THE EARL’S PROMISE.
                                A Novel.


                                   BY

                             MRS. RIDDELL,

                               AUTHOR OF
       “GEORGE GEITH,” “TOO MUCH ALONE,” “HOME, SWEET HOME,” ETC.


                           IN THREE VOLUMES.

                                VOL. I.


                                LONDON:
             TINSLEY BROTHERS, 8, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
                                 1873.

      [_All rights of Translation and Reproduction are Reserved._]




                       PRINTED BY TAYLOR AND CO.,
               LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.




                                CONTENTS
                                   OF
                           THE FIRST VOLUME.


             CHAP.                                   PAGE.
                I. KINGSLOUGH NÉE BALLYLOUGH             1
               II. WHERE CAN SHE BE?                    23
              III. THE GLENDARES                        57
               IV. HOW THE NEWS ARRIVED                 78
                V. MR. RILEY’S PROSPECTS                97
               VI. ON THE TERRACE                      124
              VII. MR. SOMERFORD’S SUGGESTION          144
             VIII. INTRODUCES THE NAME OF AMOS SCOTT   180
               IX. AT THE CASTLE FARM                  225
                X. MR. DANIEL BRADY RECEIVES           250
               XI. NETTIE AT BAY                       281




                          THE EARL’S PROMISE.




                               CHAPTER I.
                      KINGSLOUGH _née_ BALLYLOUGH.


Kingslough at high noon was ordinarily the stupidest, dullest, dirtiest
little town that could have been found in the Province of Ulster. On
market and fair, and party-procession days, the inhabitants seemed to
expend the whole of their strength. An almost unbroken calm ensued after
wild excitement, a death-like stillness followed the shouts and cries of
faction, the shrieks of drunken merriment, the shrill piping of fifes,
the braying of trumpets, and the bang-banging of drums.

Excepting on such and such-like festive occasions as those above
enumerated, the town, figuratively speaking, looked as though it had
gone to bed to sleep off the effects of its last excitement or debauch.

In the bright sunlight it appeared like a place deserted by its
population—a place rich in every natural beauty, which there was neither
man nor woman to admire.

So far as position was concerned, Kingslough had nothing left to desire.
Situated on an arm of the sea, the town, well sheltered from the wild
north winds by hills and far-spreading plantations, nestled its houses
snugly along the shore, while the blue waves rippled gently in over the
red sandstone beach.

Nature had indeed done everything for the little watering-place, and man
had, as is usually the case, done his best to spoil Nature’s handiwork.

Seen from the sea Kingslough lay tranquil under its hills, the
perfection of an artist’s ideal; but a nearer view dispelled this
allusion, and it appeared to eyes from which the glamour was removed,
just what it has already been described, the stupidest, dullest,
dirtiest little town in Ulster.

Here was no dark Moorish architecture, lighted up by the bright costumes
and brighter eyes of the Galway women. Here were no fantastic houses, no
picturesque surprises, no archways lying in deep shadow, no recessed and
highly ornamented doorways, no rich carvings, no evidences of a
wonderful and romantic past. Everything was straight, strictly
utilitarian, mean. The best houses presented outwardly no sign of the
amount of actual accommodation they contained.

They were old, but they had not grown grey and softened with the lapse
of years. The prevailing “finish” amongst the better class of residences
was paint or rough-cast, whilst the dwellings inhabited by the trading
and working members of the community were periodically covered with
lime-white, which the rain as regularly washed off.

The side-paths were uneven, the streets unlighted, every sanitary
regulation either unborn or in the earliest and weakest stage of
infancy. From a picturesque point of view the fishing-boats drawn up on
the beach formed a pleasing foreground to a charming landscape,
acceptable to the eye; but the neighbourhood of these boats was
disagreeable to the nose by reason of cods’ heads, and other fishy
matters, that lay decomposing in the sun.

Time had been when Kingslough was known by a more distinctively Irish
name, that of Ballylough, the A being pronounced very broad indeed,
while a fine guttural sound was imparted to the “ough,”—as indeed is
still the case with the terminal letters in Kingslough.

At that period, Ballylough was a very modest Bally indeed, and the
lodgings it let in the boating season to strangers from Glenwellan were
of the most primitive description.

The villa residences, the rows of terraces, the sea-wall, the grand
promenade overlooking the bay, all of which now delight the eyes of
tourists and others, had not yet emerged from the then future that has
long since become the past.

The occasion on which the tiny seaport came to be re-christened, was
that of the first gentleman in Europe succeeding to the British throne.

Mighty things were, by certain people and classes in Ireland, expected
to result from that event.

His visit, when Prince of Wales, to the Isle of Saints had excited high
hopes in the hearts of many of his Hibernian subjects.

The liberalism exhibited by the heir-apparent would, they felt
satisfied, be brought into practice by the sovereign in remedying the
wrongs of Ireland.

The Roman Catholics believed they should now have a friend and partisan
in the highest places, able and willing to redress their grievances. The
trading portion of the community, deceived by the fact of the honour or
dishonour of knighthood having been conferred on a few Dublin
shopkeepers, trusted the hour was at hand when commerce would be
recognized as a power in Ireland; and that a good time was coming, when
money made in mills and offices might be pleasantly spent in crushing
the pride of those “aristocrats,” who spite of their poverty persisted
in holding a semblance of state on their unproductive acres, and
extending such hospitality as their narrow means permitted, solely and
exclusively to those they considered born by God’s grace in the same
rank of life as themselves.

As for the dissenters in the north,—that numerous and remarkable body to
which successive monarchs and prime ministers have paid a curious amount
of attention ever since the time of William the Third, who established
that _raison d’être_ of many a shabby, poorly attended place of worship,
the Regium Donum—as for the dissenters they cherished a vague idea that,
although his Most Gracious Majesty George IV. might be styled “Defender
of the Faith,” which was not in some respects exactly their faith, still
the light of his glorious countenance would not impossibly be lent to
them for the purpose of placing those who worshipped in meetinghouses
and other conventicles on a par, socially and pecuniarily, with their
old enemy the Church as by law established. The labouring classes
commonly cherished a conviction that an immediate rise of wages must
follow the coronation; in fact, amongst those of the Irish who wanted
and hoped for anything, there was a noisy and expectant accession of
loyalty: and as a small evidence of this, the municipal rulers of
Ballylough convened a meeting, at which with the almost unanimous
consent of the inhabitants it was decided that for the future—

“The important seaport town of Ballylough, possessed of an almost
natural harbour, situated on the direct route to America, in the centre
of a supply of herrings practically speaking limitless, boasting a beach
unrivalled in the three kingdoms, and which presented facilities for
bathing unsurpassed by any other watering-place, having likewise in its
immediate neighbourhood manufactories of no mean extent” and so forth,
should for the future be known to those whom it might, and those whom it
might not concern, as Kingslough.

In liberal and democratic matters the rulers over the town were strong.
Amongst others of less note may be enumerated a woollen-draper who in
the course of a long and laborious life had made much money, and what
was more to the purpose, kept it when made; a certain sea-captain called
Mullins, reputed to be worth nine thousand pounds, every sixpence of
which he had made by smuggling; an apothecary; a Mr. Connor, who resided
a little way out of the town, and who, possessing an income of one
hundred and thirty pounds a year, did nothing, as his fathers had done
before him.

These men, being ardent lovers of their country, its traditions, Brian
Baroïhme, the Irish melodies (“Boyne Water” and “Protestant Boys”
excepted), illicit spirits, and the Old Parliament House on Stephen’s
Green, were, as might have been expected, uproarious with delight when
this graceful tribute to the virtues of their new monarch had been
offered.

From the demonstration, however, all those who belonged to the powerful
though comparatively small Tory party held resolutely aloof.

They could generally, not always by ways and influence that would have
borne the light, materially assist in sending one member for the county
at least to the House of Commons, but in local and municipal matters
they were impotent.

Ballylough was owned by the Earl of Glendare who to the disgust of Lord
Ardmorne, his relentless political opponent, chanced to be
ground-landlord of almost every house and public building the town
contained.

For centuries the Glendares had been connected with that part of the
country. All those members of the family who died in any place
reasonably accessible to Ireland were carried up a very steep hill
overlooking Ballylough, where among the ruins of Ballyknock Abbey the
curious stranger could obtain an exquisite view over land and sea, and
behold at the same time sheep nibbling the short sweet mountain herbage
beside the family vault which contained all that death had left of youth
and beauty—of rank, wealth, and earthly consideration.

It was a mighty strange contrast to meet Lady Glendare in her grand
coach, a very Jezebel made up of pride, paint, deceit, extravagance and
heartlessness, and then to toil up to that burying-place lying lonely
among the desolate hills, and think of those women—once haughty and
sinful, just like her, in life knowing no rest, making no happiness—who
lay there mouldering into dust.

At the time of George the Fourth’s accession to the throne, Charles, the
eighth Earl had not long succeeded to the title and estates of his
father, and so far from objecting to Ballylough being changed into
Kingslough gave the project his warmest support, being moved thereto by
the reasons following.

First, because he trusted his eldest son, no longer a young man, would
sooner or later hold an appointment about the Court of the new monarch;
secondly, because a builder, who proposed the wild speculation of
erecting a terrace of houses, and was willing to pay a handsome sum down
for a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years, signified his belief
that houses, and land intended as sites for houses, would let better if
the place were, as he expressed himself, “given a fresh start;” and
thirdly, because he knew the change would annoy Lord Ardmorne.

So the name was altered, and the town, after a sleepy, inconsequent sort
of fashion, grew and prospered; so that by the time this story
commences, it had established for itself the name of a highly
respectable, not to say aristocratic, watering-place.

