come round and see you?” said the lady;
+but Jenny answered:
+
+“It is only the heat. I shall be well to-morrow.”
+
+Then she walked into the house and ran up the staircase, and locked
+herself into her own room, where she fell on the floor in a dead swoon.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVI.
+                              Poor Jenny.
+
+
+It was on a Monday that Maxwell Drewitt proposed to Lady Emmeline, and
+on the following Friday he was coming along the road leading from
+Eversbeg to Duranmore, when he met a palefaced, large-eyed girl, who
+told him she wanted to speak to him.
+
+“Not now, Jenny,” he said. “I am going up to a party at Kincorth. Wait
+for a day or two.”
+
+“If I wait any longer I shall die,” she answered. “I must speak to you.
+Timothy is away, and I have been watching for you all the afternoon. Let
+me ask you something now, and then go to your party if you like.”
+
+“We cannot stand talking on the road here, Jenny,” he answered, “but I
+tell you what,” he added, seeing the look of despair in her poor tearful
+eyes: “meet me at twelve, in the summer-house at the top of the fall
+(you know the summer-house). I will be there.”
+
+“Upon your honour?” she asked.
+
+“Upon my soul,” he replied, and the pair parted. She walked forward to
+Mrs. Connor’s, and he went on to Kincorth.
+
+It was a quiet party, given in honour of Maxwell’s engagement. The
+Drewitts did not think well of the match, and for that reason they were,
+perhaps, a little over-anxious to be cordial to Lady Emmeline.
+
+It was a good thing for Maxwell, Mr. and Mrs. Drewitt agreed; and yet
+Mrs. Drewitt knew a younger woman would have appeared to her better.
+
+Such a union was likely to give Maxwell all he had lost through his
+father’s unlucky marriage, but still it seemed unnatural to see so young
+a man selling himself for money.
+
+Nevertheless, the Drewitts were bound to be pleased: the head of the
+family was expected to hold out the right hand of fellowship to Lady
+Emmeline, and Mr. and Mrs. Drewitt had accordingly driven over to
+Cragantlet and invited the widow to a very quiet party in honour of the
+event.
+
+On account of Lady Emmeline’s bereavement dancing would have been
+improper, but, looking towards her impending marriage, music was
+permissible.
+
+It was a musical party therefore—that is, dinner and music. Only very
+intimate friends on both sides were invited, such as the Munks and
+Marsdens and Hickmans and Dolf Vervensoe, who began at once to pay
+marked attentions to Laura Munks, which attentions caused the heart of
+her honourable mother to leap for joy.
+
+Miss Macpherson came with the Munks. Mrs. Drewitt had asked her to come,
+greatly on account of her musical attainments, which would, that poor
+lady hoped, cause the evening to go off all the more pleasantly.
+
+Lady Emmeline was in great force: she put on her deepest mourning, and
+flourished her widest hem-stitched pocket-handkerchief. She kissed Mrs.
+Drewitt and Wilhelmina, and Master Brian and Miss Geraldine, and pressed
+Mr. Drewitt’s hand with emotion.
+
+And Mr. Drewitt pressed Lady Emmeline’s, and the pair had a little
+private conversation in the embrasure of one of the drawing-room
+windows; and Mr. Drewitt wept, and Lady Emmeline wept, and the two
+exchanged sentiments of regard and vows of eternal friendship.
+
+To do the poetess justice, she did not care one straw about money. Give
+her Maxwell, and she was indifferent to filthy lucre. Had he owned
+Kincorth fifty times over she could not have been fonder of him. It is
+pitiful to think how far good looks go with women: how much better she
+liked this handsome young fellow than she had ever cared for her
+far-honester husband.
+
+Well-a-day, well-a-day! so the world goes, and so the world will go till
+the Millennium.
+
+Of all the company, Maxwell himself was, I think, the most
+uncomfortable.
+
+A man takes kindly enough to having honours thrust upon him, but he
+feels awkward when a select party is invited to see the process.
+
+Besides, though he loved money he hated marriage; and, above all, was
+there not a poor soft-hearted little girl crying her eyes out for his
+sake?
+
+Poor child! poor Jenny! She was in his memory all that evening. He could
+not see Lady Emmeline for thinking of her when the widow spoke; and as
+for Miss Macpherson, there were some people whom Maxwell always
+detested, and Miss Macpherson was one of them; for this was part of the
+song that terrible Scotchwoman elected to sing with a pathos utterly
+indescribable, while Maxwell Drewitt stood beside his aunt, digging his
+nails into his flesh, and cursing the poet who wrote the words and the
+woman who sung them with all his heart and soul and strength.
+
+Was ever a more mournful song penned, reader, than that from which Miss
+Macpherson selected four sorrowful verses? Four verses, sorrowful and
+beautiful. Here they are:—
+
+               “My head is like to rend, Willie,
+                 My heart is like to break;
+               I’m wearin’ aff my feet, Willie,
+                 I’m dyin’ for your sake:
+               Oh! lay your cheek to mine, Willie,
+                 Your hand upon my head;
+               Oh! say ye’ll think on me, Willie,
+                 When I am cold and dead.
+
+               “It’s vain to comfort me, Willie,
+                 Sair grief maun hae its will;
+               But let me rest upon your breast,
+                 To sab and greet my fill;
+               Let me sit on your knee, Willie,
+                 Let me shed by your hair,
+               And look into the face, Willie,
+                 I never may see mair.
+
+               “I’m weary o’ this warld, Willie,
+                 And sick wi’ all I see;
+               I canna live as I hae lived,
+                 Or be as I should be;
+               But fauld into your heart, Willie,
+                 The heart that still is thine,
+               And kiss ance mair the white, white cheek
+                 Ye said was red lang syne.
+
+               “The lav’rock in the lift, Willie,
+                 That lilts far ower our heid,
+               Will sing the morn as merrilie
+                 Aboun the clay cauld deid;
+               And this green turf we’re sittin’ on,
+                 Wi’ dewdrops shimmerin’ sheen,
+               Will hap the heart that luvit thee
+                 As warld has seldom seen.”[A]
+
+Footnote A:
+
+  The whole of this ballad is to be found in a curious collection of
+  Scotch songs entitled “Whistle Binkie.” The book is somewhat rare, and
+  I do not chance to have it by me at the moment; but I believe the
+  verses quoted above were written by Motherwell; and I know that they,
+  as well as the “King’s Ride,” referred to on page 215 (the name of the
+  author of which I am unable to learn), have recently been most
+  charmingly set to music by Miss Elizabeth Philp.
+
+After the manner of all Scotch poems, the original was of great length.
+If Maxwell had heard the whole of it I think he would have sacrificed
+Miss Macpherson in his uncle’s drawing-room.
+
+How long that evening seemed! How unendurable! How intolerable it was to
+listen to the chitter-chatter of a dozen female tongues! How plainly he
+could see the rouge on Lady Emmeline’s cheeks! How he hated the
+affectation of her manners! How sick the little flutter she pretended to
+feel made him! How he wished to heaven he could break Dolf Vervensoe’s
+head for his sly allusions, for his meaning looks!
+
+Miss Macpherson sang, and Mrs. Drewitt sang, and Laura Munks sang, and
+Lady Emmeline was induced to “join in.”
+
+Then they had tea handed round, and the card-tables were brought out,
+and the old stagers played whist, while the young people flirted, and
+Lady Emmeline sat talking demurely to Mr. Drewitt, and Maxwell walked
+from window to window looking forth at the view on which the moon was
+just rising. It must be getting on for twelve he knew by that, and
+thinking of Jenny, he went across to Lady Emmeline, and after leaning
+over the back of her chair and whispering a few compliments in her ear,
+reminded her how late it was getting.
+
+“You will come with me as far as Eversbeg,” she suggested; but Maxwell
+told her he thought of remaining at Kincorth for the night, upon which
+she rose to go.
+
+“Time has passed so pleasantly, Mrs. Drewitt,” said Lady Emmeline, “that
+I had not the least idea of the hour.” And the widow, after a tender
+farewell of the Drewitt family, swept down to her carriage, attended by
+Maxwell and his uncle.
+
+Her departure was the signal for the remainder of the party to disperse;
+and accordingly, with a great clattering of horses’ hoofs, and banging
+to of carriage doors, and putting up of carriage steps, the guests drove
+off, and left Kincorth quiet and lonely in the moonlight.
+
+Then Maxwell bade Mrs. Drewitt good-night, and took his hat, spite of
+Mr. Drewitt’s entreaties for him to stay.
+
+“Thank you, no,” answered Maxwell, “I cannot remain. I told Lady
+Emmeline I thought I should, but I forgot then that a man said he would
+come to me to-morrow morning at seven about some stock, and I should not
+care to have to walk over from here so early as all that comes to.
+Good-night, sir.”
+
+“Good-night, Maxwell, and I wish you every happiness. I think you have
+made a most prudent choice,” finished Mr. Drewitt, wringing his nephew’s
+hand; which piece of commendation elicited the remark, “D—n my choice
+and your thoughts too,” from Maxwell, as he walked down the drive.
+
+When he had got well among the trees he left the gravelled walk, and
+made his way through the plantations to the glen mentioned in an early
+chapter.
+
+Many a time he and Jenny had met in that glen during the last two years,
+for it was a lonely place where strangers were sure never to intrude,
+and where the family rarely penetrated. At the very top of the glen
+stood the ruined summer-house, going fast to wreck and decay. The roof
+let in the wet, the floor was damp and grass-grown, the seats were
+broken and crazy. It was nearly a mile away from the mansion, and as
+solitary and deserted a spot for a meeting of the kind as can well be
+imagined.
+
+As he climbed up the steep path which led to it from the glen, Maxwell,
+looking at the summer-house perched on the very top of the waterfall,
+saw a woman leaning against the rustic pillars that formed the entrance.
+
+“You are late,” she said; “I thought you were not going to come;” and
+she dropped back the shawl she had put over her head, and the white sad
+face was lifted appealingly to his in the moonlight.
+
+“Have I ever disappointed you, Jenny?” he asked, and he kissed her cold
+lips while the girl clung to him in a kind of passionate despair.
+
+“They told me you were going to be married,” she whispered; “it is not
+true? tell me it is not true.”
+
+If there had been any use in telling her a lie he would have done it;
+but he knew it must come to this sooner or later, and so he held his
+peace, and turned aside his head.
+
+“Why don’t you look at me?” she cried; “why don’t you answer?” And then,
+in her extremity, she fell on her knees before him, and prayed him say
+it was false, it was not true.
+
+He lifted her from the ground, and took her in his arms, and held her to
+his heart, and kissed her over and over again; but still he said
+nothing, while she kept moaning out—
+
+“It’s not true! You never could be so fond of me, and marry another
+woman.”
+
+“If I were married to twenty women I could never be so fond of one of
+them as I am of you,” he answered.
+
+“But you are not going to be married? Say it was an untruth they told
+me—say so, for God’s sake!”
+
+“What can it matter, Jenny?” he replied. “I will never love any one as I
+love you. I swear that.”
+
+“But you promised to marry _me_!” Jenny broke out, tearing herself from
+his embrace, and facing him as he stood silent and pale in the
+moonlight. “You swore that to me. You said whenever you had money enough
+you would marry me, and that then, when we were married, Timothy would
+soon come round. You did, you know you did! and if it was a lie, God
+pardon you, Maxwell Drewitt, and God help me!”
+
+She sank to the earth once more, not kneeling this time, but crouching,
+with her hands covering her face, with her head bent forward on her lap,
+crying—crying, oh! so terribly.
+
+And the moonlight lay on tree and ocean and field—on Duranmore down by
+the shore, on the great mountains, and the smaller hills.
+
+“You will marry me, Maxwell?” she sobbed at last, and she seized his
+hands in hers, and covered them with tears and kisses. “You cannot mean
+to desert me after all. You cannot leave me to face the world’s scorn. I
+would do my best to please you. I would never ask to go out with you to
+any place, or to be your equal, or to know your concerns. Only marry me,
+for the love of God!”
+
+“I told you before,” he answered huskily, “that I can never love any
+woman but you; and as long as I love you, what does it matter whether I
+am married or single?”
+
+“Maybe it does not matter to you,” she said; “but to me—to me——”
+
+“You will marry somebody else, Jenny, and look back upon all this as a
+foolish dream—a foolish happy dream.”
+
+“It’s a dream that’s mighty like reality,” she answered. “I wish it was
+a dream!” went on the girl, passionately. “I wish that I could wake now
+and know that all that has passed was only a dream! If I could go back
+to what I was when I first met you, I’d die happy. I wouldn’t care that
+this was my last night on earth.”
+
+“Jenny—Jenny!” he remonstrated.
+
+“I’m thinking that the water down by there looks mighty quiet,” she
+continued, looking with her great sorrowful eyes away to the sea. “If I
+could get anybody to row me out far enough that I’d never come ashore,
+I’d drown myself. Timothy would be sorry, but he would not be half as
+sorry as he will be if I don’t do it.”
+
+Maxwell could not bear this. He made her get up, and drew her back to
+the firmest of the seats, and sat down beside her, and laid the poor
+tired head on his breast and tried to comfort her. There had been a time
+when his lightest caress made Jenny’s heart leap with joy; but nothing
+he could say or do would comfort her now. “Marry me, marry me!” she kept
+crying, and she twined her arms round his neck and told him how their
+sin had found them out; how it was because she knew she could keep their
+secret no longer that she wanted him to save her from shame.
+
+For a minute, Maxwell sat stunned; a sickening remorse came over him.
+Her child!—and she was little more than a child when he first met her.
+Her child!—Maxwell knew now the reason of her pale thin cheeks, of her
+unusual importunity, of her longing look towards the quiet sea.
+
+“Oh! Jenny, Jenny, I wish we had never seen one another,” he cried out
+at last; “I wish I had never looked at your pretty face, my darling!”
+
+“And it’s I that wish I had never seen you!” she answered, “or that I
+had died before this ever came to pass; before I ever was the bad girl I
+have been, and brought trouble and disgrace on the one that knew you
+better than I did. What are you going to do now?” she demanded, with a
+sudden access of indignation. “Are you going to marry me or leave
+me?—going to desert me or shelter me from the storm? You will marry me,
+Maxwell, won’t you? Now that you know all, you will not forsake me?”
+
+And she put her “cheek against his cheek,” and took his hand and held it
+upon her heart, while she begged him to have mercy, while she craved him
+to have pity, in tones that Maxwell Drewitt remembered at his dying
+hour.
+
+But she did not know with whom she had to deal. The very reason she
+assigned would have been powerful enough to prevent Maxwell fulfilling
+his promise. Should the finger of scorn be pointed at him?—should the
+purity of his wife be questioned? He would as soon have thought of
+marrying the vilest of women as of mating with Jenny now. And he had
+brought her to this, with his lying words, with his false tongue, with
+his fair promises! He had found her young and guileless and loving, and
+she was sitting now with the moonlight streaming on her pale face,
+ruined and betrayed. That was a pleasant memory for him when “the door
+of the house came to be shut,” when the noise of the outer world sounded
+no longer in his ears, when there was no future of life stretching out
+before him—but only silence, and sickness, and recollection in the
+darkened chamber, in the lonely room.
+
+“Would he marry her?”
+
+No. But Maxwell was at immense pains to explain why he could not do so:
+how he was very, very poor; how he was only marrying Lady Emmeline for
+her money; how he would always spare enough for Jenny; how, though
+another woman might own his name, no one but Jenny should own his heart.
+He tried to work upon her feelings; he tried to get her to be
+self-sacrificing for the sake of the love she bore him. “You would not
+like to see me struggling for bread all my days?” he finished: “you
+would not like to ruin me and keep me poor till the end of my life?”
+
+“You ought to have thought about that before you ruined me,” she
+answered. “You talk to me as if money could give me back what I have
+lost, when I would cheerfully beg my bread from door to door if only I
+could be what I once was; if I only could!”