Travelling then was not what it is now. People did not go whisking about
like comets; a journey was attended with many discomforts; the nearer
home anxious mothers could obtain sea-bathing for their darlings, and
change of air and scene for themselves, the better they were pleased;
and accordingly, in the season, Kingslough was crammed from parlour to
attic, and even ladies who, having seen better days, spoke much about
their papas and mammas, and a radiant past which had once been theirs,
did not disdain to let lodgings, or it might be to accept invitations
during the summer months from various relations and friends, so as to
leave their houses and furniture free for the use of Mr. and Mrs., or
Sir and my Lady, at so much per month.

But even in the season it was not a lively place. People went there to
bathe, not to form acquaintances. Let Mrs. Murtock, wife of Murtock, the
great distiller, don what gorgeous array she pleased, not even a glance
could she win from one of the upper ten as they sat in church trying to
look blandly unconscious of her existence.

People made no experiments in acquaintanceship at Kingslough. The world,
according to the then social gospel extant, meant the old stock and the
new; and whenever the new held out the right hand of fellowship to the
old, it got, metaphorically speaking, so cruelly slapped, that the
experiment was rarely repeated.

Not a dweller in the Faubourg St. Germain was in reality one whit more
bitterly proud than those Irish ladies, so charming in their manners to
high and low, to those on the same rung of the social ladder as
themselves, and those at the foot of it; but who refused to recognize
even the existence of “such people” as the wives and daughters of men
that could, to use the expression which frequently fell from their lips,
have “bought and sold” the lands and goods and chattels of the old stock
without a misgiving as to where the money was to come from to compass so
laudable a purpose.

Altogether, unless a human being was excessively fond of his own society
and natural scenery, Kingslough could not have been accounted a
desirable place in which to settle for life.

Its aboriginal inhabitants—those, that is to say, who resided there all
the year round, were principally a well-developed race of marvellously
healthy, dirty, poor, ragged, happy children, shoeless and stockingless
as regarded their legs and feet, soapless and combless as concerned
their heads and faces.

From early morning till late at night these picturesque urchins held
high revel in the gutters and along the side-paths of the poorer
streets; scores of them disported themselves along the beach, wading out
into the sea as far as their clothing—scanty enough, Heaven knows—would
allow them, and when the sea, or tide as they called it, was out too far
to be waded into, they pursued the entrancing amusement of hunting for
crabs and periwinkles on the sands.

At intervals, shrill cries from some woman, got up in the costume of her
class—a large white cap, with immense coiffured frills on her head, and
a very small plaid shawl over her shoulders—shrieking for the return of
her offspring, interrupted the pastimes indulged in by youth at
Kingslough.

Occasionally these cries from the parents were succeeded by bitter
lamentations from the children, who were not unfrequently hurried back
to the duties and realities of life by slaps, and threats of more
serious punishment.

Towards evening, young men and old men, who, following fishing as a
profession, spent a considerable portion of the day in bed, appeared
upon the scene. Stalwart weatherbeaten men, attired in pilot-coats and
sou’westers, they made their way to the shore, where great tub-like
smacks lay waiting their coming.

These fishers were brave and patient; kind, tender husbands to wives,
who soon lost their good looks in that hard northern climate, and grew
prematurely wrinkled and aged with the battle of life; good sons to
widowed mothers or aged fathers; faithful lovers to girls who boasted
exquisite complexions, tall, erect figures, and a wealth of beautiful
hair rarely to be seen amongst their Saxon sisters; a grand, sturdy,
hard-working race, who feared God exceedingly, and went out in the wild,
dark winter nights to war with the winds and the waves as undauntedly as
though each season did not leave some maid, or wife, or mother desolate.

Next to the fishermen came the shopkeeper class, who differed from each
other as stars vary in magnitude, from Widow McCann, who set out her
cottage-window with sweets, and cakes, and apples for the children, and
who sold besides, halfpennyworths of everything that could possibly be
sub-divided into that value, to Mr. Neill, proprietor of _the_ shop of
the town, a place where everything, from an ounce of tea to canvas for
sails, from a boy’s kite to a plough, could be procured at a moment’s
notice.

Mr. Neill at one time entertained ideas of making his way into
drawing-rooms where only the _élite_ of Kingslough society was to be
found; but his pretensions being firmly and, truth to say, not over
courteously repudiated, he afterwards revenged himself by buying from
the Encumbered Estates Commissioners a great property in Munster, where,
though it was darkly rumoured that he once stood behind a counter,
impecunious gentry—_real_ gentry as the poorer classes call them—made
friends with his sons and daughters, hoping that the marriage of blood
with money might yet save the rushy acres they lacked capital and energy
to drain.

Time has done wonders in Ireland. It has taught the “old stock” that if
they want money, and unhappily they cannot do without it, they must
tolerate the people who have been able to make money.

But they do not like those persons yet, except as a means to an end; and
possibly the faculty of adding sovereign to sovereign and acre to acre
is not exactly that calculated to render a man socially popular
anywhere.

The Kingslough upper ten held that opinion at any rate. They longed for
Dives’ possessions, but Dives himself they would have consigned to a
deeper hell than that mentioned in the parable, had their theology
contained it.

Above the shopkeepers ranked the manufacturers, men who attended closely
to their business, associated freely amongst themselves, and on the
occasion of public dinners, meetings, and the like, were shaken by the
hand by Lord Glendare, Lord Ardmorne, and the remainder of the élite of
Kingslough.

They did not presume on these privileges. Residing out of the town, they
came little in contact with its inhabitants, and were content with such
civilities as the worthies of Kingslough thought fit to accord.

If they could afford to keep good horses, their sons followed the
hounds; and they generally were able to give dowries to their daughters,
when in due course of time they married men who likewise were connected
with manufacture, either far off or near at hand.

They were select people, keeping themselves to themselves, marrying and
intermarrying amongst their own class, neither meddling nor
intermeddling with the affairs of their neighbours.

They gave employment and they paid good wages, and took care that
neither their smoke nor their refuse caused offence to Kingslough.

The town might claim them, but they did not claim the town. If they
interfered in politics, and had strong opinions about the return of
members for the county, it was but human and Irish. As a rule they were
quiet enough, harmless as doves, busy with their own gathering and
storing of honey as bees.

Higher than the manufacturers, who? Old maids and poodles. The Court
Circle at Kingslough was composed almost entirely of ladies who wore
fronts, and fat, snapping wretches of dogs who had too much hair of
their own. The men belonging to these women were dead, or serving the
king in India, or captains on board men-of-war, or constabulary officers
in remote parts of Ireland, or barristers in Dublin, or even it might be
solicitors in the same city, who had a large connection amongst the
landed gentry and were learned in the mysteries of conveyancing.

These men did not often visit Kingslough, but on the rare occasions of
their coming, the sensation produced by their presence was profound.

Kingslough rubbed its eyes, so to say, and woke up, and the opinions and
facts then brought from the great and wicked world to that garden of
Eden where so many elderly Eves congregated, furnished conversation for
years afterwards.

In addition to the inhabitants already enumerated, Kingslough reckoned
amongst its gentry a clergyman, whose cure was four miles distant; a
curate, on whose shoulders devolved the spiritual responsibilities of a
rector, who was continually absent from his flock; a colonel, who had
never been in active service, but who, on the strength of his rank in
the army, was so fortunate as to marry an English lady possessed of a
comfortable fortune; a priest, the soul of good company; a remarkably
acute attorney, Lord Ardmorne’s agent; the police officer, and, may I
add, the doctor?

Hardly. He attended all the population, gentle and simple, and was
popular alike amongst high and low. He knew the secrets of most
households, was personally acquainted with the history and appearance of
those skeletons that do somehow contrive to get locked up in the
cupboards of even the best regulated families; but he had sprung from
the bourgeois class, he had relatives very low down in the worldly
scale, he had friends whose existence and status could not be overlooked
by old maids and old women of the other sex, and therefore, and for all
these reasons he was socially only tolerated by his best patients.

Curious stories he could have told concerning some of them—stories
compromising the honour of many an ancient house, but his name had never
been tarnished by any indiscreet confidence.

Even to the wife of his bosom, a woman of an inquiring, not to say
inquisitive turn of mind, who had as many wiles as a poacher, and
changed her tactics as often as a fox, he presented an invulnerable
front of lamb-like innocence.

Trusting her ostensibly with everything in and out of his professional
experience, he kept her in a state of actual ignorance, worthy of
admiration in these latter days.

The moment he started on his rounds in the morning, she started on
hers—telling this, that, and the other as the most profound secret to
each one of her acquaintances, who laughed at her when once she left the
house—for had they not heard all she was able to communicate, and more,
hours previously, from Molly the fish-wife, or Pat O’Donnel, one of the
privileged beggars and newsmongers of the town?

So ends the list. If tedious, it has been necessary to indicate the
history of Kingslough and glance at the élite of Kingslough society in
order to save stoppages by the way hereafter.

After this needful digression, let us revert to the first sentence in
this story once again, and enter the stupid, dull, dirty little town of
Kingslough at noon.




                              CHAPTER II.
                           WHERE CAN SHE BE?


Something had on that particular day, at that special hour occurred to
disturb the customary serenity of Kingslough. Spite of the sun which
flared upon the terrace, blinds were drawn up and heads thrust out.

People stood in knots upon the Glendare Parade talking eagerly together,
and looking down into the sea. At the doors of the houses in Main Street
servants occupied the door-steps and gaped vaguely to right and left as
though expecting the coming of some strange spectacle.

In the middle of the horse-ways poodles, unexpectedly released from
durance in stuffy parlours, yelped at other poodles, and fought and ran
or were carried away. The young ladies who attended as day-boarders that
select establishment presided over by the Misses Chesterfield having
been accorded a half-holiday, came walking through the town to their
respective homes, thereby adding to the tumult. Thundering double knocks
resounded momentarily at the door of an insignificant-looking
three-storey house on the parade, in the lower room of which a very old
lady, feeble though voluble, sat wringing her hand, bemoaning her fate,
and appealing in turn to each of her visitors to “do something.”

“They are turning the water out of Hay’s mill-pond, and all the
fishermen are down on the shore, and Colonel Perris has taken his groom
and gardener to the Black Stream, and oh! my dear friend, let us try to
hope for the best,” said Mrs. Lefroy, one of the annual visitors to
Kingslough, acting with a wonderful naturalness the part of Job’s
comforter to the decrepit, broken woman she addressed.

“You may be quite sure, dear Miss Riley, that everybody is doing their
best,” added Mrs. Mynton kindly, if ungrammatically.

“And whatever may have happened,” broke in the clergyman who did not
reside in his parish, and never visited it save on Sunday mornings,
“whatever may have happened I need not remind so thorough a Christian
that—”

“How can you all be so silly as to frighten the poor old lady in this
absurd manner,” said a deep stern female voice at this juncture; “the
girl will come back safe and sound, never fear. Girls do not get
murdered, or drowned, or kidnapped so easily at this age of the world;
she will return about dinner-time, if not before, mark my words.” And
the speaker a hard-featured woman of more than middle age, who possessed
a kindly eye as well as decided manners, looked round the persons
assembled as she finished, as though to inquire “Who is there amongst
you that shall dare contradict me?”

For a moment there was silence, and then uprose a confused murmur of
many voices—amongst which one sounded shrill above the rest.

“If ye think ye are in England still, Mrs. Hartley—” commenced the owner
of that cracked treble in a brogue which made one at least of her
auditors shiver.

“Pardon me, Miss Tracey, I never indulge in day-dreams,” interposed Mrs.
Hartley, rustling across the room in one of those stiff black silks,
which were at once the envy and the condemnation of feminine Kingslough,
“but whether people are in England or Ireland, I consider it very
foolish to meet trouble half way. Particularly in this case, where I
hope and believe the trouble is all imaginary.”

“Ah! and indeed we hope that too, every one of us,” said Mrs. Mynton,
who was regarded in Kingslough as a sort of peace-making chorus.

“Perhaps _you_ know where Nettie is, Mrs. Hartley,” suggested Mrs.
Lefroy, who on the score of her husband’s name claimed a relationship
with various distinguished members of the bar which it would have
puzzled the king-at-arms to trace, and adopted in consequence a severe
and judicial deportment amongst her acquaintances.

“I know no more of Miss O’Hara’s movements than you do, perhaps rather
less,” replied the lady addressed, “but until I am positively assured
some accident has happened to her, I prefer to believe that, finding she
was too late for school, she took a holiday, and has walked up to the
Abbey to sketch, or gone to see some of her young friends, who may
perhaps have induced her to spend the remainder of the day in
forgetfulness of backboards and Cramer’s exercises.”

“Ah! you don’t know Nettie.”

“Indeed, you don’t know Nettie.”

“You know nothing at all about Nettie,” broke forth Miss Riley’s
visitors, whilst Miss Riley herself, shaking her poor old head, mumbled
out from jaws that were almost toothless, “Nettie would not do such a
thing, not for the world.”

For a moment Mrs. Hartley remained silent; but she was a person who did
not like to be beaten or to seem beaten, and accordingly, with a sudden
rally of her forces, she inquired,—

“Had the girl any lover?”

Now this was in reality the question which every woman in the room had
been dying to put; and yet so unquestioned was Miss Riley’s
respectability of position and propriety of demeanour during seventy
years or thereabouts of maidenhood, that no one impressed by the
Hibernian unities had ventured to put it. Mrs. Hartley was however a
“foreigner” and audacious. “Had the girl a lover?” she asked, and at the
mere suggestion of such a possibility, the curls in Miss Riley’s brown
front began slowly to slip from their tortoiseshell moorings, whilst her
wrinkled old cheeks became suffused with a pale pink glow, just as
though she were eighteen again, young enough to be wooed, and won, and
wed.

“I am astonished at such an idea entering into the mind of _any_ one who
ever beheld my grand-niece,” she remarked, the very bows in her cap
trembling with indignation and palsy. “Nettie is only sixteen—a mere
child—”

(“With a very pretty face,” remarked Mrs. Hartley, _inter alia_.)

“Who has never, so far as I know,” went on the octogenarian, “spoken
half-a-dozen words to a—a—gentleman since she was ten years old.”

“And pray, my dear Miss Riley, how far do you know about it,” retorted
that irrepressible Englishwoman. “How can you, who never stir out of
your house except for an hour in the sun, tell how many half-a-dozen
words a young girl may have spoken to a young man. Have you asked that
delightful Jane of yours if she ever suspected a love affair?”

“You can have in Jane, if you like,” said Miss Riley. “If anything of
that sort had been going on, Mrs. Hartley, Jane was too old and faithful
a servant to have kept it from me.”

“I wish we were all as sure Nettie has met with no accident, as we are
that she has always behaved, and always will behave, like the good
little girl we know her to be,” remarked Mrs. Mynton.

“It is natural though,” began Miss Tracey, “that seeing Mrs. Hartley is
an Englishwoman, she—”

“Nonsense,” interposed the lady, thus disparagingly referred to. “No one
can think more highly of Nettie than I; indeed if I had a fault to find
with her manners, it was only that they were too sedate and quiet for
such a young creature—such a very pretty young creature,” added Mrs.
Hartley reflectively.

“It is very hard upon me at my time of life,” said Miss Riley with a
helpless whimper, and the irrelevance of incipient dotage.

“Indeed it is; indeed we all feel that, but you must hope for the best.
We shall see Nettie come back yet safe and sound.” Thus the chorus,
while Mrs. Hartley walked to the window and looked out upon the sea, a
puzzled expression lurking in her brown eyes, and an almost contemptuous
smile lingering about her mouth.

“Can you not throw any further light on this matter, Grace,” she asked
at last turning towards a young girl who sat silent in one corner of the
room.

“I never saw Nettie after she left our gate at nine o’clock this
morning,” was the reply accompanied by a vivid blush. “I wanted her to
come in, but she said she was in a hurry; that she wished to get to
school early, so as to speak to Miss Emily about a French exercise she
did not quite understand.”

“And when you reached Kingslough House she had not arrived?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I believe Miss Moffat has already told us all she knows on the
subject,” interposed a lady who had not hitherto entered into the
conversation.

“I believe Miss Moffat knows more than she chooses to tell,” retorted
Mrs. Hartley, with a brusqueness which caused the eyes of every person
to turn towards the girl, who in a perfect agony of confusion
exclaimed,—

“Oh! Mrs. Hartley, I have not the remotest idea where Nettie is. I am
quite positive she had not another thought in her mind when she left me,
but to go straight to Kingslough House.”

“The first remark you made when you heard she had not reached school
was, that some accident must have happened to her.”

“Allow me to correct you, Mrs. Hartley,” said Miss Chesterfield. “Miss
Moffat’s words were, ‘something must have happened,’ meaning, as I
understood, that something must have happened to prevent her attending
as usual to her duties; that was what you intended to imply, my dear,”
added the lady, addressing her pupil, “is it not so?”

“Yes, that was what I intended to say,” the girl eagerly agreed.

“And when the man brought in her scarf, which he saw floating on the
pond, you thought she must have met with an accident?”

“Please, Mrs. Hartley, do not ask me any more,” pleaded the witness. “We
are making Miss Riley wretched. I cannot tell what to think. Very likely
her scarf blew off as she crossed the plank. It was not in the least
degree slippery this morning. I went that way myself. Besides the water
there is not deep enough to drown any person.”

A long sentence for a young lady of that day to utter in public. The
gift of tongues had not then been so freely vouchsafed to damsels under
twenty, as it has in these later times. And after listening to Miss
Grace’s little speech, Mrs. Hartley turned once more towards the window,
and looked again over the sea.

With a different expression, however, to that her face had worn
previously. She looked anxious and troubled. Nettie O’Hara’s beauty was
too pleasant a remembrance for this middle-aged lady to be able to
contemplate without dismay, the possibility of harm having come to her.
And that harm had come to her she began to fear, not in the way
suggested by the Job’s comforters who surrounded Miss Riley, but in a
manner which might make the dripping corpse and long fair hair rendered
unlovely by clinging sand, a welcome and happy memory by comparison.

No visitor who entered Miss Riley’s house that day, had been so much
inclined to pooh-pooh the alarm excited by the girl’s disappearance as
that remarkably sensible and matter-of-fact English lady, who now stood
silently looking out over the sea; but as that sweet young face,
innocent and guileless, and yet not quite happy, rose up before the eyes
of her memory, she felt as though she should like to go forth and assist
herself in the search foolish, kindly, incompetent, well-meaning friends
and acquaintances were making for the girl.

While she stood there she heard vaguely as one hears the sound of
running water, the stream of consolation and condolence flow on. They
were good people all, those friends of the poor palsied lady, who with
shaking head and trembling hands sat listening to their reiterated
assurances that she need not be uneasy, there would be good news of
Nettie soon; but not a competent counsellor could be reckoned amongst
them. That at least was Mrs. Hartley’s opinion when she turned and
surveyed the group, and her opinion took the form of words in this
wise:—

“If you hear nothing of Nettie before the post goes out to-night, Miss
Riley, I should advise you to write and ask your nephew, the General, to
come and see you without delay. I hope and trust, however, there may be
no necessity for you to write. I shall send this evening to know if your
anxiety is at an end.”

And so saying, Mrs. Hartley took the old lady’s hand, and held it for a
moment sympathizingly; then with a general curtsey and good morning to
an assemblage so large as to render a more friendly leave-taking
well-nigh impossible, she passed from the room, her silk dress rustling
as she went.