+
+“But, Jenny,” he answered, “why should you be ruined at all? There’s a
+man who would marry you to-morrow—Connor. Marry him, and then——”
+
+He stopped in his sentence, for the girl rose up at his words and looked
+him in the face. She unwound his arm from about her, she put his hand
+away from her face, she lifted her head from his shoulder and stood in
+the moonlight staring at the man she loved with an incredulous surprise.
+
+“And it’s that you want me to do?” she said. “And it’s your child you
+would have me pass off on him as his?—and that’s the way you think
+you’ll get rid of me? But you’re mistaken; you’re wrong this time. I’ll
+tell Timothy; I’ll tell Lady Emmeline; I’ll tell your uncle, and I’ll
+see if there isn’t one of them will have me righted. Marry Dennis! Oh!
+Father of Heaven, what is this at all, at all?” and she rushed out of
+the summer-house and down the glen, sobbing as she went.
+
+He picked up her shawl and followed her. It did not take much pleading
+on his part to make her promise that she would not fulfil her
+threat—that she would not go and blazon her wrongs about.
+
+She blazed up into a passion one moment, but was calm the next.
+
+“I will do well for you, Maxwell,” she said, “though you have done ill
+for me. I will keep your secret, if it kill me. I will be faithful to
+you, though you have been false to me. I won’t have any money; but I
+won’t drown myself: I promise you, and I don’t break my word. Let me
+pass you. Don’t kiss me again—don’t; you belong to another woman now,
+and I hope—I do hope she will make you as happy as I would have tried to
+do!”
+
+“I cannot let you go, Jenny,” he said. “I love you, and you only,
+still.” And he kissed her as he never kissed another on earth, with
+passionate tenderness, with a hungry affection, with a despairing
+remorse—kissed her while the tears ran down her white cheeks, and the
+stream trickled at their feet, and the roar of the waterfall sounded in
+their ears, and the trees stirred their branches in the light wind which
+went rustling and murmuring among the trees.
+
+Then he wrapped the shawl which she wore for disguise, like the country
+people, gently about her, and pulled it over her head. And thus they
+parted, so far as meeting and loving and trusting was concerned, for
+ever.
+
+It is not in all cases parting to be separated from those we love by
+absence or death, by distance or the grave.
+
+There are worse partings than those on the deck of the outward-bound
+ship, or by the dying beds of the dear ones we have walked with through
+years—worse partings, between two who may yet hear each other’s voices,
+and touch each other’s hands, and look in each other’s faces, day after
+day.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVII.
+                             Master Harold.
+
+
+There was little change in Connemara—in the general aspect of the
+country I mean—and yet the suns of sixteen summers had risen and set
+upon the mountains since Maxwell Drewitt rode home from Cragantlet under
+the moonlight—since, under the moonlight also, Jenny Bourke accepted the
+sorrow that was inevitable, and went away through the night, crying
+silently.
+
+There were the mountains, grand and stern and rugged as ever; there were
+the desolate lakes, the dreary bogs, the huge boulders, the endless
+bays, the rocky headlands, the grassy promontories washed by the wide
+ocean.
+
+To look at the country, any one might have thought only a new day had
+dawned upon the earth; and it was a new day indeed, but one twenty years
+after that summer afternoon when you, reader, first looked into the
+parlour of Inchnagawn Cottage, and heard Maxwell Drewitt and Timothy
+Ryan talking about the new mistress who was coming home to Kincorth.
+
+What are twenty years, when all is said and done, but as an hour in the
+life of the great hills? Twenty years! Man frets and troubles himself
+through the third portion of almost his longest day, and the hills look
+on silently. Twenty years! Others come and go, are born and die, marry
+and have children, strive and plan, harass themselves, laugh and weep,
+rejoice and mourn, while the hills remain unchanged.
+
+Twenty years! The mountains and the lakes and the ocean were the
+same—but the people! Ah! dear reader, no one but God in Heaven may ever
+know what the Irish suffered between the summer’s day on which this
+story opened and the summer’s day on which I take up my pen once more.
+
+It was a lovely afternoon, towards the latter end of June. There had
+been rain in the early morning, but towards twelve o’clock the clouds
+dispersed, the sun broke out, and now, as the mail-coach, bound to
+arrive at Duranmore at five o’clock, stopped to change horses at
+Calgillan, ten miles distant, the traveller could not have desired a
+more beautiful day for his journey, or a finer country for his eyes to
+wander over. Fine, not with cultivation, but by nature. Grand with
+hills—well-wooded here and there too—with waterfalls dashing down the
+mountain-sides, with rapid rivers pursuing their course onward to the
+sea. The road leading from Calgillan to Duranmore was far the most
+picturesque approach to the little town which could have been selected,
+and it was because of its beauty that two English gentlemen chose it for
+their route.
+
+The younger of these two men had never visited Ireland before; the elder
+had been in Connemara twenty years previously, when he stood for
+Duranmore and lost the day. Henry Pryor was coming back, after all those
+years, to look at a property which was for sale near Duranmore, and if
+he liked, to buy it.
+
+Whilst he remained in Connemara he was going to be the guest of Maxwell
+Drewitt, Esq., of the Headlands; and Maxwell Drewitt, Esq., had kindly
+offered to extend his hospitality to Mr. Francis Gyton, whose father was
+principal in the great firm of Gyton, Lark, Munday, Hatfield and
+Company, Austinfriars, London.
+
+Mr. Gyton, senior, was a millionaire—Mr. Gyton, junior, was rather a
+fast young man, who went down to the City and “looked in” at the office
+as seldom as he could help, whose health required continual absences
+from town, and who, consequently, the moment he heard his uncle intended
+visiting Ireland, offered to accompany him.
+
+Calgillan was not a town, merely a straggling village lying among the
+hills, and Mr. Gyton employed himself during the time that was occupied
+in taking the tired horses out and putting the fresh horses to in making
+depreciating remarks concerning the country and its inhabitants
+generally. He saw nothing picturesque except the short petticoats of the
+women.
+
+“Like ballet girls, by Jove!” finished Mr. Gyton, who pronounced Jove
+Jauve, and surveyed Irish society through an eyeglass.
+
+“You never saw a ballet girl half so pretty,” answered a young lad who
+had travelled with them for the last thirty miles, and who now stood
+with his hands in his pockets leaning against the wall of Joyce’s Hotel.
+
+“And how do you know anything about the matter?” asked Mr. Gyton,
+laughing, for he had been tormenting and chaffing the boy all the way,
+“you never saw a ballet girl in your life.”
+
+“I don’t want to see one,” retorted the other, sulkily; “but I know our
+women are prettier than the English women for all that, and our country
+is finer than England. You have no mountains like those where you came
+from;” and he pointed away towards the “Twelve Pins,” which are the Alps
+of Connemara.
+
+“No; our mountains are twenty times higher,” said Mr. Gyton, laughing
+again.
+
+“I could take you to a place where you might count a hundred lakes below
+you,” went on the boy.
+
+“Mill-ponds,” observed the other.
+
+“And you have no such fish in England as we have at our very doors.”
+
+“Ah! you never tasted whitebait, my boy.”
+
+“We’re ready now, gentlemen, if you please,” said the guard at this
+juncture, and all the passengers clambered up into their seats.
+
+“There’s a team!” Mr. Gyton leaned back from the box to whisper to the
+young Irish lad; “why, there’s not a coachman in England would sit
+behind four such sorry nags.”
+
+“You never saw such a turn-out, at any rate,” answered the boy.
+
+“He’s right, sir,” interposed the driver. “Master Harold’s right. You
+might travel England and Ireland through, and never meet with such a
+turn-out again.”
+
+“The horses are as thin as whipping-posts, and the harness is falling to
+pieces; but I should have thought that no such uncommon sight on this
+side the channel,” replied Mr. Gyton.
+
+“But we know—we know better, don’t we, Master Harold?” chuckled the
+coachman, bringing his whip down cleverly on the off leader’s flank as
+he spoke.
+
+“Yes, Doyle, we know,” answered the boy, and the pair laughed in chorus.
+
+“What is remarkable about the turn-out?” asked Mr. Pryor, who had for
+some time been watching Master Harold with considerable interest.
+
+“There is nothing remarkable; they’re trying to humbug us, that is all,”
+said his nephew.
+
+“Bet you five to one,” retorted the boy, sharply.
+
+“Done. Who is to hold the stakes?”
+
+“He may,” agreed Master Harold, pointing to Mr. Pryor, “and he shall be
+umpire.” And with that the lad pulled out five shillings, and placed
+them in Mr. Pryor’s hand.
+
+Mr. Gyton laughed till he almost fell off the coach, while he laid down
+his stake.
+
+“Now go ahead,” he said; “what is there so remarkable about Pharaoh’s
+lean kine?”
+
+“Why, there are four horses—you see them; and here is Billy Doyle who
+drives them—you see him; and the five have only one eye among them, and
+that is Billy’s. Did you ever see anything like that in England?—did you
+now?”
+
+“Fairly beaten, Frank,” said his uncle.
+
+“Done, by Jupiter!” exclaimed the young man about town. “Here, sir, take
+your money.”
+
+“Give it to Bill—I don’t want it,” said the lad, contemptuously; and he
+folded his hands tightly together, and looked away towards the “Twelve
+Pins” with as lordly an expression as though he owned them and the
+hundred lakes he had spoken of into the bargain.
+
+“But they can’t go,” began Mr. Gyton, who considered Master Harold far
+too good fun to be left in peace. “Poor things! they seem as if they
+hadn’t one leg among them—as if they were lame as well as blind. They
+are tired already. Do you call such animals horses in this part of the
+country?”
+
+“If I was sitting where you are,” retorted the lad, “I would show you
+whether they could go or not.”
+
+“Perhaps you will take the box seat,” suggested Mr. Gyton, with a
+delighted chuckle.
+
+“I will if you’ll let me.”
+
+“Don’t, Frank, do not,” entreated Mr. Pryor. “You are carrying the joke
+too far,” he added, in a lower tone; “you do not understand the Irish.
+Remain where you are.”
+
+But Mr. Gyton would not take his uncle’s advice. They were at the very
+foot of a hill which rose up before them steep and straight like the
+wall of a house. “I mean to walk up here,” he said, “and if you like at
+the top to take my place and the ribbons, you are welcome to both.”
+
+“I did not see you offer to drive,” remarked the boy. “Are you not used
+to it?”
+
+“Not to driving such cattle as the creatures you call horses. A good
+English thoroughbred now, or something of that kind.”
+
+“Oh, indeed!” said Harold, and they walked on in silence.
+
+“Coachman, I say, coachman,” exclaimed Mr. Gyton, when they reached the
+top of the hill, “this young gentleman is going to take my place and the
+reins, and means to break all our necks. Keep your one eye on him.”
+
+“I won’t need, sir. Master Harold is as good a whip as ye’d find betwixt
+this and the Shannon; ay, and faith an’ there’s not a leap a horse could
+take that it’s himself couldn’t go over with him.”
+
+“I’d like to see him on the back of an English hunter,” laughed Mr.
+Gyton.
+
+“And damn me if I would not like to put _you_ on the back of my father’s
+chestnut Madcap; you’d be precious soon off, I’m thinking,” Harold
+turned round to answer.
+
+“Take care, Frank, take care,” urged Mr. Pryor, but his nephew was
+incorrigible.
+
+“Is the chestnut anything like our blind team, which you are driving so
+beautifully?” he asked.
+
+“No, she is not; but our team could go faster than perhaps you would
+like to travel,” retorted the boy.
+
+“Try me,” was the reply.
+
+“Don’t, for Heaven’s sake!” entreated Mr. Pryor; but, before the words
+were well out of his lips, Harold had knotted up the reins, flung them
+on the horses’ necks, and, with an hoorah and a whoop, lashed them
+forward down the hill.
+
+“Now for Hell or Duranmore,” gasped the coachman, while the insides
+screamed, and every outside passenger held on for his life.
+
+“Can Irish horses go now?” hissed out the boy, turning round to his
+tormentor, as the coach went swaying and rocking down the hill.
+
+Every moment the pace increased. Doyle seized the whip, but he could not
+stop Harold shouting and hallooing, and as the horses felt the vehicle
+gaining on them they galloped, blind though they were, faster and faster
+still.
+
+The collars tightened, and the haime chains were strained to their
+utmost, as the creatures drew further away from one another in their
+frantic endeavours to get loose.
+
+From side to side—bumping, tossing, rolling—the coach went flying down
+the incline. If one of the horses had fallen it would have been all over
+with the passengers; but hot iron had never touched the hoofs of those
+four blind steeds, and they were sure-footed as goats.
+
+Down the hill they went; the mountains seemed to be spinning along with
+them. Duranmore and the Bay were now up, now down—now in the depths of
+the earth, now on the top of Eversbeg Head—but at last the level was
+safely reached, and the bays, after galloping along for a while, stopped
+of their own accord.
+
+“It’s not your fault, Master Harold, that there’s one of us left alive.
+If the craythurs had not been blind it is hard to say when we would have
+pulled up,” remarked Doyle, as he descended from his perch and
+unfastened the reins, and soothed and patted the frightened and panting
+animals, that stood with their nostrils quivering, with their flanks
+white with foam.
+
+“Is it your misfortune, Bill?” asked the lad, swinging himself to the
+ground. “I’ll send for the kit;” and then he looked coolly up to Mr.
+Gyton, and hoped he had enjoyed his drive. “It was not the distance, I
+suppose, so much as the pace?” he suggested, and lifting his cap to the
+two gentlemen, he turned along the road leading towards Kincorth.
+
+“Who is that—that lunatic?” asked Mr. Gyton, when the coachman resumed
+his seat on the box.
+
+“That, sir,” answered the man, whose cheeks and nose were blanched as
+white as though whiskey had never reddened them, “is Masther Harold
+Drewitt; and I am free to say that a bigger divil niver run.”
+
+“Any relation to Mr. Drewitt, of Kincorth?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
+
+“His youngest son,” was the reply; and uncle and nephew exchanged
+glances.
+
+“They sent him to school to quiet him down a bit; but faith I think he’s
+come back worse than he went.”
+
+“Send a goose to Dover, and a goose will come over,” remarked Mr. Gyton.
+
+“A goose!” repeated the coachman. “It’s not much of a goose there is
+about Masther Harold. It’s more of the cloven foot than the web that’s
+inside his boots; an’ it’s a pity, for a kinder-hearted, more spirity,
+freer-spoken young gentleman there’s not in Connemara. But they tell me
+it’s the mother has spoiled him entirely; an’ a nice lady she is, too,
+and homely-like in her ways, for a foreigner.”
+
+“Foreigner!” echoed Mr. Pryor, in surprise.
+
+“Well, English then, like yourself, sir; shure it’s all one. The masther
+married her in London, I think it was—and well spoken of she is by rich
+and poor. Only they do say it’s she spoils Masther Harold: though some
+think he would not have been so wild a divil if he had not been so much
+at the Headlands: that’s his cousin’s place, sir, Mr. Maxwell Drewitt,
+and a clever gintleman he is. He’s made a sight of money, and gives
+plenty of employment.”
+
+“We are going to the Headlands,” remarked Mr. Gyton, demurely.
+
+“See that now!—well, as I was saying, you are going to see a clever
+gintleman. What he has in his head nobody would credit; and as for land,
+I could not tell all he bought up in the Estates Court. All that fine
+farm, that lies down in the hollow after we passed Calgillan, is his;
+and he has a great property, they tell me, beyond Cragantlet; that is
+behind the hill there facing you: and then he has the place that used to
+be Mr. Munks’, on the other side of Laddenwell Lake; and never chick nor
+child to leave all to. Many a time I think about that when I see the
+childer swarming in and out of the cottages of his labourers. They say
+he’d give Cherryfield, the place he bought from Mr. Munks, to have a
+son. It seems queer, sir, the way them things go. I suppose it’s by
+favour, like kisses.”