“That delightful Jane,” as Mrs. Hartley called her, was in waiting to
let the visitor out. She was a woman of thirty or thereabouts, ruddy
complexioned, and of a comely countenance. She was arrayed in decent
black. Some one or other of the Riley family was always dying, and her
mistress liked to see Jane in black, though the mistress could not
perhaps well have afforded to provide mourning for the maid.

Mourning was tidy and respectable, further it enabled Jane to wear out
Miss Riley’s tardily laid aside sable garments; but a better dressed
servant could not have been found in Kingslough than Jane M’Bride, who
now stood apron at her eye ready to open the door for Mrs. Hartley.

“My good Jane,” said that lady, pausing, “what do you think of all
this?”

“If anything has happened to Miss Nettie, it will break the mistress’s
heart altogether,” answered the servant.

“But what can have happened?” asked Mrs. Hartley.

“Nothin’ plaze God,” replied Jane, with that ready invocation of the
sacred name, which is an Hibernian peculiarity, and yet apparently with
a secret misgiving, that her own views and those of Providence might on
the special occasion in question have chanced to be at variance.

“Jane,” said Mrs. Hartley, unmoved by the solemnity of the
adjuration—perhaps because she was too much accustomed to hear it
used—“has it occurred to you that Miss Nettie might have gone off with
a—lover?”

“No, ma’am; oh! presarve us all, no; Miss Nettie had no lover, nor
thought of one.”

“You are quite certain of that? I speak to you as a friend of the
family.”

“Certain sure; it is as sure as death, Miss Nettie had no lover.”

“Then as sure as death, if Miss Nettie had not a lover, she will be back
here before the sun sets,” and adown the parade sailed Mrs. Hartley, all
her silken flags and streamers flying in the light summer breeze.

Before, however, she reached Glendare Terrace, came a soft voice in her
ear, and a light touch on her arm.

“May I walk with you, Mrs. Hartley?” said the voice.

“I want to confide in you,” said the touch.

“You here, Grace?” exclaimed Mrs. Hartley stopping and looking her young
companion straight in the face. “Most decidedly you may walk with me,
you know I am always glad of your company.”

And then they went on in silence. “Surely she will ask me some
question,” thought Grace. “I will give my lady line enough,” decided the
older woman—and the latter won.

“I have so wanted to speak to you, dear Mrs. Hartley,” said the girl,
after they had paced along a few minutes in silence.

“I like to hear you speak, Grace,” was the calm reply.

“But about Nettie—”

“I understood you to say, my love, that you had told us all there was to
tell.”

“And so I have—told all I had to tell, but surely, surely—you know—that
is—I mean—dear Mrs. Hartley,” and the timid hand clasped the widow’s
well-developed arm more tightly, “I may trust you implicitly, may I
not?”

There was a second’s pause, then Mrs. Hartley said,—

“I hope you may trust me, Grace.”

“I have told all I know about Nettie,” went on the girl vehemently, “but
not all I suspect. Oh! Mrs. Hartley, when I heard you advise Miss Riley
to send for the General, I could have _blessed_ you. If ever Nettie
comes back, you must never tell, never, what I am saying to you now.
Nettie was miserable and discontented, and—and wicked. She used to wish
she was dead. Oh! how she used to cry at the prospect of being a
governess for life; and it _was_ hard, was it not, poor dear? I cannot
bear to think about it. She seemed good and kind to Miss Riley, but she
was not a bit grateful, really. Papa never liked Nettie. I did, and I
like her still, but somehow, try her as one would, soft and sweet as she
appeared, one always seemed to be getting one’s teeth on a stone. I am
afraid you will think me dreadfully unkind, but I _must_ talk to
somebody, and, may I, please, talk to you?”

“Certainly, Grace, if you will make yourself intelligible,” was the
reply; “but I want to understand. Not fifteen minutes since you said you
were certain that when Nettie parted company with you, she had, to use
your own expression, which, if you were my child, I should beg of you
never to use again, ‘not another thought in her mind but to go straight
to Kingslough House.’”

“If I talked English, like you,” retorted Grace, “everybody in Ireland
would laugh at me.”

“Do you talk Irish, then?” asked Mrs. Hartley.

“You know what I mean,” was the answer, and once again Mrs. Hartley felt
the soft hand clasping her arm.

“My love, I do know what your Irish-English means, but not in the
slightest degree do I comprehend your mystery. Do you believe Nettie has
committed suicide?”

“Suicide!” with a shiver, “why should she?”

“Do you believe she is drowned?”

“No! oh, no!”

“Will she return to the Parade to-night?”

“I hope she may. How can I tell?”

At this juncture Mrs. Hartley freed her arm from Miss Moffat’s grasp.

“My dear child,” she said, “you had better go home to your father. He is
a man of mature years, and may like to be fooled. I am a woman of mature
years, and the bare suspicion of being fooled is intolerable to
me—good-bye.”

Then Miss Moffat suddenly brought to book, exclaimed,—

“I have no mother, Mrs. Hartley, and my father never liked Nettie, and I
liked her so—so much.”

“And therefore you know what has become of her—where she has gone?”—a
sentence severely uttered as an interrogative.

“No! I wish I did—I wish I did.”

“What do you suspect? you may be quite frank, Grace, with me.”

“She had a locket she wore inside her dress, a ring she put on sometimes
and said belonged to her grandfather; but it was quite a new ring, and
the hair in the locket was black as jet. The locket fell out of her
dress one day, and she invented in her confusion two or three stories
about it. If she had only told me—if she had only said one word—Nettie,
Nettie,” wailed the girl, extinguishing with that cry the last ray of
hope Mrs. Hartley’s horizon had contained.

“Grace,” began that lady, after a long and painful pause, “you reminded
me a little time since that you have no mother. May I talk to you like
one?”

“Dear Mrs. Hartley, yes! what have I done wrong?” and Grace’s hand stole
back to its accustomed place, and for once Mrs. Hartley thought her
companion’s accent more than pretty, something which might even have
attracted admirers at “the West End.”

“Nothing, I hope; I trust you never will; but does your great interest
in Nettie O’Hara arise from the fact that you and John Riley are likely
to be much hereafter one to another?”

Instantly the hand was withdrawn, and a quick flush passed over the
girl’s face.

“John and I are nothing to each other but very good friends. He does not
care enough for me, and I do not care enough for him, for things to be
different. I only wish Nettie and he could have liked each other, and
made a match. Perhaps in time she would have grown good enough for him.”

“You think John Riley a very good man, then?”

“Yes, too good and rare—” began the girl, when her companion interrupted
her with—

“You little simpleton, run home, and to-night when you say your prayers,
entreat that if you ever marry, you may have just such a good and rare
(though foolish and capable of improvement) husband as John Riley. In
all human probability you never will be anything more to each other than
you are now; but still keep him as a friend, and you shall have me too,
Grace, if you care for an old woman’s liking.”

“Though I am not pretty like Nettie,” added the girl.

“You are pretty, though not like Nettie. Ah! child, when you are my age
you will understand why we, for whom admiration, if we ever had the
power to attract it, is a forgotten story, are so tender to girls. Oh! I
wish I had that fair-haired Nettie beside me now. How shall I sleep if
no tidings come of her to-night?”

“Surely there will,” said Grace softly.

“Surely there will not,” considered Mrs. Hartley; and so the pair
parted, Miss Moffat with the hope that although Nettie might have “gone
off” with somebody she would repent by the way and turn back, Mrs.
Hartley wondering who in the world that “somebody” might be with whom
the young lady had chosen to elope.

Could it be Mr. John Riley; that same John to whom Grace Moffat had, by
popular consent, been long assigned? Grace was young, but young people
grow older in a judicious course of years. John likewise had not yet
that head on his shoulders which is popularly supposed to bestow wisdom
on its possessor; but he was an honest, honourable, good-looking,
sufficiently clever young man, and as both families approved of the
suggested alliance (had done so indeed since Grace wore a coral and
bells), Kingslough considered the marriage as well-nigh _un fait
accompli_.

True, Grace had been known to declare “she never meant to leave her
father, that she did not think much of love or lovers, of marrying or
giving in marriage. Why could not girls let well alone, and when they
were happy at home, stay there? She was happy; she would always remain
at Bayview; she was well; she did wish people would leave her alone.”
Thus Grace, whilst John, when gracefully rallied on the subject by
acquaintances who never could be made to understand that if a man has
lost his heart, he does not care to talk about the fact, was wont
laughingly to quote the Scotch ballad, and say, “‘Gracie is ower young
to marry yet,’ and when she is old enough it is not likely she would
throw herself away upon a poor fellow like me.”

For Grace had a large fortune in her own right, and expectations worthy
of consideration, and she came of a good old family, and persons who
were supposed to understand such matters declared that eventually Grace
would be a very attractive woman.

But then that time was the paradise of girls; they held the place in
masculine estimation now unhappily monopolized by more mature sirens,
and if a girl failed in her early teens to develope beauty after the
fashion of Nettie O’Hara, her chances in the matrimonial market were not
considered promising.

Curls, book-muslin, blue eyes, sashes to match, blushes when spoken to,
no original or commonplace observations to advance when invited out to
the mild dissipation of tea, and a carpet-dance; such was the raw
material from which men of that generation chose wives for themselves,
mothers for their children.

It was the fashion of the day, and we are all aware that fashions are
not immutable.

Such is not the fashion now; and yet who, looking around, shall dare to
say that the old curl and crook and shepherdess business had not, spite
of its folly, much to recommend it?