+
+“It will be a deucedly lucky thing for that boy if he never have any
+children,” observed Mr. Gyton, thoughtfully.
+
+“So Mr. Drewitt thinks, people do say,” answered the driver. “Maybe,
+gentlemen,” he went on after a pause, “ye wouldn’t mind saying nothing
+to Mr. Maxwell about Masther Harold’s tricks. It might get him into
+thrubble. An’ the lad intended no harm; it’s just divilment and
+contrariness.”
+
+“Oh, we will do the young fellow no harm,” said Mr. Gyton, “though, as
+you remarked, it was not his fault that our necks were not broken; and
+if you take my advice you will not trust him with the ribbons again.
+What _are_ you considering, uncle?” he added. “You look as grave as if
+you had been retained for a bad case and got an adverse verdict.”
+
+“I was thinking about that Master Harold,” replied Mr. Pryor, who had
+neither wife nor child himself. “I was thinking about that Master
+Harold. He is the very image of what Maxwell Drewitt was twenty years
+ago, though there is not much resemblance now.”
+
+“They tell me Mr. Maxwell never favoured him, sir,” dissented the
+driver; “that there’s a kindly look in Master Harold’s eyes, and a soft
+winning way with him, that nobody ever remembered in Mr. Maxwell; but I
+ask your pardon, sir, for making so free, and Mr. Maxwell a friend of
+your own too.”
+
+“I have only seen him twice in the last twenty years,” replied Mr.
+Pryor, “but I can remember very well what he was the first day we ever
+met, and that boy is like him. I could not think who he reminded me of
+all the way. Of course,” he added, speaking to his nephew, “Maxwell
+Drewitt was a man when I first saw him, somewhere about my own age at
+that time, and this Harold is but a boy; still, the turn of the head,
+the tone of the voice, the features, and something in the expression,
+are the same. How it carries one back!” he finished, with a sigh; “how
+it carries one back! But here we are at Duranmore, and there is Mr.
+Maxwell Drewitt himself.”
+
+“Welcome once more to Connemara,” said that gentleman, shaking Mr.
+Pryor’s hand as though he wanted to shake it off. “See to the luggage,
+Dickson,” he added, turning to his servant, and then he asked his guests
+which they would choose—to walk or drive.
+
+“Walk, if you please,” answered Mr. Gyton. “I shall be glad to stretch
+my legs after so much coaching.”
+
+“And you?” inquired Maxwell, turning to Mr. Pryor, with a smile at the
+younger man’s lead.
+
+“Should like the walk also,” laughed Mr. Pryor. “Do you remember all the
+walks we had along the bay, twenty years ago?”
+
+“Twenty years this month,” answered Maxwell Drewitt. “They have not been
+long in passing.” And the trio sauntered down the street together, while
+Doyle said to Dickson—
+
+“Whose’s them gentlemen, Barney, do ye know?”
+
+“One of them is some Mr. Pryor,” said Dickson, “that stood for Duranmore
+the time of the great election.”
+
+“You don’t mane that?”
+
+“Do you think I’m a liar then?” asked Dickson, who was of a taciturn
+disposition and easily annoyed.
+
+“I don’t think much of the young chap, but if that’s Mr. Pryor, I wish I
+was dhriving him ivery day, and was getting his blissing in silver too.”
+
+“Ay, faith, I believe ye. That’s the only blissing or crossing aither
+you ever thrubble yerself about.”
+
+Which remark being disagreeably true, caused Mr. Doyle to retire into
+the “Marsden Arms,” where he wet Mr. Pryor’s gift with whiskey
+immediately.
+
+Meanwhile Harold, after parting with his travelling companions,
+proceeded along the road which led round the north side of Duranmore
+Bay, and wended his way towards home—now running, now loitering, now
+pegging stones at the birds in the trees by the wayside, now cutting a
+stick, now decapitating the dandelions and benweeds, which were
+plentiful and in splendid bloom. He was full of life and youth and
+strength and spirit. He did not seem to know what to do with himself for
+very happiness, and so he would jump backwards and forward over the
+ditches and swing himself up to the first branch of a tree, and then
+drop lightly to the ground, in order to let off the superfluous steam.
+
+A fine lad truly—straight and tall and well-made—with black hair, dark
+eyes, white teeth, good features, and a fine open expression of face. He
+was like Maxwell Drewitt, and yet he was unlike. He had Maxwell’s figure
+and Maxwell’s face, but he had not Maxwell’s impassiveness of muscle,
+his command of countenance, his steely self-possession.
+
+A fine lad—one whom his mother idolised and his father adored. No other
+autocrat had come to reign after him; and the love and thought and
+devotion bestowed on Harold as a baby were bestowed on Harold likewise
+when he was a boy.
+
+Brother and sister and servants were all alike—all yielded their wills
+to Harold. It was an understood thing in the household that Master
+Harold could think no wrong, that Master Harold was not to be crossed,
+that whatever Master Harold desired was to be done for him immediately.
+
+Brian had for so long a time given place to Harold that no person
+remembered the time when Brian was anybody. The eldest born was to have
+Kincorth, and the younger was to reign over all hearts in consequence.
+No one ever seemed to think such an arrangement harsh or unjust until
+the boys grew up, but then people began to remark that Mrs. Drewitt’s
+entreaty—
+
+“Do, Brian. Now cannot you let him have it? remember he is the
+youngest,” was heard too often for much good to come of such training.
+
+The best horse in the stable, the best fishing-rod, the best gun, had to
+be relinquished in Harold’s favour without a murmur; and, perhaps, I
+cannot say more in praise of Brian Drewitt than that he never murmured
+at this favouritism; that he accepted his lower seat without a word.
+
+At the gate of Kincorth the brothers ran up against each other.
+
+“I was coming to meet you, Haro,” said Brian, passing his arm through
+his brother’s. “I meant to have been at the cross-roads in good time. Is
+the coach early, or am I late?”
+
+“Both, I should say,” answered Harold. “The coach was early, for I
+drove; and you are late, for some reason best known to yourself.”
+
+“I had to fetch Doctor Sheen to see papa,” was the reply. “He’s often
+ill now. I sometimes think Sheen does not know what is the matter with
+him.”
+
+“Sheen is a fool!” remarked Master Harold. “Why don’t you have old
+Barnes? But doctors are no use, are they now?”
+
+“I don’t know,” sighed Brian; “but I wish somebody would do him some
+good.”
+
+“What ails him?” asked Harold; “is it the same old pain?”
+
+“I believe so,” answered Brian, and the pair walked on a little way in
+silence.
+
+“I tell you what,” at last broke out the younger brother; “if I were
+mamma I’d take him to Dublin; I would not stand Sheen’s duffing about
+any longer. The fellows there could soon find out all about him, and
+he’d be ready for the hunting if they set him up at once.”
+
+“Harold——”
+
+“Yes, Brian.”
+
+“Sometimes I am afraid that nothing will set him up.”
+
+“Do you mean, you think he is going to die?” Harold asked, with a
+gradual crescendo.
+
+“I hope not—but——”
+
+“You are as bad as old Sheen,” retorted Harold. “Die—why should he die?
+he is ten years younger than Sheen himself, and he’s twenty years
+younger than old Mrs. Waller—Waller’s grandmother I mean. Why you might
+as well talk about you or me dying as of him.”
+
+“Don’t say anything to mamma.”
+
+“_I_ would be ashamed to repeat such folly,” answered Harold, with a
+swagger; “but I shall tell her to take him to Dublin, and to have done
+with Sheen.”
+
+“I wish she could. She was wishing herself she had money to pay some
+eminent physician for coming down.”
+
+“Money—there you go again—money! It is all nonsense our being short of
+money. Haven’t we this, and haven’t we that, and haven’t we hundreds and
+thousands and millions of acres beside?” asked Harold.
+
+“What is the use of acres if they are all mortgaged?” demanded Brian.
+“What is the use of land if we can make nothing out of it?”
+
+“I declare, Brian, if you go on like that I will turn straight back to
+school; you are the most confounded old croak I ever heard; and I have
+got such a lark I want to tell you about. I galloped the horses down
+Calgillan Pass, and nearly frightened the wits out of two English
+fellows, who thought Doyle’s team had no blood in them. They shouted for
+me to stop: the younger fellow prayed and cursed alternately: the
+insides were screeching like pigs a-killing. Old Doyle could not get the
+reins, for I had pitched them on the horses’ necks, and I gave it to
+them with the whip as long as he left it with me. Didn’t I, just? and
+didn’t they go? We came down the hill with never a drag on, at the rate
+of about forty miles an hour; and then I hoped they had enjoyed their
+drive. Serve them right!—teach them to abuse Ireland again.”
+
+“You’ll get your neck broken some day to a certainty, Harold,” said
+Brian, gravely.
+
+“Well, it can only be broken once, that is a comfort,” answered Harold.
+
+“And did the harness hold?—did no accident happen?”
+
+“Devil an accident.”
+
+“What did Doyle say?”
+
+“He was frightened to death—thought we were all going to hell, I
+believe—old humbug! He was trembling for his half-crowns I suspect. I
+hope they won’t give him a halfpenny! Shall I tell mamma? Yes, I will,
+for it would put her all of a shake. No, I won’t, because she would send
+word to Doyle never to let me drive again. There she is at the hall-door
+waiting for us;” and both sons started off to reach her.
+
+“Beaten, Brian,” said Harold, disengaging himself from his mother’s
+arms, and wiping her kisses away with his coat-sleeve. He could not bear
+her to kiss him. He did not think it looked manly; he was afraid of
+anybody calling him a “Molly Coddle,” and he considered the correct
+thing would have been for Mrs. Drewitt to shake hands with him and say,
+“How are you, Harold?” instead of “hugging and kissing,” as the young
+gentleman put it.
+
+A natural enough sentiment for his age and disposition; and yet, do not
+be quite so energetic about the matter, Harold. Let the twining arms
+hold you, and the loving kisses remain, for those arms cannot clasp you
+always—those kisses cannot be given twice.
+
+There is no need to be ashamed of a mother’s love, boy; no need to
+wonder if any one be looking at that clinging paroxysm of affection.
+
+Do not turn your eyes from her to see if the servants have beheld your
+meeting; for you will never find another on the wide earth to love you
+like her. No one hereafter will lie awake at nights wondering how it is
+faring with you: no one will ever think of you in the days to come as
+she does now: no one in that vague future stretching away before you
+will ever feel her entire world bound up and centered in you.
+
+Do not thrust her love aside, boy; you will stand in grievous want of it
+yet: do not wipe her kisses off your lips; the day is coming when you
+will lay your head on her breast and pray for another—and another yet.
+
+Her love may be foolish, but it is foolish only because she thinks too
+much of you.
+
+As man is born of woman, so man in his bitterest extremity turns back to
+woman; and ere many years passed over, Harold asked to listen to no
+voice beside his mother’s, to look in no other face save hers, to hold
+no hand except that which had so often caressed him in vain.
+
+He found comfort in the love which was unselfish in its selfishness; he
+sought shelter in a heart he had well-nigh broken; while she, poor soul!
+while she——?
+
+If Mrs. Drewitt loved him too much, she was punished; if she were
+unjust, justice was done; if she sowed the wind, she reaped the
+whirlwind; if she made an idol of him, he showed her his feet of clay;
+if she spoiled him, she repented her of it; if she mourned, the Lord
+God, in his own good time, brought consolation to her!
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVIII.
+                      A little Political Economy.
+
+
+The breakfast-room at Headlands faced the east, and from the large
+bay-window you could see, over the trees which grew down to the sea,
+Eversbeg Abbey and Eversbeg House, the mountains where the marble was
+quarried, and the Twelve Pins far away in the distance.
+
+“Lovely! exquisite!—perfectly enchanting!” exclaimed Mr. Pryor, looking
+for the twentieth time away from his tea and toast, from his ham and
+eggs, to the view before him. “It is not reality, Mr. Drewitt; we must
+be in fairyland!”
+
+“Never saw anything more charming put on the stage,” capped Mr. Gyton;
+at which remark his host laughed a little scornfully.
+
+“Frank and I do not generally agree in our opinions,” observed Mr.
+Pryor; “but on the present occasion I confess I think he is right. I
+never saw anything more charming on the stage nor in a picture, which is
+about the same thing. On the stage, as in a picture, the best part of a
+scene is given to us, and all the worst is excluded. What we get is
+perfect of its kind, without blemish, without spot; and this scene is
+perfect; we could wish nothing more, we could do with nothing less.”
+
+“An unconscious plagiarism from Moore,” remarked Lady Emmeline from
+behind the tea-urn, with an engaging titter. She had had a pleasant life
+of it during the fifteen years of her second experiment in matrimony;
+but experience had not made her any more sensible.
+
+“Indeed!” said Mr. Pryor; “I was not aware.”
+
+“Of course not—I am sure not,” replied Lady Emmeline, who prided herself
+on the extent of her reading. “So few people know the little poem to
+which I refer, It begins”—and Mr. Drewitt’s wife coughed affectedly and
+tapped with her fingers on the table-cloth, and said, “Oh dear! how does
+it begin? ‘To kneel—’ no; ‘To keep—’ no—how is this?—‘To weep—’”
+
+“To damn,” suggested her husband, and Mr. Gyton grew quite red in the
+face with his efforts to keep from laughing.
+
+“‘To sigh, yet feel no pain,’” said Lady Emmeline, with a swan-like
+movement of her lean neck; “‘to weep, yet scarce know why’—the lines I
+referred to are towards the end—
+
+     “To feel that we adore with such refined excess,
+ That though the heart would burst with more, it could not live with
+    less.
+
+“This is love,” and Lady Emmeline shut her eyes and repeated the
+remainder of the poem to herself.
+
+“Well, it may be,” remarked Mr. Drewitt; “I confess I am no judge; but
+it sounds to me much more like folly. What is your opinion, Mr. Gyton?”
+
+“Mine?” exclaimed that young gentleman. “I know nothing about it. The
+fact is, love is not in my way. Ask my uncle; he’s a shocking flirt.”
+
+“Oh, fie!” said Lady Emmeline, looking immensely pleased for all that.
+“Defend yourself, Mr. Pryor, from such a frightful accusation.”
+
+“Conscious innocence——” murmured Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Needs no advocate,” finished his nephew. “What a compliment to your
+clients!”
+
+“I have come here, Frank, to forget my clients,” answered the other.
+“Let me enjoy my holiday; let me imagine I am in Paradise without a
+serpent near me.”
+
+“If the garden of Eden had been in Ireland,” said Lady Emmeline, “poor
+Eve would never have been beguiled into eating the apple.”
+
+“My experience of Eves would lead me to a different opinion,” remarked
+Mr. Pryor. “I do not think the absence of serpents would have secured
+the safety of the fruit.”
+
+“How terribly ungallant!” observed his hostess.
+
+“How terribly true!” added her husband.
+
+“And besides,” finished Mr. Gyton, “St. Patrick was not born for a few
+years after Eve’s petty larceny.”
+
+“It is a sad thing,” said Mr. Pryor, addressing his host, “that so fine
+a country should not be more prosperous. I cannot understand the reason
+why Ireland is so far behind England at the present day. You have soil,
+climate, labour, fuel, canals, navigable rivers. It is a perfect puzzle
+to me.”
+
+“You are wrong in some of your premises,” answered Maxwell Drewitt; “we
+have not soil, nor climate, nor efficient labour. Of course a soil can
+be made, and bogs can be drained; but these things require capital, and
+Ireland has no capital. If we had your climate and your capital we could
+do anything.”
+
+“But there must be money in Ireland,” Mr. Pryor persisted.
+
+“There is money in the North, I suppose,” answered Maxwell,
+indifferently; “though even there I should say great capitalists are
+almost unknown; and there may be a few pound-notes in Dublin; but, as a
+whole, there is no money in Ireland, for this reason—that all the money
+made in Ireland is spent out of it; that rents are not returned to the
+soil, but squandered in England and on the Continent. We never had many
+resident gentry, and there are fewer resident gentry now than ever.
+Since the famine, this part of the country, at any rate, has been like
+the Deserted Village. People have purchased in the Encumbered Estates
+Court who have never seen their properties, and are never likely to see
+them.”
+
+“Surely, however, the Encumbered Estates Court has done good?”
+
+“I ought to say nothing against it, at any rate,” answered Maxwell, with
+a smile, “for I have bought to great advantage in it.”
+
+“I am sure I thought at one time he was going to buy all Connaught,”
+said Lady Emmeline, languidly.
+
+“Things will be better now, though,” remarked Mr. Pryor, after
+acknowledging Lady Emmeline’s observation.
+
+“Will they? What makes you think so?” asked his host.
+
+“The famine must have taught the Irish not to depend on potatoes,”
+interrupted Mr. Gyton.
+
+“Would a murrain teach the English not to depend on beef and mutton?”
+demanded Mr. Drewitt.
+
+“Certainly not; but beef and mutton are not potatoes, are they?”
+
+“Potatoes were beef and mutton to the Irish,” answered the owner of the
+Headlands.
+
+“And, good heavens! how can you expect a country to prosper whose people
+are satisfied with that cursed root, as Cobbett called the potato?”
+asked Mr. Gyton.
+
+“The people here are not at all averse to butchers’ meat,” Maxwell
+replied, coolly; “only it is sometimes true philosophy to be satisfied
+with what one can get.”
+
+“_Quand on n’a pas_——” began Lady Emmeline, but her husband cut
+ruthlessly across her little observation.
+
+“There is no man living,” he went on, “can tell what the cause of
+Ireland’s misery may be, or where the best remedy for that misery is to
+be found. I thought at one time I had got to the bottom of the matter.
+After twenty years’ consideration I have arrived at the conclusion that
+I know nothing about it. Every fact in the country is contradicted by
+some other fact.”
+
+“But surely the reduction of the superabundant population——” began Mr.
+Pryor.
+
+“My dear sir, as you came through the country, did you see any traces of
+there ever having been a superabundant population in Connemara?” broke
+in Mr. Drewitt. “I hear a great deal of talk about the blessings of the
+potato blight, and the good done by emigration, but I confess I cannot
+trace the blessing or see the good.”
+
+“Potatoes could not, however, be a desirable article to form the sole
+diet of an entire population,” persisted Mr. Pryor.
+
+“They were quite as good as yellow meal,” retorted Maxwell Drewitt, “and
+a precious sight more palatable. I really should like to have some clear
+explanation of the benefits this blight has showered down upon us,” he
+continued; “for, so far as I can see, it has only reduced our population
+a couple of millions and brought Indian corn to our doors. Is yellow
+meal beef and mutton? is yellow meal bread and butter? is Indian-meal
+porridge a richer diet than potatoes and salt?”
+
+“But wages must be higher,” argued Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Possibly they may be a little,” answered the other; “But certainly
+provisions are higher also. Potatoes are dearer, oaten meal is dearer,
+all the necessaries of life to the mass of the population are much
+dearer. It is not the potato blight or emigration that has, in my
+opinion, caused the slight rise in wages, but simply that money is not
+of the same value as formerly. No terrible calamity has fallen on the
+whole of England during the last few centuries, and yet an ox used to be
+sold for fewer shillings than it now fetches in pounds. I repeat what I
+said at first: plague, pestilence, and famine have done Ireland no good.
+What will do Ireland good remains yet to be seen.”
+
+“You have mounted him on his hobby now, Mr. Pryor,” said Lady Emmeline,
+“and if you do not take him out he will not get down to-day;” which hint
+being sufficiently intelligible, Mr. Pryor asked his host to show him
+his improvements, and Mr. Gyton gladly accepted an invitation from Lady
+Emmeline to accompany her over to Kincorth.
+
+Mr. Gyton thought her Ladyship “awful value,” as he told Harold
+confidentially, while he considered her husband confoundedly slow.
+
+“A demmed blue-book,” was Mr. Gyton’s irreverent conclusion; “a perfect
+table of confounded statistics.” And Harold laughed and vowed he would
+tell his cousin what Mr. Gyton said; while Mr. Gyton was inwardly
+thinking he had never seen, in all his life, a prettier girl than
+Geraldine Drewitt.
+
+Meanwhile Mr. Pryor and Maxwell Drewitt walked by the shore, conversing
+as they loitered along.
+
+“I should like to understand why this country cannot be made to
+prosper,” repeated Mr. Pryor, pausing at last and looking with
+thoughtful eyes across the bay. “We in England imagined Ireland’s
+difficulties were over; but now, when I come back here, I see no change.
+I see the same dress, the same wretched cabins, the same dunghills, the
+same weeds. Excepting your place, I see no improvement anywhere. Tell me
+what your idea is of the matter? as a thinking man you must have formed
+some opinion on the subject.”
+
+“I have not,” was Maxwell’s reply. “I am as far at sea as ever. If you
+told me that unless I could give a clear account of the cause of
+Ireland’s misery, and suggest some means of bettering her condition, I
+should be hung to-morrow morning—I must either string together a parcel
+of lies, or go to the gallows. I know no more than an infant where the
+evil lies, though I know where it does not lie. Ireland has nothing to
+complain of from England now. The English helped us nobly through the
+famine, though only about a quarter of that help reached the poor. We
+are fairly taxed, fairly governed. The unprosperous man never likes the
+prosperous. If Ireland does not like England, it is only because England
+is the rich lady, and Ireland the poor. Grievances are all rubbish: very
+well on the hustings, perhaps, or in a newspaper leader, but absurd when
+one talks sober, sorrowful earnest. I am sorry to see my country limping
+along, but I cannot see where the shoe pinches for all that.”
+
+“You are satisfied, then, the population was not excessive?”
+
+“It was not excessive for the country, though it probably is still
+excessive for the capital in the country. A dozen servants may not be
+too much for one house; but if there be no money to feed and pay them,
+what then?”
+
+“That is precisely what political economists say!”
+
+“I beg your pardon, political economists say there were too many people
+for the soil. You have only to use your eyes to see that view is
+erroneous, at any rate. The population of London, which is about half
+that of the whole of Ireland, is not too great for London, because you
+can employ your population and pay them. Here we could employ our
+population, but not pay them. Do you see what I mean?”
+
+“Yes, you want capital; but if capital comes to Ireland, you shoot its
+bodily representative.”
+
+“I have not been shot.”
+
+“But you are Irish, and you are popular.”
+
+“No,” said Maxwell Drewitt, slowly. “No, I am not popular, but I have
+been cautious. I loved my life, and I took care of it. I have tried to
+be just. I have made no distinction between Catholic and Protestant. I
+have never evicted a tenant. I have given employment. I have assisted
+the poor. I have fed the starving. And yet,” he added, “I am not
+popular. Explain it how you will.”
+
+Mr. Pryor thought about what the coachman had said, but wisely held his
+peace.
+
+“There is my uncle,” proceeded Maxwell, “who has mortgaged and wasted,
+beggared his tenantry and himself, ruined his tradespeople and
+encouraged pauperism, been a furious bigot and an intolerant Tory. He is
+liked better than I am. People would rather run a mile for a word from
+him than go across the street for a shilling from me. I cannot be blind,
+Mr. Pryor; these are the facts which puzzle me about Ireland—which I
+shall go to my grave and never understand.”
+
+“How is your uncle?” asked Mr. Pryor.
+
+“But middling,” was the reply. “Middling in mind, body, and estate. As
+for the latter, it is going to the dogs. Nothing can save Kincorth. If
+he lives long enough he will have to leave it, and God help the man who
+has it after him.”
+
+“Why?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Because an angel from heaven would not give satisfaction there now. If
+you bring a new mistress home to a disorderly household, what is the
+consequence? That the household hates the new mistress who wishes to put
+things to rights a little. For the same reason, Kincorth would hate a
+new master.”
+
+“But tenants are surely not like servants? They stand in a different
+position to their landlord to what a servant does to his master, and a
+good landlord must be felt by them to be a blessing.”
+
+“True—but there you come round the screw in the Irish character: they
+like to be benefited, it is true, but they must be benefited in their
+own way. They love to have their rents remitted, rents lowered; but they
+cannot endure a man who wants them to improve their land and take more
+out of it; who wishes them to help him and themselves at the same time.
+I have made my money, not by my tenants, but by my labourers. There is
+not a man who pays me rent that has bettered himself or me to the value
+of sixpence. If I had to begin again I would not buy an estate that had
+tenants on it; because if you evict them you are likely to get a bullet
+through your head, and if you let them stay it is endless worry and
+trouble. Besides, there is a something very shocking—look at the matter
+how you will—in sending a whole colony adrift. A man used to a farm of
+his own will not become a labourer; and over and above that, the Irish
+attachment for place is strong to a degree inconceivable to an English
+mind. If you took a small house from an Englishman and gave him a better
+he would be contented I suppose?”
+
+“He would be a great idiot if he were not,” answered Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Well, an Irishman would not be contented. Where he is planted he grows:
+he is like a cat; he loves the walls he has been accustomed to. If you
+take the roof off he will still kindle his fire on the old hearthstone,
+and sit there with nothing but the sky above him, cursing the men who
+have, as he calls it, brought him and his ‘to the world.’”
+
+“But what are people to do?”
+
+“Let the tenants stay, as I have done; or, better still, buy the waste
+land and reclaim it. I would turn no man out in this country, because it
+is better for him to live poorly off his own labour rather than live
+poorly by begging. The thing is this—if you turn a man out he will not
+work, and he will neither let you or anybody else till his land;
+therefore the land is useless, and he is a burden. That is the state of
+the country at present; but if capital were introduced into Ireland, if
+our waste ground were ploughed, if our cattle were properly fattened, if
+the people were taught to eat beef and mutton, if they could be made to
+love luxury, if they could be induced to wear shoes and stockings, and
+to live in any house better than a pig-stye—if, in one word, they could
+be civilised, I think in another hundred years things might be better. I
+only think, remember, because Ireland is a hopeless problem to me at
+present. Had I had English tenants to deal with, had I had to work with
+any class of human beings that wanted to rise in the world, I could have
+money in handfuls. I declare to you, Mr. Pryor, I could.”
+
+“As it is you have not done amiss, I think,” said the other.
+
+“I have done nothing to what I might have done,” was the reply;
+“nothing. I might have owned the whole tract of country that lies
+between here and Bennebeola. Land was to be had in this neighbourhood at
+one time almost for the asking; and if I could have got hands to farm
+it, and a market for my produce, I should have been as rich as
+Rothschild. With me it was not the want of capital so much as the want
+of immediate return for capital and the perfect impossibility of
+obtaining labour. Even starvation could not induce men who had owned
+little patches of land to do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.
+They tired of it; tired of having my bailiffs after them, of being
+compelled to turn up the ground in earnest. My ways were contrary to
+their ways, my determination to their prejudices. They could not bear
+improvement: they saw in it just what the North American Indians saw in
+civilisation, the downfall of their dynasty of dirt, laziness, and
+letting things alone.”
+
+“And so you had to give up.”
+
+“So I had to draw in my hand. I had stretched my arm out further almost
+than I could draw it back; and I do not mind telling you that there was
+a time when, what with poor’s rates and beggars, and capital bringing
+back no return, I was almost ruined. Look here, Mr. Pryor,” he added;
+“at that very time I could have found work for every able-bodied man in
+this part of the country. I could not get labourers enough. It was then
+I tried Ireland: then all my old ideas were overset: then I _began_ to
+understand that the English were right about us—‘that the fault was in
+ourselves.’”
+
+“And you think so still?”
+
+“I do. I cannot tell you where the fault lies, or what the fault is, but
+it is in us. I have heard Englishmen talking about friends of
+theirs—capital fellows, honest, clever, and so forth, who yet could not
+get on, and wondering what the reason might be. Well, Ireland is as
+great an enigma; she cannot get on. If her sons and daughters go to
+England or America they can push their way up, but they will not push
+here. We are alike in all ranks. There is my uncle at Kincorth, and
+there is his poorest tenant: they cling together, and love one another,
+because their ways are the same, their ideas are identical. They are
+both thoroughly Irish: they do not see the use of ‘taking so much
+trouble,’ of ‘being so particular.’ What their ancestors did is surely
+good enough for them; and so where the rushes grew a hundred years ago,
+they are growing still: where the dungheap was piled in their
+grandfather’s time, it stands fouling the air to this present day.”
+
+“But you have done so much! I cannot understand _your_ talking in this
+manner.”
+
+“I have done much; but mark you, if I were dead to-morrow, and an Irish
+gentleman took this place, in twelve month’s time the lawn would be
+turned into grazing, and the weeds would be growing beside the drive. I
+go to England and I see velvet lawns, and clean, well-rolled walks. I
+come back here and I pay a visit to any house in the neighbourhood—to
+Lord Marsden’s, or your cousin’s, or any gentleman’s residence—and up to
+their very hall-doors the grass is half-a-foot long, and the gravel cuts
+my boots, and the weeds grow lank and luxuriant. If the gentry kept
+their places in the same order as the English, our labourers would find
+employment about our gardens and pleasure-grounds alone. But we are all
+alike,” finished Maxwell, bitterly; “all—all alike.”
+
+“You are all alike in one thing, at any rate,” answered Mr. Pryor; “in
+your detestation of trade: you do not consider buying and selling cattle
+and farm produce trading; but you hate mills, factories, shopkeepers,
+and merchants.”
+
+“Till they are rich enough,” replied Maxwell; “wherein I think we only
+follow your English lead. You do not recognize traders as equals till
+they are millionaires.”
+
+“Fairly hit,” laughed his guest.
+
+“And as the Irish think more of caste than of comfort, they would
+rather, as a rule, live on a little, and be gentlemen, than earn much,
+and sink in the social scale.”
+
+“But as money goes on depreciating in value; as small incomes, I mean,
+buy less and less each year; as birth becomes of less importance, and
+money, and what money can buy—education—of more, that prejudice will
+vanish.”
+
+“It may—but it will take a long time first,” was the answer.
+
+“To me,” went on Mr. Pryor, “love of pleasure and indifference to
+luxuries seem the curse of the country. To do as little work, to live on
+as little money as possible, appears to be the aim and object of every
+man, woman, and child I meet. It makes it a pleasant country to travel
+in; but I should not care to live in it all the year round.”
+
+“Do you remember,” asked Maxwell, with a cold smile, “how you were going
+to right all Ireland’s wrongs when you stood for Duranmore? Do you
+think, if you had got in, you could have done any good for us?”
+
+“No,” answered Mr. Pryor, “I do not; and I know it was a capital thing
+for me, being beaten. I lost nearly all my money after I got back to
+London; and what I should have done, had I been returned, I really
+cannot imagine. As it was, I turned to my profession with a will; and I
+have made nearly as good a thing of law as you have of farming.”
+
+“For which reason—and because you are too rich, too prosperous, too
+happy—you want to come to Ireland to be shot?”
+
+“I hope not! If I buy Durrow Park, I shall take your advice and not
+evict a solitary tenant. I will regard the parents as so many
+encumbrances, but endeavour to teach the children better ways.”
+
+“You had better not present them with shoes and stockings,” counselled
+Maxwell.
+
+“Why? would that be interfering with the liberty of the subject?” asked
+Mr. Pryor.
+
+“And there is a Holy Well in Durrow Park, to which, whenever there is a
+‘station’ appointed, about ten thousand people will flock: you had best
+not meddle with that.”
+
+“Anything else?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Well, yes; there are a number of fishermen living under Durrow Cliff
+who claim the sea-weed as theirs: it would not be wise for you to have
+any dispute with them.”
+
+“What more?”
+
+“There is a right of way across what is called the ten-acre field, and
+the inhabitants of Durrow village take their donkeys through the grounds
+at all hours of the day and night.”