Men made mistakes then no doubt, but they were surely less costly
mistakes than are made nowadays. If a husband take to wife the wrong
woman—and this is an error which has not even the charm of novelty to
recommend it—he had surely a better chance for happiness with natural
hair, virgin white dresses made after simplicity’s own device, innocent
blue eyes, and cheeks whose roses bloomed at a moment’s notice, than
with the powders, paints, and frizettes of our own enchanting maidens.

We are concerned now, however, with the girl of _that_ period. According
to the then standard of beauty, as by society established, Grace Moffat
was not lovely. With Nettie O’Hara the case stood widely different.

Had her portrait ever been painted, it might now have been exhibited as
the type of that in woman which took men’s hearts captive in those old
world days; golden hair hanging in thick curls almost to her waist;
large blue eyes, with iris that dilated till at times it made the pupil
seem nearly black; long, tender lashes; a broad white forehead; a
complexion pure pink, pure white; dimpled cheeks; soft tender throat;
slight figure, undeveloped; brains undeveloped also; temper, perhaps,
ditto.

A face without a line; eyes without even a passing cloud; an expression
perfectly free from shadow; and yet Grace Moffat described her favourite
companion accurately, when in vague language she likened her to some
fair tempting fruit, inside whereof there lurked a hardness, which
friend, relative, and acquaintance, tried in vain to overcome. It had
been the custom at Kingslough to regard Nettie as a limpid brook,
through the clean waters of which every pebble, every grain of sand was
to be plainly discerned. Now as Mrs. Hartley sat and pondered over the
girl’s mysterious disappearance, she marvelled whether Miss Nettie’s
innocent transparency might not rather have been that of a mirror; in
other words, whether, while showing nothing much of her own thoughts,
the young lady merely reflected back those of others.

She had been unhappy, yet who save Grace was cognizant of the fact? The
outside world always imagined she was interested and absorbed in those
studies, which were to fit her to fill a responsible position—perhaps
eventually at a salary of eighty pounds a year; such things were amongst
the chronicles of society—in that state of life in which strangely
enough Providence had seen fit to place an O’Hara. And yet what was the
truth? the position had been unendurable to her, and most probably the
studies likewise.

“Oh!” sighed Mrs. Hartley, sinking into the depths of a comfortable
easy-chair, “is truth to be found nowhere save at the bottom of a well?
and has John Riley anything to do with Nettie’s disappearance? If I find
he has, I shall renounce humanity.”

Nevertheless, how was she to retain her faith intact even in John Riley?
Not for one moment did she now imagine that if Nettie were actually
gone, and she believed this to be the case, she had gone alone. No
relative, Mrs. Hartley well knew, would welcome this prodigal with tears
of rejoicing—with outstretched arms of love. She had been slow to share
in the alarm caused by Nettie’s disappearance, by Nettie’s saturated
scarf; now she could not resist a gradually increasing conviction that
the girl’s conduct had belied her face, and brought discredit on her
family; that she had stolen away with some one who, fancying the match
would not be approved of by his own relatives, possessed power enough
over her affections to induce her to consent to a secret marriage.

A deeper depth of misfortune than a runaway match Mrs. Hartley had
indeed for a moment contemplated, as whilst the talk in Miss Riley’s
parlour ran on, her eyes looked over the sun-lit sea; but seated in her
own pleasant drawing-room, her reason refused to let her fears venture
again to the brink of so terrible an abyss. No; Nettie had always been
surrounded by honest and honourable men and women; women, who though
they might be at times malicious, fond of scandal, given to tattling
concerning the offences of their neighbours, would yet have done their
best to keep a girl from wrong, or the knowledge of wrong; men, who let
their sins of omission and commission be in other respects what they
would, had yet a high standard of morality, as morality concerned their
wives, mothers, sisters, children, and female relatives generally.

Had Nettie been one of the royal family, fenced round by all sorts of
forms and ceremonies, by state etiquette, and the traditions of a line
of kings, she could not, in Mrs. Hartley’s opinion, have breathed an
atmosphere more free from taint of evil, than that in which she had
hitherto lived and had her being.

It might be John Riley—incited thereto by love of her pretty face, and
fear of opposition from his family—had persuaded the girl to run off
with him. If this were so, the greater pity for both. He was poor and
struggling; her worldly fortune consisted of those personal charms
already duly chronicled, a very little learning, and a smattering of a
few accomplishments.

She knew as much as other young ladies of her age of that period; but
after all, “La Clochette,” the “Battle of Prague,” and other such
triumphs of musical execution were not serviceable articles with which
to set up house.

She had been in training for a governess, and why, oh! why, could not
John Riley have left her in peace to follow that eminently respectable,
if somewhat monotonous vocation?

“It must be John Riley;” that Mrs. Hartley decided with a sorrowful
shake of her head. Thanks to the blindness, or folly, or design of Grace
Moffat, the young man had been afforded ample opportunities of
contemplating Nettie’s pink cheeks, and blue eyes, and golden curls, in
the old-fashioned garden at Bayview.

She had counted there as nobody, no doubt, the demure little chit. She
had been still and proper, Mrs. Hartley could well understand. At a very
early period of her young life, Nettie was taught in a bitter enough
school the truth, that speech is silver, but silence gold.

Nevertheless, young men have eyes, and John Riley was at least as likely
as Mrs. Hartley to realize the fact that Nettie was a very pretty girl.

“And it will be misery for both of them,” decided the lady; “but there,
what can it signify to me, who have no reason to trouble myself about
the matter, to whom they are neither kith nor kin? I shall never believe
in an honest face again Mr. John Riley, nor in a blundering, stupid
schoolboy manner. There, I wash my hands of the whole matter; I only
wish they were both young enough to be whipped and put in the corner,
couple of babies.”

And then as a fitting result of her sentence, Mrs. Hartley sent up this
message to the Parade: “Mrs. Hartley’s kind love, and has Miss Riley
heard any tidings of her niece?” as by a convenient fiction Miss O’Hara
was called.

The answer which came back was, “Miss Riley’s best love to Mrs. Hartley.
She is very poorly, and has sent for the General. No news of Miss
Nettie.”

“What a shame,” thought Mrs. Hartley, “for them to keep the poor old
lady in such a state of suspense!” and she went to bed, having
previously corked up all the vials of her wrath, with the intention of
opening them sooner or later for the benefit of John Riley.

Alas! however, for the best laid schemes of humanity. Next morning, when
Dodson, Mrs. Hartley’s highly respectable and eminently disagreeable
maid, called her mistress, she brought with her into the room the
following announcement:—

“It is nine o’clock’ ’m, and if you please, ’m, Mr. Riley, ’m, is in the
drawing-room, ’m, and Miss O’Hara—”

“What of her, woman?” demanded Mrs. Hartley, in a tone Mrs. Siddons
might have envied, sitting bolt upright in bed and looking in her
_toilette de nuit_ a very different person indeed from the stately widow
whose dress was the envy and whose tongue was the dread of all the
ladies in Kingslough, whether married or single. “Don’t stand there
silent, as if you were an idiot.”

“Miss O’Hara have gone off with Mr. Daniel Brady, ’m, if you please,
’m,” and Dodson the imperturbable, having made this little speech,
turned discreetly to leave the room.

“If she pleased, indeed!” Whether she pleased or not the deed was done
and irrevocable.

For blue eyes, and pink cheeks, and golden hair there was in this world
no hope, no pardon, no chance of social or family rehabiliment; not even
when the eyes were bleared and glassy, not when the cheeks were pale and
furrowed, not when the thick, bright hair was thin and grey, might
Nettie ever imagine this sin of her youth would be forgiven and
forgotten.

An hour had been enough for the sowing, years would scarcely suffice for
the in-gathering.

All this Mrs. Hartley foresaw as she laid her head again on the pillow
and turned her eyes away from the sight of the bright sunbeams dancing
on the sea.

Meantime the door had closed behind her immaculate and most unpleasant
maid.




                              CHAPTER III.
                             THE GLENDARES.


Twelve Irish miles from Kingslough, meaning fifteen or thereabouts
English measurement, stood Rosemont, the ancestral residence of the
Earls of Glendare.

That fifteen miles’ journey took the traveller precisely the same
distance from the sea; but it did not matter in the smallest degree to
any of the Glendares where the family seat was situated, since they
never lived on their own acres whilst a guinea remained to be spent in
London or Paris.

Once upon a time, as the fairy-books say, the Glendare rent-roll had
provided the head of the family with an income of one thousand pounds a
day. There were larger rent-rolls in the United Kingdom no doubt, but
still a thousand a day can scarcely be considered penury.

To the Glendares, however, it merely assumed the shape of pocket-money;
as a natural consequence the ancestral revenues proved ultimately
totally inadequate to supply the requirements of each successive earl.

They married heiresses, they married paupers, with a precisely similar
result.

The heiresses’ wealth was spent, the paupers learned to spend. Gamblers,
men and women, they risked the happiness and well-being of their tenants
on a throw of the dice. Rents, too high already, were raised on lands
the holders had no capital to get more produce out of.

“Money! money!” was the Glendare refrain; and money scraped together by
pence and shillings, money painfully earned in the sweat of men’s brows,
by the labour of women’s hands, went out of the country to keep those
wicked orgies going where my lord, and other lords like him, helped to
make a poor land poorer, and milady, all paint, and pride, and sin,
played not only diamonds and spades, but the heart’s blood of patient
men, and the tears and sobs of hopeless women.

In the quiet fields where the wheat grew and the barley ripened, where
the potatoes put forth their blossoms, purple and yellow, white and
yellow, where the meadows yielded crops that reached far above a man’s
knees, there was the Glendare rent sowed and planted, reaped, mown,
garnered, gathered, pound by pound, all too slowly for the harpies who
waited its advent.