+
+“Any other advantages?”
+
+“Durrow Cliff is full of caves: you must never explore them; and should
+you hear suspicious sounds round the coast in the calmest night, you
+must conclude it is the Atlantic breaking on the rocks. If you are wise,
+you will be kept in brandy free. Many a keg is left outside the
+dining-room window at the Headlands; and as for potheen, I know a place
+up among the hills where some of the natives gather mountain dew in such
+quantities that I could almost set up a public-house with the presents
+that find their way to me. The constabulary officer sometimes says my
+whiskey tastes wonderfully like potheen; but I always assure them it is
+sent to me by a friend in the North.
+
+“‘Bushmills?’ suggests Captain Ford, mixing himself another tumbler.
+
+“‘Somewhere thereabouts,’ I answer; and between us we empty the
+decanter. There is a still on the Durrow property, and if you see any
+smoke rising without apparent reason, you had better attribute it to a
+volcano.”
+
+“Have you exhausted your catalogue of drawbacks?”
+
+“No,” replied Maxwell; “there was a fellow ejected by the late
+proprietor, who has vowed to burn the house down over the head of the
+first man who gets his lot.”
+
+“What do you mean by a lot?” interrupted Mr. Pryor.
+
+“A lot,” answered Maxwell, “is so much land let by the piece instead of
+by the acre; perhaps a tract of waste ground containing one hundred
+acres of morass, rock, granite and brambles, will let for, say five
+pounds a year. Molloy’s case was a hard one, if his story is to be
+believed. Three years running he reared three pigs to pay his rent, and
+three years running his pigs died; only one out of the nine lived to be
+killed, and the price of that one he offered to Mr. Carford, who refused
+to take it.
+
+“‘All or none,’ he said, and Molloy was ejected. Now, if you buy Durrow,
+take my advice and give Molloy back his house. He is living there on the
+hearthstone, like hundreds of others in Ireland. Roof his house for him,
+and give him a potato-garden, and an acre or two of common land for his
+pigs to run over.”
+
+“But would not that look as if I were afraid?”
+
+“If you had turned him out it would; as you did not turn him out, it
+will only make things pleasant for your agent.”
+
+“On the whole, I think I shall not care about buying Durrow. I tell you
+a place I should like, if it were in the market—Kincorth.”
+
+Maxwell’s face changed.
+
+“Kincorth will not be for sale, I fancy,” he remarked.
+
+“I thought you said Mr. Drewitt would have to leave it?”
+
+“So he will; but the mortgagees are likely to take possession.”
+
+“Then he is mortgaged?”
+
+“Mortgaged?” repeated Maxwell. “Swamped would be a better word, Mr.
+Pryor. He has never paid a shilling of interest these four years, and
+there were arrears then.”
+
+“The place could not have been mortgaged for anything like its value,”
+remarked the other.
+
+“I believe it was not, in the first instance,” answered Maxwell; and Mr.
+Pryor looked him straight in the face.
+
+“I suppose I must not guess who will ultimately take possession of
+Kincorth,” said Mr. Pryor, a little significantly.
+
+“You can if you like,” answered Maxwell. “Most probably I shall. I
+bought up the mortgages long ago.
+
+“It is a pity!” exclaimed the other, “for your uncle was a thorough
+gentleman, and his wife a charming creature.”
+
+“Of course, if I am obliged to foreclose, I shall not require them to
+leave Kincorth,” said Maxwell, loftily.
+
+“You will do the same by them as you have done by your other tenants, I
+suppose,” remarked Mr. Pryor.
+
+“If they allow me,” was the reply; and the two walked on for a minute or
+two in silence, while Mr. Pryor thought that perhaps none of the tenants
+had found Mr. Maxwell Drewitt very pleasant to deal with, spite of his
+worldly wisdom.
+
+“You will, I am sure, consider our conversation as confidential,” said
+Maxwell, after a pause.
+
+“Most assuredly. I have no right to speak about your business at all.”
+
+“Not that it matters much,” thought Maxwell, “for the pear is nearly
+ripe.”
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIX.
+                                Durrow.
+
+
+Mr. Pryor had said he should not care for Durrow Park, but when he rode
+over there, accompanied by Maxwell Drewitt, his nephew, and Mr. Waller,
+he altered his opinion, and thought that, despite its drawbacks, Durrow
+would be a very pleasant residence for a couple of months in the year.
+“Non-resident again,” remarked Maxwell, laughing, while Mr. Gyton
+inquired—
+
+“How the deuce he could expect a man to stay away from London any
+longer?
+
+“More especially in such a hole as this, with only one post a day; with
+no railway-station within fifty miles; with no telegram nearer than
+fifty miles, also; with no books, no newspapers, no society. And a
+bachelor, too,” finished Mr. Gyton.
+
+“That is his own fault, I suppose,” remarked Maxwell Drewitt, “if it be
+a fault; but I should rather call it a virtue.”
+
+“Well said,” cried Mr. Waller, who was terribly under the influence of
+petticoat government at home.
+
+“For my part, I consider a bachelor one of the most enviable beings
+under the sun,” went on Maxwell: “he can go as he likes, come as he
+likes. He is free as air, and yet knows that he can settle down whenever
+he pleases into husbandhood.”
+
+“It is not so easy to settle down—at least, not to find any one to
+settle down with at my age,” answered Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Why, you cannot be more than a year or two my senior; and if I were
+single to-morrow I could have my pick of a dozen—ay, and pretty girls,
+too.”
+
+“I wish you would introduce me to some of them,” remarked Mr. Pryor.
+
+“I am too much your friend,” replied Maxwell; “far be it from me to lead
+you up to the trap and help you to snap the spring on yourself. Wedlock
+is a padlock,” added the owner of the Headlands. “Not that I ought to
+speak against it, for my marriage made me; and my wife never had a will
+of her own, so far as I heard of; but for an independent man to
+marry—for a man like yourself, for instance—it is folly.”
+
+“Drewitt is going to turn preacher, and expound the Gospel according to
+St. Paul,” said Mr. Waller.
+
+“I shall hold you up as an example of a sinner’s end then,” retorted
+Maxwell.
+
+“Hang it, man, you need not be so confoundedly personal!” observed Mr.
+Waller, whose domestic discomforts were too well known for him to
+attempt concealment. “It is not everybody knows how to marry so well, or
+manage a wife so well when he is married, as yourself.”
+
+Maxwell looked away from his companions over the ocean, and a thought
+came across his mind that he had not married so very well after all.
+
+He had given his youth—his liberty—all chances of happy love, for money;
+and now he could not get rid of his wife—could not get rid of that old,
+rouged, affected, ugly woman, who was jealous of every look he cast in
+the direction of those who were younger and prettier than herself; who
+had no homely graces, no fireside virtues; whom he could not even love
+like a mother and value as a friend.
+
+Forty-three and sixty—seventeen years on the wrong side. It was of this
+Maxwell thought while he stood in front of Durrow House, and looked over
+the Atlantic which lay like a lake below.
+
+They were four fine-looking men. Maxwell was much the same in figure as
+when we first saw him, but his face was more set and hardened; the lines
+were deeper, the look in his eyes was darker. He was getting a little
+bald, that is, the once-luxuriant hair was thinner, more especially
+about his temples, and his whiskers were turning grey. He was the
+oldest-looking man of the party, though Mr. Pryor was a year his senior;
+but then Mr. Pryor’s life had not been so hard a one, and his heart was
+younger too.
+
+Mr. Pryor’s face was one that his sister said “it rested her to look
+at,” so calm, so trustworthy, so good. Maxwell Drewitt had lived twice
+as fast as this London barrister, and would be old twice as soon.
+
+Some idea of this kind came into Mr. Waller’s mind, apparently, for he
+said—
+
+“I wish I looked as young as you do, Geoffry. I wish you could give me
+the secret of wearing so well and keeping so handsome:” at which remark
+Maxwell Drewitt turned round and laughed.
+
+“I know what you are laughing at,” went on Mr. Waller; “you are thinking
+that one must be handsome before one can keep handsome. That is the
+worst of being clever, Drewitt; it makes a man so devilishly sharp and
+disagreeable: but, now, do look at Pryor; there was not so much
+difference between us twenty years ago, and yet——”
+
+“There is all the difference now—is that what you would say?” asked
+Maxwell. “If it be, perhaps there has been all the difference in the
+twenty years too; in how the twenty years has been passed. You have
+drunk hard, I have worked hard, while he has been addressing an
+attentive court or lounging in an easy-chair. It is the pace that kills,
+Waller, more than years.”
+
+“As for pace,” muttered Mr. Waller, but a dangerous look in Maxwell’s
+face stopped him.
+
+“We can but live,” said the latter, hastily; “if we grow old soon, we
+have lived much, that is all any one can make of the question; and yet,”
+he went on, “I think it must be a fine thing for a man in middle age to
+find himself free to begin the whole drama of existence over again. Free
+to settle, free to choose, free to reside in a great town; and yet,
+also, free to buy a place like this and keep it for a kind of dessert to
+the dinner of the year. You will buy it?” he added, turning to Mr.
+Pryor. “Can you resist?—can you look upon Durrow and yet flee from such
+temptation?”
+
+“I cannot,” answered Mr. Pryor: “spite of right of way, and private
+stills and smugglers, and evicted tenants, and holy wells, I must have
+Durrow.”
+
+“And we will get a jolly lot of fellows together, and come over and have
+such capital sport,” finished Mr. Gyton, who had kept silence for an
+unusual time.
+
+“Thank you, Frank, you are very kind,” replied his uncle.
+
+“And you might get my mother to matronize halfa-dozen girls; it would be
+such a lark,” went on Mr. Gyton; “dancing and boating, and riding and
+driving.”
+
+“No fear of the rents of Durrow being spent off the soil,” said Mr.
+Pryor, “if Frank’s programme were carried out. I should spend as much in
+a couple of months as Durrow would return in a year.”
+
+“First-rate for Connemara,” answered Maxwell.
+
+“I will write to my mother to-night,” persisted Mr. Gyton, “and give her
+a description of Durrow. It is the very place she would delight in. Let
+me see, how can I describe it? Help my imagination, Mr. Drewitt.”
+
+“Your imagination!” repeated Maxwell; “gracious heaven! there is no
+imagination about the matter; it is all fact, from beginning to end.
+There are the rocks, and the Atlantic, and the islands; and Durrow
+stands, say a hundred feet above the sea, and the ground is level from
+the house to the very edge of the cliff, which goes sheer down to the
+shore. There are no trees to speak of, no shrubs, no fields; it is all
+rock and mountain, and bog and morass. It is a place to make your teeth
+chatter in the winter-time; but in the summer—you see for yourself,
+young gentleman, what it is like now.”
+
+“Cannot you buy the place at once, and let us all spend August here?”
+asked Mr. Gyton, with enthusiasm.
+
+“I am afraid not,” said Mr. Pryor, with a smile; “but I dare say I can
+have it all ready for your mother by the spring.”
+
+“And if you want a good fellow to manage your property and to reside in
+the house while you are away, let me recommend you a deserving man. His
+name is Connor; and he has been overseer at the marble quarries for
+sixteen or seventeen years past.”
+
+“What—Ryan’s brother-in-law!” exclaimed Mr. Waller, with some surprise.
+
+“Even so; do you know anything against Connor?” demanded Maxwell, facing
+sharp round on the last speaker.
+
+“No; only you remember that you thought—that is—that Ryan himself—”
+
+“Ryan himself is not Connor,” interrupted Maxwell; “and Mrs. Connor is a
+very worthy person.”
+
+“And pretty too,” added Mr. Waller “though she is not so young as she
+used to be. By Gad! Geoffry, that was a girl! If she had been more
+thoroughbred she might have married a duke. Faith, I thought she stayed
+single so long waiting for some travelling prince to pick her up and
+carry her off with him. She must have been thirty before she took on
+with Connor; eh Drewitt?”
+
+“I am not the parish clerk, sir,” answered Maxwell, hotly. “I do not
+keep a register of births in my head;” and with this civil speech the
+owner of the Headlands marched off to the edge of the cliff, where he
+flung himself down on the grass, and with one hand supporting his head,
+looked away and away over the sea across which white sails were glancing
+in the sunshine.
+
+“What a damnable temper Drewitt has!” remarked Mr. Waller. “I am sure it
+is just wearing his body out,” and the trio turned into the house and
+walked through the empty rooms, and looked at all possible views, from
+all possible windows, discussing furniture and papers, and carpets and
+window-curtains the while.
+
+After a time Mr. Pryor made his escape, and rejoined his host, and the
+two lay on the grass, near the edge of the cliff, talking about
+Duranmore, and Kincorth and Durrow, and Ireland and England, for nearly
+an hour.
+
+“There is another thing,” said Maxwell, at last; “the last proprietor,
+Mr. Carford, was a Roman Catholic, and almost supported the priest of
+Durrow, besides paying tithes. Will you follow suit? I know that to
+English ears such advice must sound absurd; but, after all, the few
+things I have mentioned will not amount to a hundred a-year, and you
+will have five hundred a-year back in comfort. You cannot civilize a
+country in a day. You must give savages beads, and rum, and
+looking-glasses, if you take their land from them. They cannot
+understand the substance, so you must let them have the sham. I should
+like to come back to life in a hundred years’ time, say about 1950, and
+see Ireland then. Will there be butchers’ shops in a place like
+Duranmore, where the poor people will buy scraps for their Sunday’s
+dinner, as the Londoners do on Saturday night? Will yellow meal be a
+tradition, and the cup of tea an institution? Will the people wash
+themselves, and the women wear their flannel petticoats under their
+dresses instead of round their necks? Will the bare feet be covered?
+Will the children drop off their rags some night, and put on clean
+cotton frocks, like English children, when they get up in the morning?
+Will they comb their hair, and scrub their faces, and eat with a knife
+and fork? Will the men who drive the sheep into Ballinasloe fair ever
+know by experience what number of joints there are in one? Will they
+ever have wooden floors? and if they have, will they keep them clean? I
+wonder, Mr. Pryor, I wonder! And yet,” added Maxwell, “if that day ever
+do come, Ireland will he Ireland no longer, but only a more picturesque
+England—a Cumberland, in fact, across the channel.”
+
+“On the whole, perhaps, you would not care to come back after the
+hundred years,” suggested Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Yes, I should. I should like to have my land then, and to be able to
+sell it at the 1950 market price. A hundred years!—where shall we be
+then? where shall we be?”
+
+“Certainly not on the top of Durrow Cliff, talking about Ireland,”
+answered Mr. Pryor, gravely. There was something about the fierce tone
+of Maxwell’s question which quivered through every nerve in his body.
+
+“Is he afraid of death?” marvelled the barrister, and even while he was
+marvelling, Maxwell spoke again.
+
+“I can remember,” he said, “when I was a boy coming across here with my
+father, and walking over the very spot where we are now talking, hand in
+hand with him. It was just such another day as this, warm and bright and
+clear; there were vessels coming and going; the sea was blue and calm;
+the fishermen were drying their nets in the sun. Well, the years have
+passed since then—passed like days. I have been lying here thinking how
+short a day life is after all, and wishing that we could endure through
+the centuries like the mountains, or the ocean yonder.”
+
+“It would be very sad if we could, I think,” answered Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Do you really mean what you say? But we are so differently constituted
+that one man’s meat is literally another man’s poison. To me it has
+always seemed that life is so short, while there is so much to be done
+in the world.”
+
+“Ay! but by successive gangs of labourers,” replied Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Shall we go?” asked Mr. Maxwell Drewitt, hastily springing to his feet.
+“Have you seen enough of Burrow? Shall we call at Kincorth as we return,
+and ask how my uncle is to-day?”
+
+“I should like to call on Mr. Drewitt,” said the other. “The last time I
+saw him he was lying on Doctor Sheen’s bed, with his pretty young wife
+nursing him. I suppose twenty years has changed them both.”
+
+“It has changed everybody excepting you, Geoffry,” exclaimed Mr. Waller,
+who heard the last words. “I think you must be one of the immortals.”
+
+“It has changed me, Harry,” was the reply, spoken sadly, though with a
+smile. “Twenty years lie behind instead of before me; that is all the
+difference; but, after all, that difference is considerable.”
+
+It was a long way from Durrow to Kincorth—ten Irish miles to ride,
+though probably not more than four, had the road followed the flight of
+the crow.
+
+“But what road in Connemara ever did follow the flight of the crow?”
+demanded Mr. Waller; whereupon Maxwell asked what engineer could bridge
+the bays, and make a way through the rocks and precipices.
+
+“Besides,” added Mr. Gyton, “to a man not pressed for time, the windings
+in and out are pretty and picturesque: but only fancy, uncle,” he said,
+turning to Mr. Pryor, “how one would curse these curves and turnings if
+one were riding for one’s life, or for a doctor.”
+
+Maxwell Drewitt seemed impressed with this idea. “I never thought of
+that before,” he observed; “but then, I suppose, no man ever did ride
+for his life through Connemara. It would be all foot-work over the
+hills.”
+
+And yet when they rounded the base of another mountain, as they turned
+another corner sharply, Maxwell pulled up.
+
+“I cannot get that notion of yours out of my head,” he said, noticing
+that the others pulled up also. “Riding for one’s life—what a strange
+fancy!”
+
+“I tell you what is a strange fancy to my mind, Drewitt—going to a sick
+man’s house with six horses and two servants, like a troop of dragoons,”
+exclaimed Mr. Waller.
+
+“We need not ride up to the hall-door,” answered Maxwell; while Mr.
+Pryor said—
+
+“Well thought of, Waller; we might have had enough sense for that
+ourselves.”
+
+“But we had not, you see,” summed up Mr. Gyton, and the four rode on
+abreast.
+
+“I never pass that old ruin,” said Mr. Waller, pointing to a tower and
+some walls belonging to an ancient castle lying back among the hills,
+“but I think of Murphy. You remember Murphy, don’t you, Drewitt, that
+used to be with Sheen?”
+
+“I remember some fellow of that name, but what the devil had he to do
+with Castle Cronach?”
+
+“Why, there was a squireen lived at that house in the hollow, where the
+honeysuckles are growing, and he had a wife who used to drink
+tremendously—spent every farthing on whiskey, and sold everything she
+could lay her hands on to get more. The poor fellow was almost at his
+wits’ end what to do about it (she did drive him to America in the long
+run), and so he went to Murphy for advice in the matter.
+
+“‘Could the doctor give him nothing?’
+
+“‘Is it poison you need?’ said Murphy; ‘because if it is, say so like a
+man.’
+
+“‘Of course it was not poison he wanted, but only some trifle to cure
+her of drinking. Could Mr. Murphy not mix her up something?’
+
+“‘If we could mix up anything to cure that disorder,’ says Murphy, ‘we
+should be made men: but I tell you what, take home a gallon of whiskey,
+and let her drink as much as she likes, and I will be round with you
+before night.’
+
+“It was in the summer-time, but not moonlight, and when the woman was
+thoroughly drunk, Murphy and the husband carried her down into the
+vaults of that old castle and laid her down on some boards till she
+should come to.”
+
+“I suppose she never ‘came to?’” suggested Mr. Gyton.
+
+“Didn’t she, though? but she had a good sleep first, and when she woke
+about twelve o’clock she began calling out and asking where she was.
+
+“‘Well, you are in the vaults underneath Eversbeg Abbey, ma’am,’ Murphy
+says.
+
+“‘And how long have I been here?’ she inquired.
+
+“‘A matter of ten or twelve months,’ he answered.
+
+“‘Then I’m dead, in course?’ she says.
+
+“‘As a doornail,’ wound up Murphy.
+
+“‘And are you dead too?’
+
+“‘Yes, ma’am.’
+
+“‘And how long have you been here?’
+
+“‘Somewhere about five years,’ he said.
+
+“‘Then we are all dead?’
+
+“‘Yes.’
+
+“She sat down on the floor and thought the matter out a bit. Murphy said
+he could not imagine what she would say next, and was just trying to
+fancy, when she began—
+
+“‘You must know the ways of his country a good deal better than me.
+Where can you get a drop of good whiskey now, reasonable?’
+
+“‘That floored me,’ Murphy finished. ‘Squire,’ said he, ‘you’d better
+take your wife home; if she thinks there are whiskey-shops in Hades, it
+is of no use trying to frighten her with death. Take her home and let
+her live.’
+
+“And he let her live; but she ruined him and died a beggar in Spanish
+Place, in Galway.”
+
+“I wonder what has become of Murphy?” said Maxwell, while they rode,
+with loose bridles, at a slinging trot over the hard Connemara roads,
+neck and neck together, hoofs keeping time, all four abreast; the
+Irishmen with their feet well in their stirrups, riding only on the
+snaffle, bending a little over their horses’ manes; the Englishmen
+sitting more stiffly and more erect in their saddles, with only their
+toes in the irons, holding both bridles equally in their hands.
+
+There is not much in these things perhaps, but there is something, and
+the grooms riding behind remarked the difference, as all Irish people
+do.
+
+“Murphy is, I hear, doing very well indeed, in London,” answered Mr.
+Waller. “He was a clever fellow, a man who loved you for your ailments,
+who adored a complicated case, who—”
+
+“Murphy!” repeated Mr. Gyton; “Murphy! a Mr. Murphy was telegraphed for
+once when my father met with an accident at Tunbridge Wells—an awful
+curiosity—he attended him afterwards in London. I remember the man
+perfectly. A long, loose fellow, with rusty hair and greenish-grey eyes,
+and an astonishing brogue. Is it likely to have been the same?” he
+asked, turning towards Mr. Waller.
+
+“Had he tremendous legs and no body to speak of, arms like flails, and a
+habit of turning his side to you when he spoke?”
+
+“Yes; and there was no one place where his clothes seemed to fit him. He
+was all joints, too, and he used to turn up his coat-cuffs and the
+wristbands of his shirt before he felt my father’s pulse. I remember
+tooling him over to the station one morning, and he kept me in screams
+all the way. He used to take people’s legs off ‘In the name of God.’ We
+never ceased laughing from the time he came into the house till he went
+out of it. He told us lots of stories about the notions of the Irish
+concerning physic—how they considered doctors liked red-haired men the
+best for ‘cutting up’—how they thought rhubarb was a decoction of dead
+bodies—how they believed fever came up the road in a ‘swirl’ of dust,
+and entered the house where it was destined to prove fatal like a
+visible simoom—how they believed in ‘possessions’—how he was told of a
+spirit who threw a bad man down stairs and broke his arm, and then
+called out to him, ‘I have not done with you yet.’ ‘And they went on to
+recount,’ added Mr. Murphy, ‘how the spirit twisted his head round on
+his shoulders, and how, for the future, whenever he walked forward, the
+back of his head came first. That was a case I should like to have
+attended,’ he finished. ‘I candidly confess I should.’”
+
+“It must have been our Murphy,” said Mr. Waller; “there could not be two
+of the same kind of the same name.”
+
+“This man was born in Roscommon, wherever that may be; for I remember
+him telling me the morning I went over with him to the station, that
+when the examiners were asking him for a certificate of baptism, he
+said—
+
+“‘And, my God, gentlemen, do you know so little about Ireland in England
+as to ask a man from the County Roscommon for a certificate of his
+birth? I have heard my mother, and a decent old woman she was too as
+ever brought up a family on potatoes and buttermilk, say I was born the
+day Widow O’Flynn’s cow was lost in the bog, and that is all the
+information I can give you on the subject.’”
+
+“What is he, surgeon, or physician, or what?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Surgeon,” answered Mr. Gyton. “My mother asked him something about it,
+and he said, ‘If you want a leg or an arm taken off I shall be most
+happy to oblige you, ma’am; but pills and potions are out of my line
+altogether.’ I had enough of physic in Connaught to last me my lifetime,
+and I prescribe for nobody. Operative surgery, ma’am, is enough for me;
+“_Satis supraque;_” which being freely translated, for I won’t insult a
+lady of your position by supposing you understand Latin, means, ‘Lashins
+and Lavins.’”
+
+“How the devil,” demanded Maxwell Drewitt, “does such a fellow contrive
+to make his way into any respectable house?”
+
+Mr. Gyton looked at him in surprise.
+
+“There is nothing to prevent Mr. Murphy entering any house in England,”
+he answered, a little stiffly. “Perhaps the Irish are more exclusive. He
+stands very well in his profession; has a very good house in one of the
+West-end squares; and though he is eccentric, he is not more eccentric
+than many of our first-rate men have been.”
+
+“John Hunter, for instance, was not merely eccentric, but vulgar,”
+chimed in Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Well, Murphy was never vulgar,” said Mr. Gyton. “He never said a word
+to which you could have taken exception, and then he always brought such
+a cheerful face with him that he was half the cure himself.”
+
+“Was that the person who was Dr. Sheen’s assistant at the time of the
+Duranmore election?” asked Mr. Pryor, looking towards Maxwell Drewitt.
+
+“The same; a fellow without a second coat to his back, and possessed of
+no one single talent except impudence,” was the reply.
+
+“He must have put out his capital to great advantage, then,” said the
+barrister dryly, “for it to have produced such results.”
+
+“He married well,” explained Mr. Gyton; “he married a rich old maid, who
+was, I believe, the first paying patient he ever had in London, and that
+gave him a lift. Anyhow,” added Mr. Gyton, “he is a rising man now.”
+
+They had been walking their horses up a steep hill during the latter
+part of this conversation, but as the young Englishman concluded his
+sentence they reached the top and saw Duranmore lying in the hollow
+below them. Duranmore and the road branching off to Kincorth!
+
+“I wonder how we shall find my uncle to-day,” said Maxwell, looking at
+the woods in which the house lay sheltered; “perhaps if Mr. Murphy were
+here now he could cure him.”
+
+“Is Doctor Sheen not able to do so then?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
+
+“It would seem not,” was the answer, “for he grows worse rather than
+better,” and Maxwell Drewitt, after they got to the foot of the hill,
+gave his bridle a shake, and the rest taking the hint touched their
+horses lightly with whip and spur, and followed him at a hand gallop
+along the shore road to the entrance-gates of Kincorth.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XX.
+                             A Little Leap.
+
+
+A man may be very nearly ruined and yet make few signs: Mr. Drewitt was
+close on the edge of the precipice, but still he uttered no cry. To have
+ridden through the gates, to have passed the porter’s lodge, to have
+reined in your horse and alighted at the beginning of the avenue, and to
+have walked beneath those over-arching trees up to the house, no person
+could have imagined the end so nigh at hand.
+
+And yet Kincorth had virtually passed away from Archibald Drewitt and
+his family. He was only now waiting for the end—only—ah, me!
+
+He was growing old, his health was broken, his hopes were gone, but
+still at times the cheery buoyant spirit of old would return to inspire
+him with fresh courage.
+
+“When the boys grow up they will see to things,” he would mutter to
+himself. “Brian will be a great man yet, and Harold, God bless the boy,
+he may rise to anything he likes.”
+
+So with ruin only waiting without to enter, involved beyond all hope of
+extrication, swamped with debt, harassed with duns, Archibald Drewitt
+still clung to the delusion that Kincorth would never pass away from
+him—that something would still turn up, that his creditors would give
+him time, that his sons would save the property, and do as well for
+themselves as Maxwell Drewitt had done for himself.
+
+“You must make haste and be a man, Harold,” he was wont to say to his
+youngest born, and Harold would reply—
+
+“I am a man now, father, what would you have me do?”
+
+Over the broad avenue the trees bent their long branches; across the
+drive their arms met and intertwined. The place was lovelier than ever,
+for the timber had grown and grown during the twenty years, and the
+sunbeams had to steal their way through closer tracery of leaf and twig
+and bough to the grass beneath. The shrubs grew luxuriantly, the flowers
+were bright under the summer sky; the house itself looked gay and
+cheerful, with every window reflecting back the afternoon sunshine, and
+Maxwell Drewitt, as he walked up the ascent, felt already the pride of a
+possessor, and pointed out the beauties of Kincorth with a certain
+triumph which was intelligible enough, and sad enough, to Geoffry Pryor.
+
+“You will be merciful, I hope,” he said in a low tone aside to Maxwell
+Drewitt, “in the hour of your strength.”
+
+“Have I not said?” was the reply, and they all passed on together.
+
+In an arm-chair placed on the lawn before the house, an old grey-haired
+man was seated so busily engaged in reading the newspaper that he took
+no heed of the approaching strangers.
+
+“Is that your uncle, Mr. Drewitt?” inquired Mr. Pryor. “Can that be he?”
+
+“That is he,” Maxwell answered. “Twenty years have done their work with
+him, have they not?”
+
+Had they not indeed? Feeble, bent, emaciated, but still with the same
+old grace of manner, with the same frank heartiness as had won his young
+wife’s heart and kept her love through all those years fresh and green
+as ever, Archibald Drewitt rose to meet his visitors.
+
+“You will scarcely recollect me, sir,” said Geoffry Pryor, holding out
+his hand, which the old man took cordially.
+
+“I do not recollect you,” he answered, “but you are welcome, whoever you
+may be.”
+
+“It is Mr. Pryor, uncle,” said Maxwell, “Mr. Pryor, who stood for
+Duranmore long ago; don’t you remember?”
+
+“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Mr. Drewitt. “Yes, yes, you are coming over to buy
+Durrow, I hear: but have a care, sir, have a care. Ireland is not what
+it used to be. The old families are ruined, and the fresh owners are not
+gentlemen, and the people have acquired new-fangled notions, and the
+breed of horses is deteriorating, and our best tenants are gone to
+America. Ah! well, it was God’s will I suppose, and we ought not to
+grumble; but an old man finds such changes hard to bear. Won’t you come
+in, Mr. Pryor? Maxwell, show Mr. Pryor the way.”
+
+But Geoffry Pryor declined Maxwell’s guidance, and remained behind with
+Mr. Drewitt, who walked feebly towards the house.
+
+“I am not so young as I used to be,” he remarked, “and the famine was a
+terrible affliction to us owners of property as well as to the poor. I
+know it aged me a dozen years,” he said, taking Mr. Pryor’s proffered
+arm and leaning on it as he walked. “And so you are the young fellow who
+gave us so much trouble twenty years ago? Ah! the last election was a
+tame affair—there are no elections now like what there used to be.”
+
+They were by this time in the drawing-room, and Mr. Pryor left his
+companion for a moment while he spoke to Mrs. Drewitt.
+
+Would he have recognized her? Certainly not; and looking at her hair,
+which had threads of grey in it; at her eyes, which were not so bright
+as they had been; at her hands, which were plump no longer, but thin and
+worn; at her face, which was wrinkled and altered—Mr. Pryor turned
+coward for the moment, and wished he had never come back to Duranmore to
+see such changes as these.
+
+But there were other changes, and not disagreeable ones either: there
+were the boys, unborn when he stood for Duranmore, tall, strong, and
+handsome; and there was Geraldine! I had better say at once that Mr.
+Pryor fell in love with the girl on the spot, and so save myself any
+lengthened description of his state of mind.
+
+“Is not she pretty, uncle?” asked Mr. Gyton, the first opportunity he
+found of putting the question. “Is not she pretty?”
+
+“Pretty!” echoed Mr. Pryor; “she is perfection.” And so I think
+Geraldine was; perfect in every womanly grace, in every womanly beauty,
+yet not so handsome as Harold, who never left Maxwell’s side for a
+moment, but stood beside his chair, talking to him, laughing with him,
+and evidently longing for the invitation which his cousin at last gave.
+
+“You will come back with us to dinner? You can ride Trumpeter, and
+Dickson shall walk.”