The hens in the untidy farm-yards, the eggs they laid in convenient
hedges, the chickens they hatched were all in due course sacrificed on
the altar of rent. The cows’ milk, the butter it produced, the calves
they bore, might have been labelled “Rent.” The yarn spun by an ancient
grandmother, the cloth woven by a consumptive son had that trade-mark
stamped upon thread and web. The bees in the garden hummed unconsciously
the same tune, the pigs grunting on the dung-heap, wallowing in the
mire, exploring the tenants’ earth-floored kitchens, repeated the same
refrain.

Rent! the children might have been hushed to sleep with a song reciting
its requirements, so familiar was the sound and meaning of the word to
them. Rent! lovers could not forget the inevitable “gale days,” even in
their wooing.

What did it matter whether the tenants looked forth over land where the
earth gave her increase, or upon barren swamps, where nothing grew
luxuriantly save rushes and yellow flags? The rent had to be made up
somehow just the same. Did the pig die, did the cow sicken, did the
crops fail, did illness and death cross their thresholds, that rent,
more inexorable even than death, had to be paid by men who in the best
of times could scarcely gather together sufficient to pay it at all.

In the sweat of their brows was that income made up by the Glendare
tenantry, and the Jews had the money. Fortunately in those days penny
newspapers were not, and tidings from the great capital came rarely to
remote homesteads, otherwise how should these men have borne their lot;
borne labour greater than any working man of the present day would
endure, and superadded to that labour all the anxieties of a merchant?
The farmer then was a principal and yet he did his own labour. He had a
principal’s stake, a principal’s responsibilities, and as a
recompense—what? The privilege of being out in all weathers to look
after his stock and his crops; the right to work early and late so long
as he could make up his rent; the power to keep a sound roof over his
head if he saw to the thatch or the slating himself. Add to these
advantages a diet into which oaten meal entered largely and meat never;
the luxury of a chaff-bed; the delight of being called Mister by the
clergyman, the minister, the agent, and friends generally, and the
reader will have a fair idea of the sort of existence led by tenants on
the Glendare and other estates at that period of Ireland’s history.

Landlords in those days had no responsibilities. Responsibility was at
that time entirely a tenant question, which fact may perhaps account for
some of the troubles that have since then perplexed the mind of the
upper ten. By the grace of God and the king there was then a class
established to spend money; by grace of the same powers there was a
still larger class created to provide the money the former chose to
squander.

That property had its duties as well as its rights was a maxim which
would have been laughed to scorn by those whom the adage concerned.

Once again we may find in this, cause for the later effect, of the lower
classes now utterly denying that property has its rights as well as its
duties.

Revolutions come and revolutions go; there is a mighty one being wrought
at the present moment, which has arisen out of circumstances such as
those enumerated and others like them, and happy will this land be if
for once the wealthy can persuade themselves to personal abnegation as
the poor did in days gone by.

It is hard to do so with the eyes of body and understanding wide open,
but in proportion to the difficulty so will be the reward.

The great must give much now for the years wherein their fathers gave
nothing; and if they are willing to do so, the evil will right itself,
and a bloodless battle-ground shall leave an open field whereon the next
generation may ventilate the differences of centuries, and settle those
grievances which have been handed down from generation to generation,
but investigated truthfully and thoroughly by none.

In the days of which I write, taking society round, the rich were all
powerful, and the poor had none to help. It was a great and patient
population that rose up early and worked hard all day, that ate the
bread of carefulness and saved every groat which their poor lives could
spare in order that milady and other ladies like her should fulfil no
one single useful or grand purpose in life.

Were the sights of nature in her different moods sufficient reward for
their uncomplaining labour? So perhaps the men and the women who never
noticed nature at all, considered.

And yet there must have been some great compensation about the whole
business, which perhaps we shall never quite understand here—unless it
was to be found in the great contentment, the sweet patient adaptability
of the people of that far away time.

The love of wife and children was wonderfully dear to those toilers on
the land, and as a rule they had tender, helpful wives, and dutiful,
hard working children. There was peace at home, let the agent be never
so unquiet; there was no straining this way and struggling in that
direction.

The oaten meal porridge was eaten in thankfulness, and no dissension
curdled the milk with which the mess was diluted. They were too poor,
and too dependent one upon another to quarrel, added to which the
Almighty had bestowed upon them that power of knowing when to speak and
when to refrain, which adds so mightily to the well-being of households.

“The world,” says the old adage, “grows wiser and weaker;” comparing the
poor of these days with the poor of a long ago period, it is to be
feared they do not grow better.

Concerning the rich, it is to be hoped they grow wiser than their
progenitors.

Wickeder it might baffle some even of the men whose doings now astonish
worthy magistrates and learned judges, to become.

No man of the present day at all events dare emulate the doings of those
historical Glendares, and yet one redeeming point may be stated in their
favour. They exhibited their vices where they spent their money. On the
rare occasions when they honoured the family mansion with their
presence, they left their immoralities behind them. They came like
leeches to suck the life’s blood out of their tenants; to assert feudal
superiority in the matter of votes; to get out of the way of importunate
creditors; sometimes it might be to recruit health, enfeebled by London
hours and London dissipation: but no tenant ever had cause to curse the
day when his daughter’s pretty face was commented on by one of the
Glendares, old or young; no farmer’s wife ever had reason to weep for a
child worse than dead through them; no household held a vacant place in
consequence of any ill wrought by my lord or one belonging to him.

Indeed that was just the sort of evil my lord would not have brooked on
the part of one belonging to him.

He knew the people he had to deal with, and understood precisely the
straw which should break the camel’s back of their endurance.

So to put it, he and his were on their good behaviour when they crossed
the channel; and accordingly, though never worse landlords cursed a soil
than these men who had come in with the second Charles, and not gone out
with any of the Georges, the Glendares were popular and well liked.

Perhaps for the same reason that the Stuarts were liked. They had
winsome faces, gracious ways, familiar manners. The beggars in the
streets had free liberty to bandy repartee with my lord, who always kept
his pockets full of coppers for their benefit.

Coppers! the pence were much to them, but what were they to him? And yet
the farmer, from whose leathern pouches those coppers originally came,
and who gave out of their poverty a million times more than their
landlord out of his abundance, liked to hear the mendicants’ praise of
my lord, who had a word and a joke for everybody, “God bless him.”

And perhaps there was some praise due to a nobleman who, situated as my
lord was, had a word and a joke for anybody.

It is not in the slightest degree likely that a single reader of these
lines can know from experience the irritating effects which a persistent
dun is capable of exciting on the serenest temper. Still less can the
present race of debtors understand the horror that encompassed even a
nobleman when he knew at any moment the hand of a bailiff might be laid
on his shoulder.

Fancy capping jests under these circumstances with a bare-footed,
imperfectly clothed Hibernian beggar who had never washed her body nor
combed her hair for forty years or thereabouts. Could you have done it?
No, you answer with a shudder; and yet that was the way in which gentry
courted popularity, and “made their souls” in the good old days
departed.

To the poorest man who touched his hat to him, my lord raised his; let
the humblest Irish equivalent of John Oakes or Tom Styles ask audience,
he was asked into the presence-chamber. On his agent, on his lawyers, my
lord thrust the unpleasant portion of the land question, and every
tenant on that wide estate was from his own personal experience firmly
convinced that if his landlord could only be privately informed how
wrong many things were, he would publicly redress them.

“Not but what the lawyers and the agent were very pleasant gentlemen,
only it was not natural they should take the same interest in the soil
as his lordship,” and so forth. Whereas those unhappy gentlemen were
always trying to moderate his lordship’s demands, always striving to
make that most worthy nobleman understand there was a limit to a
farmer’s purse, a point beyond which a man could not, physically or
pecuniarily, be safely bled.

Besides Rosemont the Glendare owned other residences in Ireland:
Glendare Castle, a black ruin, the foundations of which were washed by
the wild Atlantic waves; Beechwood, a lovely property occupied by a
certain Major Coombes, who kept the place in good order to the exceeding
mortification of his landlord, who considered the well-kept lawns and
trim flower-gardens and richly stocked conservatories a tacit reproach
to himself; to say nothing of several dilapidated shooting-lodges that
were either rented by poor gentlemen farmers, or else going to ruin as
fast as damp and neglect could take them.

Had any one of the family set himself to the task of freeing the
estates, he might have succeeded. Had any fresh earl when he returned to
Rosemont, after laying the body of his predecessor in the old Abbey
overlooking the sea, faced the question of his difficulties, and
determined to rid his property of debt and the Jews, he might even at
the eleventh hour have saved those broad acres for his posterity and won
ease of mind and blessings from his inferiors for himself. Until the
very last, the disease though deep seated was not incurable; but not one
of those careless earls ever had courage to endure the remedy.

After the funeral of each successive nobleman, the next heir hied him
back to London, or Paris, or Baden, or some other favourite resort; and
the Jews and the lawyers and the middle-men prospered and fattened on
the Glendare pastures, whilst both landlord and tenants led wretched,
anxious lives, the first driven almost mad by the harpies, whose cry
from January to December was “More, more,” the latter toiling to fill a
purse out of which the money poured faster than it could be thrown in.

Yes, they were doomed in those days of which I write—the Glendares
gracious in manner, false at heart; lightly had their lands been won,
lightly it seemed destined they should go. And yet there was one of the
family towards whom the eyes of the tenantry turned with hope, though he
was not heir-apparent, or presumptive, or anything of the sort.

He was resident, however, and that, in the estimation of the Glendare
dependents, was a virtue and a promise in itself. Since his earliest
youth Robert Somerford had lived amongst his uncle’s tenantry; not from
any desire on his part to do so, the reader may be certain, but simply
because Mrs. Somerford having no money to live anywhere else, had been
glad enough when left a widow, to embrace Lord Glendare’s offer for her
to take up her abode at Rosemont, and make her moderate income go as far
as she could in one wing of that commodious family mansion.