+
+“I have got my own horse, thank you,” returned the young king, with a
+grand air of proprietorship. “I can have the saddle put on Madcap in
+five minutes.”
+
+“What!” exclaimed Mr. Maxwell Drewitt; “do you ride Madcap now?”
+
+“Yes, my father says he is never likely to want her again. I say Max,”
+and here the boy lowered his voice to a whisper, “do you think he is so
+very bad?”
+
+“Not a bit of it. His life is good enough for twenty years yet. If you
+are coming with us,” he added in a louder tone, “you had better tell
+them to bring round your horse. We did not know how ill you might be,
+sir” (this to his uncle), “and so left our nags at the lodge.”
+
+“I am better to-day, thank God,” answered Mr. Drewitt, “much better. I
+have been ill, but it is nothing to signify, nothing.”
+
+“I think, Harold, you ought not to go down to the Headlands this
+evening,” said Mrs. Drewitt, gently, as the boy passed her on his way
+out to the stables, “and I hope you will not in any case ride that
+hunter.”
+
+“Pooh! Agnes,” exclaimed her husband, “what can that signify? Harold
+could ride any horse I ever saw, and the exercise will do him good.”
+
+“But he will be out so late,” urged Mrs. Drewitt.
+
+“You cannot get all boys to come home like young chickens at sundown,”
+said Maxwell, scornfully. “Go and get your horse, Harold. I am sure your
+mother is too wise a woman to wish to keep both her sons tied to her
+apron-strings.”
+
+But still Harold hesitated.
+
+“There is no danger, my dear, indeed there is not,” said Mr. Drewitt;
+and then his wife added, “You may go, Harold,” but she spoke the words
+with a sigh.
+
+“Are you not coming with us too?” asked Mr. Pryor, addressing the elder
+brother.
+
+“I have not been asked,” was the reply.
+
+“But your cousin surely——”
+
+“Does not want me,” interrupted Brian, and Mr. Pryor was silenced.
+
+“You will come and dine with us?” said Mr. Drewitt to his visitor,
+holding Mr. Pryor’s hand almost affectionately in his own. “Agnes, my
+dear, these gentlemen will fix a day. It had best be soon, before I have
+another attack. You will see to it, Maxwell; you will let us know?”
+
+“Yes, sir, I will let you know,” answered Maxwell; and then he muttered
+something about not thinking it had been so late, and that Lady Emmeline
+would be expecting them, as an excuse for hastening their departure.
+
+“I will see you to your horses,” said Brian, gravely, taking up his hat;
+and while Harold went cantering off over the grass, the elder brother
+walked down the drive, talking to Mr. Pryor as he went.
+
+As a matter of habit he felt the horses’ girths, as a matter of habit
+also he patted the horses’ necks, as a matter of courtesy he waited till
+each man was in his saddle, till Harold had joined the party and was
+expatiating in the most boastful manner concerning the fine points of
+the young mare he was riding; then Brian laid his hand on Maxwell’s rein
+and detained him for a moment.
+
+“Well, Master Brian, and what can I do for you?” asked Maxwell, with a
+sneer.
+
+“I want to know, sir,” and Brian’s hold of the rein grew tighter; “I
+want to know how you dare speak to my mother as you do.”
+
+“You are ruffling up your feathers early, young gentleman,” retorted his
+cousin.
+
+“Birds who have feathers have sometimes also spurs,” was the reply.
+
+“When a bird’s spurs are too sharp to serve our purpose, we cut them,”
+answered Maxwell. “Let me pass, boy,” he added, angrily. “Let me rejoin
+my guests.”
+
+“One second,” said Brian; but Maxwell wrenched his hand off the bridle,
+and striking his horse with his heel, for he wore no spurs, galloped on
+to overtake his companions.
+
+“It does not matter now,” Brian said to himself, as he stood looking
+after his cousin; “I can wait.”
+
+And you had but to see Brian Drewitt to feel sure he could wait from
+boyhood to manhood—from youth to age, till the hour of his revenge came.
+
+Meantime Harold was leading the way towards Eversbeg. He could scarcely
+hold the chesnut to any reasonable pace, and, even as it was, the brute
+went dancing and curvetting about the road like a mad thing; and as she
+danced and kicked and curvetted, Harold turned round in his saddle, and
+laughed back at his companions for very pride and happiness.
+
+“He rides splendidly,” said Mr. Gyton, whose equestrian performances
+were as nothing compared with those of this wild Irish lad.
+
+“So he may,” answered Maxwell; “he rode from the time he walked or
+thereabouts, I think. I can remember seeing Harold riding his father’s
+hunters barebacked round the field when he was so little, a man had to
+lift him up to his seat. The boy never knew fear. I have found him many
+a time among the horses’ feet in the stable, hugging them, and they
+never put a hoof on him. That is what makes a man a rider. I’ll be bound
+now Harold could manage that devil just as well without saddle or
+stirrup, with nothing on her but a surcingle, and nothing in her mouth
+but a common bit. Harold!” he shouted, and Harold rode back, while the
+mare kicked her best and laid her ears flat on her neck because he would
+not give her her head and let her make for Kincorth as though she were
+running a race.
+
+“Would you take the mare over that hedge and fence at the Headlands
+barebacked?”
+
+For a moment the boy looked grave. He held the reins in one hand while
+he put the other behind him on the saddle, and so leaned round towards
+his cousin.
+
+“It’s a stiff leap, Max,” he said.
+
+“I know that. Do you think she is able for it? I should like to show
+those gentlemen what an Irish horse can do.”
+
+“I should not like anything to happen to her, you know,” remarked
+Harold. “I only got her yesterday.”
+
+“If anything happens to her you shall have Trumpeter,” said his cousin.
+
+“It is not that—it is not that,” the boy said hesitatingly; “but I think
+she can do it, Max, don’t you?” and he brightened up.
+
+“Do it—of course she can; but will you do it barebacked?”
+
+“If Madcap can go over it, I can,” was the answer; but Geoffry Pryor
+broke in—
+
+“I would not see you do it for any money if it be that ditch and hedge
+beyond the gardens; don’t attempt it, Harold. I am sure you could stick
+on, and I am sure the mare could take the leap; but still—”
+
+“Still what?” demanded Harold.
+
+“Accidents will happen,” was the reply, and the pair looked at each
+other for a moment, Harold manifestly wavering.
+
+“So they may riding along the Queen’s highway,” said Maxwell.
+
+“Do you really wish him to take such a leap?” Mr. Pryor inquired; and
+Maxwell answered coolly, “I do not like to see a boy a milksop.”
+
+“I’m not a milksop, at any rate,” burst out Harold; “we’ll show them how
+we can take our fences, won’t we, old girl?” and the boy patted the
+mare’s neck, which she arched as consciously and proudly as though she
+knew what her rider said.
+
+“Isn’t she a beauty—isn’t she, now?” Harold said, addressing Mr. Gyton.
+“My father was offered two hundred and fifty guineas for her the other
+day and would not take it. Think of that.”
+
+“Have you found a gold mine anywhere about Kincorth?” asked Maxwell,
+sharply.
+
+“Not that I know of; why do you ask?”
+
+“I thought you must have done, when your father could refuse a sum like
+that for a horse.”
+
+“He said he would rather I had her,” answered the lad; but the colour
+came into his cheeks, and unless Geoffry Pryor were greatly mistaken,
+the tears into his eyes, as he pulled Madcap to one side, and let
+Maxwell get on in front.
+
+“I think the Irish are the strangest sort of people under the sun,”
+decided the lawyer; and he worked away at this puzzle of race and
+constitution and temperament till they arrived at the Headlands.
+
+“Are you not going to see the leap?” asked Maxwell Drewitt, noticing
+that he turned to enter the house.
+
+“Thank you, no,” he replied; “if anything happened to the boy, I could
+never look his mother in the face again.”
+
+“Nonsense!” retorted Maxwell, “nothing can or will happen; he was only
+afraid of the mare; and if she should make a mess of it, without saddle
+or stirrups he is safe enough. Come along; he will take the fence anyhow
+now, and you may as well be there to see fair play.”
+
+In his heart Geoffry Pryor wanted to see that leap taken; he wished to
+know if the boy would flinch—if his heart would fail.
+
+This problem of weakness and strength, of timidity and courage,
+interested him immensely; and accordingly he suffered himself to be
+persuaded, and walked down with Maxwell to the field, where Harold was
+already cantering the mare up and down to quiet her for the leap.
+
+I wish I could bring that summer scene before you, my reader, as Geoffry
+Pryor often recalled it to himself when he was back in London hard at
+work among his briefs.
+
+There was the smooth, soft turf; there was the calm blue bay; there was
+the village of Eversbeg and the evening sun shining down upon it; there
+were the fast-growing trees Maxwell had planted, standing still and
+quiet in the rich, warm light; there was the house, covered with
+climbers and creepers, with ivy and honeysuckle, with roses and myrtles;
+there were the gardens, well sheltered from the north and east; and for
+foreground there was the hedge and ditch, over which Master Harold
+Drewitt purposed taking his new possession.
+
+“Had not you better think twice about it, Harold?” asked Mr. Pryor,
+laying his hand kindly on the boy’s shoulder.
+
+“We Irish,” said the lad, “leap twice before we think once,” and he
+flung himself out of the saddle and began to unbuckle the girths.
+
+“Bring a cloth,” Maxwell ordered; but Harold said, “No, I would rather
+have her without. Never mind, Dickson.”
+
+Then he took off his coat and waistcoat, and tossed his cap down beside
+them.
+
+“Give me a hand, Max,” he said, and next minute was on Madcap’s back.
+
+“Now, madam, show your breeding,” and he went at the leap full swing.
+
+Anything more perfect than the boy’s riding Mr. Pryor had never seen. He
+sat that horse as though he were part of her, and yet there was no
+stiffness, no tightening of the bridle, no gripping of her sides with
+his knees: as easily as a bird on the wing goes through the air Harold
+flew past on Madcap; and as he neared the leap, Mr. Pryor involuntarily
+held his breath.
+
+“Damn her!” said Maxwell Drewitt, heartily, for the mare refused the
+fence.
+
+Once again Harold put her at it, and once again she swerved.
+
+“Give me your whip, Max,” he cried, while Mr. Pryor implored him to give
+in.
+
+“We see what you can do,” he went on, “and we will take what she can do
+for granted.”
+
+“I must take her over now,” Harold answered.
+
+“Why must you?” asked Mr. Pryor; but the boy was out of hearing.
+
+“Because she would never be worth a curse again if he let her master him
+once,” Maxwell explained.
+
+On they came for the third time, the sun shining on the chesnut’s glossy
+coat, and Harold’s black hair streaming in the wind caused by his own
+rapid passage through the air. On they came, the mare with her nostrils
+distended—with her eyes like fire—with her tail straight out behind
+her—with her hoofs, as she bounded along, scarcely touching the
+grass—the boy riding lightly and easily as ever, with his left hand low
+on her neck, with his right hand resting on his thigh, while he swept
+past the spectators. Then all in a moment he tightened his rein, struck
+her smartly with his feet, gave her one blow with the whip, and lifted
+her to the leap. The creature rose so high that Mr. Pryor thought she
+never could come down again; and as she rose she went, it seemed to him,
+straight through the air as though she were flying. Her forefeet were
+doubled under her, her hind quarters were stretched out almost on a
+level with her body, and she lighted on the grass on the other side the
+hedge as safely as though she had been a greyhound.
+
+“I would not see that done again for fifty pounds,” exclaimed Mr. Pryor,
+while they walked into the next field, where Harold, dismounted already,
+was standing beside the mare.
+
+“Bravo!” said Maxwell, clapping the boy on the back; “but you took too
+much out of her, less height would have done.”
+
+“Just try to leap it yourself,” retorted the boy, and Mr. Pryor noticed
+that both horse and rider were reeking—that the mare was wet and
+trembling, and that the perspiration was standing in beads on Harold’s
+forehead.
+
+“Will you take her back over it now?” asked Maxwell, but the lad
+answered—
+
+“No, thank you. I never felt afraid before, and I never want to feel
+afraid again.”
+
+He slipped his arm through the bridle, and walked Madcap half a dozen
+yards from the hedge, when he tossed the reins towards Mr. Waller.
+
+“Take her quick,” he said, and before any one could reach him he threw
+up his hands in the air as if to steady himself, and fell all in a heap
+on the ground.
+
+“He has more spirit than strength,” remarked Maxwell philosophically,
+but he knelt down, and, not without some show of tenderness, lifted the
+boy’s head and bade one of his men run in and get some whiskey.
+
+“He will never make old bones,” added the owner of the Headlands, and
+there was something in his words and the way he spoke them that
+astonished Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Is he fond of the lad?” thought the barrister, and he looked curiously
+at his host, who was still kneeling on the sward, and holding Harold’s
+head against his breast. “Is he really fond of the lad?” but there was
+nothing in Maxwell Drewitt’s expression to favour such a supposition.
+
+He was looking out over the sea, as if he saw something of which Mr.
+Pryor knew nothing standing out against the horizon. And with his mind’s
+eye he did see something—Harold’s double—his own son.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXI.
+                                 Help.
+
+
+The negotiations for Durrow went on apace, and still Mr. Pryor remained
+at the Headlands, a welcome guest to Lady Emmeline—a guest not so
+welcome, perhaps, to her husband. For Mr. Maxwell Drewitt could not be
+blind to the fact that the barrister did in some matters join issue with
+him; that he belonged rather to the Kincorth party; that he rather
+affected the Kincorth interest. “It is Bryan and Geraldine together,”
+Maxwell decided, and Maxwell was right. Brian and Geraldine and Mr.
+Pryor’s own eyes caused the barrister to suspect that nature had
+forgotten an important item when she made Maxwell Drewitt.
+
+“My cousin is totally heartless,” Brian said one morning when he and Mr.
+Pryor were walking by a near cut across the hills from Kincorth to
+Durrow, “and for that reason I am quite in earnest concerning myself. I
+desire to get some employment; to be ready for the evil day when it
+comes.”
+
+“What makes you think an evil day is coming?” asked Mr. Pryor.
+
+“There was a person told me,” answered Brian. “Four years ago, Mr.
+Pryor, when I was only fifteen. I got a warning. I was told to learn
+diligently; to be on my guard against bad company; to keep my eyes open
+and my mouth shut; for that Maxwell Drewitt had made up his mind to own
+Kincorth, and that I should have to turn out and earn my bread some day.
+I am not going to tell you who warned me,” added Brian; “but I took the
+advice. I have tried to learn. I have kept my eyes open, and I know
+Maxwell means to do us harm if he can.”
+
+“Why should he do you harm?”
+
+“Why? Because, as he says, we have been idle while he has worked;
+because we have sat with our hands folded while he has been toiling and
+struggling; because my grandfather willed Kincorth away from the elder
+brother and left it to his younger son; because my father married and
+had children; because he hates us,” finished Brian Drewitt, “as I hate
+him.”
+
+Mr. Pryor turned and looked at the boy as he spoke these last words.
+There was a something more terrible than any passion could have been in
+the stern restraint of Brian’s manner; in the strong curb he seemed to
+put on himself—on his words, on his gestures. There was no fury—no
+outbreak of rage—no outburst of violent indignation. He spoke of
+hate—sullenly, calmly—without a change of colour; without a variation in
+his voice.
+
+“Why do you hate him?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Because I do. That is not a very civil answer, you will say, and yet it
+is the best I can give you. Why I hate him I feel; but I could not
+explain what I feel, except that I know he wants to grind me under his
+foot as I grind this gravel,” and Brian stamped his heel upon the
+ground; “but he shall never have the chance, I swear.”
+
+“But for a young man of property——” argued Mr. Pryor.
+
+“I am not a young man of property,” the youth replied. “Have you really
+no idea how we are actually situated? Do not mention it to my mother,
+because she thinks that Kincorth is clear, at any rate; but Kincorth is
+mortgaged, like everything else. We have not an acre of land that is not
+owned by strangers, and I am quite confident if anything were to happen
+to my father, and that the mortgagees sold the estates, Maxwell would
+buy them all, and then where should we be?”
+
+“Where should you be whoever bought them?” asked his companion. “It
+would not matter whether he or Queen Victoria bought them so long as
+they were sold.”
+
+“No; only so far as this, that perhaps one could do something with other
+people, while one could not with him. For instance, I might be agent to
+anybody else, but I would not serve Maxwell. I wish, Mr. Pryor,” added
+the boy, for though he looked so manly, he was but nineteen after all;
+“I do wish I had known you were going to buy Durrow, for I would have
+asked you to give me the agency until I saw how it was going to be with
+my poor father.”
+
+“I have promised it to Connor,” said Mr. Pryor, regretfully.
+
+“I know you have, and Maxwell recommended him to you. Mr. Waller told me
+that,” went on Bryan; “but I should have suspected it anyhow, for he
+knew I wanted something to do, and thought he would be beforehand with
+me; but I will make my way in spite of him, if he were ten times as rich
+as he is.”
+
+“May I ask you something, Brian; and will you answer my question
+honestly? Why is there such bad blood between you and your cousin?”
+
+“I told you before I should never be able to make you understand,” was
+the reply. “We have never had a quarrel, and yet we have never been
+friends. He does not treat my mother as I like. He is trying to take
+Harold from us, and he is a bad man—a bad, heartless man, without a
+conscience.”
+
+“How do you make out that he is a bad man? I knew him before you were
+born. He was poor then; but he has worked hard since, and earned great
+possessions. Is there any crime in that?”
+
+“No; but there is harm in the way he has got rich. You do not like
+usurers in England. You do not like people who take advantage of their
+neighbours’ necessities. Well, Maxwell is a usurer. He has got a
+‘backer,’ I think you call it, in Liverpool or London, or some of those
+great towns, where you come from, who lets him have as much capital as
+he wants; and then when they make a good hit they share the spoil.
+Maxwell got lots of properties into his hands that way during the
+famine. Gentlemen were hard up and wanted an advance; then he let the
+interest drop behind, and wanted principal, and interest, and compound
+interest, just in a day. He never bought Mr. Munks’ place, nor that
+enormous estate he has in the Joyce county. He foreclosed on both, or
+rather his agent did it for him. He has a man who does all his dirty
+work cheap—a lawyer, called Ryan.”
+
+“Surely that is the name of Mrs. Connor’s brother?”
+
+“Yes, he is Mrs. Connor’s brother; but that is nothing against either
+Connor or his wife, and you are safe enough in letting Maxwell’s
+_protégé_ have the agency; for even if his man were not honest, my
+cousin would try no tricks with _you_.”
+
+“Go on—what were you saying about Ryan?”
+
+“He has Ryan under his thumb somehow, and can make him do just what he
+pleases. It appears that at one time they were great friends: that at
+the time when you stood for Duranmore——”
+
+“I remember a young lawyer who was always with your cousin—a clever,
+artful dog I thought him. Is that the Ryan you are talking about?”
+
+“The very same. Ryan had Mr. Waller’s agency for a long time, until, in
+fact, he displeased Maxwell somehow or other, and then everything went
+wrong with him. He lost his agency and his clients, and finally went as
+clerk to a new attorney who came to Duranmore. Whatever happened then I
+cannot tell you; but he got into some trouble, either through drinking
+or want of money, which Maxwell saw him out of. From that time on, Ryan
+has been back in business on his own account, and is Maxwell’s
+factotum.”
+
+“I am afraid, Brian,” said Mr. Pryor, “that you are a sad gossip.”
+
+“If I am, it is only about one man,” was the answer; “and sometimes I
+fancy,” here the lad lowered his voice, “that it is really he who has
+got the mortgage over Kincorth, and if it be——”
+
+“If it be—what then?” demanded Mr. Pryor.
+
+“Why the place will not be ours even during my father’s lifetime,”
+finished Brian; “let alone afterwards.”
+
+“But supposing—even supposing he have lent money on the property, it
+would do him no good to turn you out; it surely would answer his purpose
+much better to let you all remain.”
+
+“As dependents on him! thank you, Mr. Pryor. No one belonging to me
+shall ever eat his bread, if I have any say in the matter.”
+
+“But would it not be wise to keep on good terms with him? Would it not
+be less galling to take an obligation from him than from a stranger?
+Your father provided for him. It would be a simple matter of justice if
+he were to provide for you.”
+
+“Ay; but my father had the property, remember, that ought to have
+belonged to Maxwell’s father; that is the cause of all his ill-will
+towards us; and from what I can hear he had nothing but his keep out of
+the place, just as we have never had anything that with better
+management we ought to have had. He told my mother that he disliked her,
+not for herself, but for being the mother of the future owner of
+Kincorth. I can remember quite well, about ten years ago, Harold—he was
+a little fellow then—saying to him one day in a passion, ‘Go home, go
+home, this is not your home,’ and Maxwell made the remark, ‘And it won’t
+be yours either, my boy, when I come back.’ No later than Friday last I
+spoke to him about letting Harold take that leap on Madcap, and he told
+me—I repeat his words, Mr. Pryor—‘to hold my blasted tongue, and not
+presume to speak to my betters.’”
+
+“And you——”
+
+“I am waiting, Mr. Pryor.”
+
+There was a long pause while they stood together on the top of the hill
+resting. Everything on earth and in heaven looked peaceful and serene.
+There were no clouds in the sky, there were no billows on the ocean. You
+would have thought that for very sympathy, the heart of man would in
+such a place have throbbed quietly through its allotted time, untroubled
+by jealousy, undisturbed by passion.
+
+And yet here, of all places in which he had ever set his foot, it seemed
+to Mr. Pryor that men’s passions were strongest—that their hate was
+fiercest. He had heard such stories of cruelty—of vengeance—of
+heartburnings—of envy—of unforgiveness, that had he not heard likewise
+histories of patience—of devotion—of constancy—of faithfulness—of
+endurance, and of love, he might have thought he was not on earth at
+all, but in hell; and now here, with the blue mountains looking calmly
+down upon them, with the great sea stretching away for thousands and
+thousands of miles at their feet, with the beauties of nature all
+around, and a great silence, an intense stillness, pervading the scene,
+was this boy nursing up his wrath likewise against a coming day.
+
+“I am waiting,” and Brian’s face never changed, his eye never dropped
+under Mr. Pryor’s scrutiny.
+
+“You are thinking,” said the youth, when his companion’s glance at last
+came back from the ocean and rested once again on his face, “that I am a
+fool; that if Maxwell does not do all I want him to do, it will be a
+short shrift and a long sleep with one or other of us; but you are
+mistaken. I would not hurt his body. I would not thrash him. I would not
+even put a bullet through him; but I would make him feel. There is an
+old epigram,” he proceeded, “that I read lately and learned by heart,
+because it put me in mind of Maxwell. I wonder if you know it,” and he
+repeated:—
+
+              “Death threw his dart at Bindon’s heart,
+                But how was he astounded,
+              When from the part, as with a start,
+                The weapon quite rebounded:
+              ‘Ho! ho!’ quoth Death, and drew his breath,
+                ‘My slaughtering arm you mock at;
+              But here’s a blow shall lay you low,’
+                And smote him through the pocket.”
+
+“Then your idea is to injure him pecuniarily?”
+
+“If he do not alter his manners to my mother; if he encourage Harold in
+drinking, gambling, and all kinds of folly, as he has done hitherto; and
+if he vents any more of his temper upon me—yes; because I know that
+Maxwell’s only vulnerable point is money.”
+
+“Brian,” began Mr. Pryor, and the lad looked surprised at the change in
+his companion’s tone—“Brian, you are laying up great trouble for
+yourself. You are preparing an awful curse for your future days. You are
+nourishing a viper and hugging it to your breast: when it comes to life,
+it will bite you worse than it will ever bite him. Put all these
+thoughts and fancies out of your head, boy. At your age the cup should
+be sweet, not bitter. Whatever your cousin may have done—whatever he may
+be, it is not to you he will have to answer for his misdeeds; but you
+will have to answer for yours, Brian; and for sins, too, if you do not
+crush this hate out of your heart and turn, before it is too late.”
+
+“What can I do? What would you have me do?”
+
+“I would have you go on your way, and not ever cast your eyes on his——”
+
+“But he will not let me go on my own way. Look here.” And Brian pulled a
+couple of letters out of his pocket. “There is an old Quaker who has
+been very good to my father. I thought I would write and ask his advice,
+and tell him I wanted to work, as the properties were so much involved;
+and that if he could find anything to do I would work hard and try to be
+worth my salary. Here is his first letter. You see how kind—how
+encouraging. Here is his second. Just time enough between, you perceive,
+for him to write to Maxwell and get back his answer. You will say I do
+not know he wrote to Maxwell or that my cousin said anything about me;
+but I am as sure his fingers have spoiled my pie as that I am living.”
+
+“You did not reply to the first letter.”
+
+“No. I was waiting to see how my father would be after that last
+attack.”
+
+“It seems strange,” remarked Mr. Pryor.
+
+“No, it does not seem strange to a person who knows Maxwell as I do,”
+and Brian folded up the letters again, and put them back in his pocket.
+
+“What makes you want so much to get to England?” asked the barrister,
+after a pause.
+
+“Because there is no way in which a man can make money here.”
+
+“Your cousin has made money here. Why not have a turn at some of your
+waste lands, and do as well as he has done?”
+
+“He never would have done so well but for his wife; and I would not
+marry an old woman. No, not if she was hung with diamonds. Besides, it
+is not often Connemara sees an heiress, even if I were inclined to try
+my luck.”
+
+“But supposing, now, Kincorth were your own, could you not make a living
+out of it?”
+
+“If it were clear of debt?”
+
+“No. Suppose it were mortgaged to close upon its present value, could
+you do no better for yourself than your father has done?”
+
+“I would make a try to do better anyhow.”
+
+“Would you work? Would you put your shoulder to the wheel, and cut down
+the expenses, and be brave, as your cousin was, disregarding
+appearances?”
+
+“Whatever a man could do, that I would do,” was the answer.
+
+“But you are not a man yet,” said Mr. Pryor, with a smile.
+
+“Am I not? I wonder when I shall be one then,” was the reply.
+
+Mr. Pryor stood still—he was looking back through the years and trying
+to remember what he was at Brian’s age in the days before he came over
+in compliance with the wishes of a certain very wealthy and influential
+relative to contest Duranmore.
+
+He had not a care in the world at nineteen. Life was to him fairyland—to
+be young was to be happy. He had never had a sorrow in his life, save
+about his lessons at school or his examinations at college. He could
+look back and see himself as he was then. He could look back at himself,
+as though at another person. He could see the lad with his fair
+hair—with his happy, frank face—with his little airs of dandyism—with
+his cheerfulness, his hopefulness, his _insouciance_—and contrasting
+that picture with this, his heart bled for this poor lad, to whom the
+cares of life had come so soon, on whose shoulders the burden of
+existence was pressing already so heavily—who had to think for father,
+mother, sister, brother, and be tender and careful for all.
+
+Brian’s face was still smooth as a girl’s, but he was a man for all
+that—and as a man, Mr. Pryor addressed him.
+
+“My boy,” he said, “I will talk to you now as if you were thirty-nine
+instead of nineteen. If you will do all you say, if you will be a good
+lad and give up the next ten years of your life to work, putting your
+cousin out of your thoughts, and making up your mind to pursue one
+certain course irrespective of him and his concerns, I will help you in
+this matter. Have you sufficient influence with your father to get him
+to give you the management of the estate?”
+
+“I think so, if nobody puts it into his head that I am wanting to take
+the whole property from Harold.” And for the first time during the
+conversation, Brian’s lip trembled.
+
+“Do you mean to say any one has ever raised such a question?”
+
+“Yes: Maxwell told me once that probably my father would do like the
+rest of the Drewitts—cut me out for his favourite son; and he has tried
+to make Harold dissatisfied about my being the eldest. But Harold does
+not care who has the place as long as he rides the hunters. If he had
+been fond of money, or greedy, Maxwell would have made him hate me long
+ago.”
+
+Geoffry Pryor was a man who, as a rule, did not swear, but he could not
+help uttering an oath then.
+
+“I am that fellow’s guest,” he thought, “but hang me if it is fair or
+honest for me to eat his salt now!” And he made up his mind that he
+would get pressing letters from London, and return thither as soon as
+possible.
+
+“Will you take the matter into consideration, and see if it be possible
+for you to assume the reins?” he said.
+
+“If I promise you to drive, I will get the reins somehow,” was the
+reply; “only tell me how you mean to help me—only show me how I can save
+Kincorth, and give my mother some ease, and keep my father free from
+anxiety, and I will work—never fear—I will work.”
+
+“I will advance money to pay off the present mortgage, and be your
+creditor myself; and whatever sum, in moderation, you require to work
+the estate satisfactorily, you shall have.”
+
+Three times Brian Drewitt made an effort to speak, and three times the
+words would not come. Then he held out his hand to his benefactor, and
+the tears he could no longer keep back rolled down his cheeks,
+separately, singly, one by one.
+
+It was not weeping—it was not excitement, the barrister had never seen
+anything like it before, and he was never likely to see anything like it
+in the future; for in the hour of his blackest trouble—in the time of
+his worst agony—in the day of his deepest remorse—Mr. Pryor never saw
+Brian Drewitt’s eyes wet again.
+
+His kindness wrung tears out of them once, but grief could not open
+those fountains, which seemed thenceforth dried up for ever.
+
+Brian Drewitt’s wife may have seen him cover his face, and heard him sob
+aloud, but I, who can only follow his footsteps to a certain point, know
+no more than this, that the only sign of human feeling Geoffry Pryor
+ever saw him evince, was when he stood on the heights near Durrow,
+grasping his hand as though he held it in a vice, while the big tears
+fell from his young eyes, one by one.
+
+
+                             END OF VOL. I.
+
+                                       PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                             February 1887.
+
+                           Tauchnitz Edition.
+
+                            Latest Volumes:
+
+
+  Alicia Tennant. By Frances Mary Peard, 1 vol.
+
+  Living or Dead. By Hugh Conway, 2 vols.
+
+  King Arthur: not a Love Story. By Mrs. Craik, Author of “John
+    Halifax,” 1 vol.
+
+  A Mental Struggle. By the Author of “Molly Bawn,” 2 vols.
+
+  Transformed. By Florence Montgomery, 1 vol.
+
+  The Heir of the Ages. By James Payn, 2 vols.
+
+  A Country Gentleman and his Family. By Mrs. Oliphant, 2 vols.
+
+  A Fallen Idol. By F. Anstey, 1 vol.
+
+  Court Royal. By the Author of “Mehalah,” 2 vols.
+
+  Her Week’s Amusement. By the Author of “Molly Bawn,” 1 vol.
+
+  Masollam. By Laurence Oliphant, 2 vols.
+
+  The Evil Genius. By Wilkie Collins, 2 vols.
+
+  A Playwright’s Daughter and Bertie Griffiths. By Mrs. Annie Edwardes,
+    1 vol.
+
+  My Friend Jim. By W. E. Norris, 1 vol.
+
+  As in a Looking Glass. By F. C. Philips, 1 vol.
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+
+  Doctor Cupid. By Rhoda Broughton, 2 vols.
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+  One Thing Needful. By Miss Braddon, 2 vols.
+
+  Jo’s Boys. A Sequel to “Little Men.” By L. M. Alcott, 1 v.
+
+  By Woman’s Wit. By Mrs. Alexander, 1 vol.
+
+  Children of Gibeon. By Walter Besant, 2 vols.
+
+  Oceana or England and her Colonies. By James Anthony Froude, 1 vol.
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+
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+
+A complete Catalogue of the Tauchnitz Edition is attached to this work.
+
+
+                      Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+ ● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+ ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78945 ***