The Hon. Mrs. Somerford never made even a pretence of being contented
with this arrangement. She gave herself airs, she openly stated her
dislike to the country and its inhabitants; she never visited the poor,
or the rich either if she could help it, for that matter; she never
assisted the sick and needy; the ready graceful charity of that generous
peasantry she laughed to scorn; indeed, as Mrs. Hartley, herself a
distant kinswoman of Lord Glendare’s relative declared, “Mrs. Somerford
was a truly detestable person.”

But Lord Glendare had loved his younger brother, her husband, and for
the sake of the dead gave shelter to the widow and her son, the latter
of whom grew up amongst the Irish people as has been stated.

Had fate so willed it, he would gladly have left Ireland and the people
behind him for ever. Aliens the Glendares were when to John Somerford,
first Earl, King Charles granted those lands, privileges, and so forth,
of which mention has already been made; and aliens they remained through
the years that followed. They were not of the soil; better they loved
the pavement of Bond Street than all the shamrocks of the sainted isle;
but as already hinted, they were a plausible and an adaptable race,
possessed of manners that might have pleased their first royal patron,
not given to tramp unnecessarily on people’s corns and blessed with that
ready courtesy, which if it mean in reality very little, conveys the
idea of intending a great deal.

Certain were the tenants that some day Mr. Robert would put matters
right for them with my lord.

“He is like one of ourselves, bless his handsome face,” said the women,
enthusiastically. “He has sat down there,” and the speaker would point
to a settle opposite, “many and many a time, and taken the children on
his knee, and rested his gun in the corner, and eaten a potato and salt
with as much relish as if it had been a slice off a joint.”

“And his tongue is like ours,” some man would continue. “Even my lord
talks English, and so do his sons, fine young gentlemen though they be,
but Master Robert is Irish to the backbone. He will go away to Dublin
and make a great name for himself one of these days, and then he won’t
forget the ‘gossoons’ he played with once, but ‘insense’ my lord into
the wrongs that are put upon us in his name.”

“There never was a Somerford a patch upon Mr. Robert,” sometimes cried a
female voice when the conversation turned upon Rosemont and its
inhabitants. At which juncture a tenant more wise, more just, or more
prudent than the woman-kind, was certain to interpose with a cautious
remark—

“Hoot! ye shouldn’t say that, the young lords are wonderful fine lads to
be sure.”

From all of which it will be perceived that another earl now received
the Glendare rents from that lamented nobleman who ruled over his
vassals at the time George the Fourth began his glorious reign.

He lay in Ballyknock Abbey securely cased in elm and soldered down in
lead, and, for greater safety, boxed up a third time in oak; and Louis,
the son he hoped might obtain an appointment in the Royal Household, and
who did obtain it, reigned in his stead.

Thus a new race was springing up not one whit less extravagant, selfish,
short sighted, and evilly inclined than the former generation. Strange
tales about the Glendare _ménage_, and the Glendare doings, found their
way across the channel to Dublin, and thence down to the better class of
houses in the colder and darker north,—tales whereat sometimes society
lifted up its hands and covered its face, tales at which it shook its
decorous head, tales of shifts and subterfuges at which it was not in
Irish nature to avoid laughing.

A volcano was threatening the land, but the Glendares danced unconscious
on the edge of the crater. The skeleton ruin was creeping up to their
gates, but they only threw those gates open the wider, and bade more
guests enter. A cloud of debt, once no bigger than a man’s hand, now
covered almost the whole of their social future, and yet, each day,
fresh debts were contracted.

The Countess was one of the queens whose voice was potent at Almack’s.

She had been a great beauty in her youth. Artists had painted, sculptors
moulded her, poets had written verses in her honour, philosophers had
basked in her smiles, statesmen esteemed it an honour to receive a tap
from her fan.

But the loveliness was gone, as the lands were going, and everybody knew
it.

She had immediately before the period when this story opens, received an
intimation from her husband that as an election was imminent, it would
be necessary for them both to repair to Ireland; and when she looked in
the glass, to trace precisely the change which the years come and gone
since she had canvassed for votes before had wrought, she sighed at the
alteration made not so much by time as by the harassing life led of her
own choice and her own free will.

“Heigho!” she thought, “who would imagine I had once been the beautiful
Lady Trevor?” and then she put on a little more rouge, and decided that
after all the change was more apparent to her than it could be to any
one else.

Happy in this delusion, my lady arrived at Rosemont on the morning of
the day when all Kingslough was in consternation at high noon by reason
of Nettie O’Hara’s disappearance.




                              CHAPTER IV.
                         HOW THE NEWS ARRIVED.


It was a remarkable fact that although of the three ladies who kept the
only circulating library Kingslough boasted one was deaf, a second
nearly blind, and the third afflicted with lameness, nowhere in the town
was such early and reliable information concerning important events to
be obtained as in the small room lined with shelves, which were filled
with ragged, soiled, generally imperfect, and sometimes wholly disabled
books, which had passed through hundreds of hands, and done duty at
various other circulating libraries before settling down for life
amongst the inhabitants of that dull little seaport town.

In the pleasant days of old, few people in Ireland worked for their
living. There was an idea abroad that to labour for daily bread could by
no possibility be the right thing to do; and accordingly, as human
beings found it impossible to live without bread, or at all events
potatoes, as pennies were very scarce, even if the price of provisions
was inconceivably low, a convenient series of fictions obtained amongst
the Hibernians, that if any work was done it was performed entirely as a
matter of pleasure or occupation.

Even the very labourers, most of whom had their few acres of rush or
daisy-covered land, farmed by their wives and children, went to the
estate on which they chanced to be employed, “Just to oblige the
masther.”

The work was done fairly and the wages received regularly, but it
pleased them to make the latter seem by a figure of speech rather an
accident than a result.

And the same spirit pervaded all ranks. If a young man more clever and
more fortunate than his fellows had a secretary’s place offered, he
accepted it merely, so partial friends declared, because “Lord This or
That was so good to him; treated dear George like his own son.” Did a
boy enter the navy, “he could never, his relations declared, be happy on
shore, so they were glad to humour his whim.” Did a brother scrape
together all the family resources and purchase a commission in a cavalry
regiment, the girls were delighted, because “Charley never was happy out
of the saddle.” Did a man read hard and study hard and go in for the
bar, mamma murmured in a delicious brogue, “Henery had always a turn for
arguing and making speeches;” whilst if a keen young fellow were
sufficiently lucky to own an attorney uncle, friendly enough and rich
enough to find money to article the lad to himself, the matter was
generally put in some such light as this:—

“Jack is going to Dublin to help his uncle. The dear old man’s
business—almost entirely confined to the nobility—is increasing just as
fast as his health is failing, and so he asked Jack if he would mind
assisting him, and of course it will not be any extra expense to us, as
he would not have Jack there and give him nothing.”

As regards the Church, I really think there was no need to put a false
gloss on the motives of any man who entered it then, so far at least as
money was concerned. The great prizes were not many. The pay of curates
was ridiculously small; so small indeed that few save those possessed of
adequate private means could have been found among their ranks; but
perhaps this was the only career concerning which a fair amount of
candour prevailed.

To India, indeed, men did not scruple to say they were going, simply and
purely to make their fortunes; but then India was a long way off, and
the fortunes men had made there, the undying names they had left behind,
the pages their deeds filled in history, read like the enchanted story
of some eastern romance.

By a similar convenient fiction to that employed by men, if ladies
worked, it was because they liked employment, not because they earned
money.

Supposing “family circumstances” induced Miss Brennan to take up her
abode in Sir Thomas O’Donnell’s family in the capacity of governess or
companion, she stayed there, so sympathetic friends would have it, not
because Sir Thomas paid her fifty pounds a year, but because Lady
O’Donnell liked her so much she would not hear of her returning to her
friends.

Supposing Mrs. Waller and her daughters, driven to their wits’ ends how
to make the ends of their income meet! Visitors were expected to believe
that all these screens Martha painted so beautifully; all these purses,
glittering with beads and tassels and clasps and fancy rings, which
Pauline knitted or netted with a grace and dexterity really pleasant to
behold; all those pen-wipers and scent-bags and card-baskets and paper
mats which the younger fry manufactured as industriously as though they
had been inmates of a deaf and dumb school, were intended merely as free
gifts to their richer relations.

That was the way Mrs. Waller put and her friends received it; with the
light in which the richer relations viewed those works of art we have,
happily, nothing to do. The delusion was kept up at one end; perhaps
there was execration at the other. There are some persons who to this
hour cannot behold an embroidered sofa-pillow, a set of dinner-mats
adorned with robins seated on twigs; rural cottages surrounded with
trees; foreign temples, and vague sea-views, all executed in Indian ink;
a smoking-cap; a pair even of ornamented braces,—without groaning in
spirit over memories of black mail, levied in the name of fancy work,
that are recalled by the sight.

When however at a period, many years previous to the commencement of
this story, Mrs. Larkins and her two maiden sisters, the Misses Healey,
opened the circulating library to which reference has been made,
Kingslough was fairly non-plussed what to do with, what to say about
them. In its way it was as bad as though an Agnew had started a mill, or
a Riley taken a shop and expressed his intention of serving behind a
counter. The thing could not be concealed. There lay the awful
communication,—

“_Have_ you heard,” wrote Mrs. Lefroy, “that the Healeys are going to
lend out books?” and then of course it became that recipient’s duty to
write to some one else. “My dear, _what_ do you think? The Healeys are
having shelves put up all round their front parlour, and intend making
it into a _public_ library,” and so forth, and so forth, till at last
some spinster more courageous or more inquisitive than her neighbours,
went boldly and asked Mrs. Larkins what she meant by it all.

Mrs. Larkins was equal to the occasion, she had not been left a widow
twice for nothing.

“Yes; it is very sad,” she sighed, “but we cannot give up our
charities.”

Now for many a long day the Healeys had, on the plea of giving to the
poor, let their first floor to an old bachelor who, dying one morning
minus a will, left them without a legacy or a lodger.

At once Kingslough accepted the Library, and its _raison d’être_. The
idea had been suggested and the means found for carrying it into effect
by a dreadfully vulgar man who made money somehow out of flax, in a
distant part of the kingdom, and who having been brother to the deceased
Larkins had given many a stray pound note to Larkins’ widow, but all
this was discreetly kept in the background.

“We cannot give up our charities,” settled the business satisfactorily
at Kingslough, and why should it not have done so when every hour, even
at the present enlightened day, men and women have, as a matter of
common politeness, to swallow doses of social humbug as large if not
larger.

Not very long ago, the writer of this was expatiating to a friend on the
bad taste of a wealthy and titled lady who not merely insisted on
writing very poor verses but expected to be paid for them.

“Ah! it is for her charities!” was the reply. “What! with an income
of—?” Not to be personal the amount shall remain blank. The reader, even
if left to his internal consciousness, cannot fill it in at too high a
figure.

“Yes, she is so good; she gives so much away.”

In comparison to that what could Kingslough offer?—Kingslough, which
has, I am credibly informed, gone on with the times, and now prints its
own newspaper, and has its books from Mudie.

There was no Mudie when the Misses Healey converted the parlour of their
“dear papa’s” house into a room free to the public.

A second door was put up, to enable the hall door to stand hospitably
open, and soon their friends began to consider the Library a pleasant
sort of place in which to meet and while away half an hour. They visited
the Misses Healey, in fact, and borrowed a book or so from them. And
thus the ladies kept a roof over their heads, and retained their
standing in society. If they did make charity an excuse, who amongst us,
friends, has been so invariably straightforward that he shall dare to
throw the first stone at them.

Let the man who has never played with that which is worse than
lying—equivocation—stand up and condemn them. Charity begins at home,
the worldly-wise tell us, and Mrs. Larkins and her sisters, who were in
grievous need, bestowed it there. No beggar in the street was, after a
fashion, poorer than they, and so they remembered their own need first.

But when all this was done they had still something left; a pot of jam
for a sick child, a basin of soup for a weakly mother, tea-leaves with
capabilities of tea still in them, for the old women, who loved their
cup as their husbands loved their “glass;” clothes shabby and thin and
patched, it is true, but still clothes for some half-clad beggar, and a
few shillings even it might be in the course of the year given in cases
where nothing but money could be of any use.

They gave what they could, and the beggars curtseyed to them, and even
the young reprobates of the town—there were reprobates, alas! in
Kingslough, dull as it was—sometimes lifted their hats, and always
refrained from jeering remarks when the deaf sister and the blind paced
along the Parade arm-in-arm together.

Further to the credit of the town, be it stated, certain hours were by
the _non-élite_ set apart for their own visits to the Library. These
hours were either very early or very late. They did not wish to intrude
when Miss Healey had visitors, and in return Miss Healey acted towards
them the part of a mother, and only recommended them such books as she
could warrant from previous perusal to be perfectly innocuous.

Mrs. Larkins and Miss Healey might indeed safely have been planted
guard, not merely over the morals of Kingslough, but of the then coming
generation.

Could the old darlings rise from their graves, what would they think of
the literature of the present day?

If a girl, attracted by a particularly taking title, remarked, laying
hands on the book, “I think I will have that, Miss Healey,” Miss Healey
would turn upon her a wizened face, a pair of spectacles, and a brown
front, and say,—

“My dear, you must not have that. It is a gentleman’s book.”

What awful iniquity lay concealed under that phrase perhaps the
gentlemen of Kingslough could have explained. Certain am I no woman in
the place excepting Mrs. Larkins and her sisters knew. Neither did the
“lower orders.” Had Miss Healey belonged to the strictest sect of
professing Christians, her spectacles could not more diligently have
searched profitable and proper reading for the young men and the young
women who, being able slowly and painfully to spell out a story, were
willing to pay their hardly-earned pennies for the privilege of doing
so.

No new novels found their way to Kingslough. The youngest Miss Healey’s
shelves boasted must have been at least ten years of age, but they were
fresh to the subscribers as the last work of fiction published. As a
rule Miss Kate Healey, who was deaf, read aloud to her two sisters, but
occasionally books would arrive, some scenes in which trenched so
closely on their forbidden ground, that Miss Healey would decide against
their public perusal, and undertake herself silently to grapple with the
enemy.

As a woman twice married (“To think of it,” as Grace Moffat observed,
“while so many women never are married even once”), on Mrs. Larkins this
duty would naturally have devolved, but time and other causes had
rendered her eye-sight so bad that reading was impossible.

Indeed she could not find any other means of employing the shining hours
except knitting; and “How thankful I ought to be,” said the poor lady,
“that I learned to knit while I could see!” And accordingly, morning,
noon, and night, she plied her needles incessantly. Counterpanes,
curtains, shawls, reticules, purses, grew under her bony fingers. Miss
Kate read the tenderest love passages to the accompaniment of those
clicking needles; and while Miss Healey, in the interests of public
morality, was silently perusing some questionable scene, that
everlasting knitting still made way.

Three busily idle women were those sisters; always at work, and yet
always at leisure, always ready to hear news, equally ready to repeat
news. They were to Kingslough as Reuter to the civilized world. The
Library was the central telegraph office of the day to the little town.
Had it ever occurred to the Misses Healey to issue a newspaper, they
might have produced edition after edition containing the very latest
intelligence concerning the last piece of scandal.

To them, late on the evening of that summer’s day when this story opens,
entered, in great haste, a burly, red-faced, hearty-looking man, arrayed
in a driving-coat, and having a large kerchief muffled about his neck.

“My compliments, ladies, your most obedient servant,” he said, with a
sort of rough gallantry which set upon him not amiss, uncovering at the
same time, and holding his hat in his hand in a manner which might put a
modern dandy to shame. “I want you to find me a book for my little wife.
Plenty of love, and millinery, and grand society; you know her taste,
Miss Healey. I am in a hurry, for I stopped longer at Braher fair than I
intended, and my poor girl always thinks some accident has happened to
me if I am late. Thank you. I knew you could lay hands on what I asked
for in a minute,” and he was about to depart, when Mrs. Larkins, full of
the one subject of the day, interposed with—

“Oh! Mr. Mooney, and what do you think about this sad affair?”

“What sad affair?” he inquired.

“Dear! dear! haven’t you heard?” exclaimed Miss Healey and Mrs. Larkins
in amiable unison. “Miss O’Hara has been missing ever since ten o’clock
this morning, and no one knows what has happened to her.”

“Miss O’Hara?” he repeated. “Miss Riley’s niece? a pretty young lady
with a quantity of light hair?” and he made a gesture supposed to
indicate curls flowing over the shoulder.

“Yes; and they have been dragging the river.”

“And watching the tide,” added Miss Healey.

“And poor dear Miss Riley is heartbroken.”

“And she has sent for General Riley.”

“I am very much mistaken if I did not see the young lady this morning,”
said Mr. Mooney, a serious expression overclouding his frank, jovial
face.

“You? oh, Mr. Mooney! where?” cried the two ladies.

“Why, driving along the Kilcullagh Road with—”

“With whom?” in a shriek.

“With Mr. Dan Brady. I thought I had seen the young lady’s face
somewhere before, but his mare trotted past me so quick I could not
identify it at the moment. Now, however, I am sure the lady was Miss
O’Hara.” There was a moment’s silence.

“He must have abducted her, then,” broke out the sisters, but Mr. Mooney
shook his head.

“It is a bad job, I am afraid,” he observed; “but she has good friends,
that is one comfort. I do not think my little woman will want to read
any novels to-night, Miss Healey, when I tell her this story. I am
sorry, ay, that I am.” And with another bow, for the Misses Healey were
too high and mighty personages for him to offer his hand, Mr. Mooney,
with the books in his capacious pockets, passed out into the street,
mounted his gig, untied the reins he had knotted round the rail of the
dash-board, said, “Now, Rory,” to his horse, a great powerful roan, and
started off towards home at a good round pace, thinking the while how
grieved his delicate wife would be to hear of this great trouble which
had befallen respectable people.

“It is enough to make a man glad he has none of his own,” murmured Mr.
Mooney to himself, in strict confidence, and this must be considered as
going great lengths, since if Mr. Mooney had one bitter drop in his cup,
it was the fact that no living child had ever been born to him; that he
had neither son, nor daughter, nothing to love or to love him except the
little “wife,” who beguiled the weary hours of her invalid existence
with stories of lords and ladies, of fond men and foolish maidens, of
brave attire and brilliant halls, of everything farthest removed from
the actual experience of her own monotonous, though most beautiful and
pathetic life.

Meanwhile Miss Healey having screamed the tidings brought by Mr. Mooney
into Miss Kate’s least deaf ear, the three stood for a moment, so to
say, at arms.

“Anne,” said Mrs. Larkins at length, “Miss Riley ought to know this,”
but Anne shrank back appalled at the idea of being the bearer of such
tidings.

“Some one ought to go after them now, this minute,” said Miss Kate.

“Poor, poor Miss Riley!” exclaimed Miss Healey. “Yes,” began Mrs.
Larkins impatiently, “that is all very well, but something should be
done.”

“I’ll tell you what,” exclaimed Miss Healey, fairly driven into a
corner, which might excuse, though not perhaps justify her form of
speech. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll put on my bonnet and shawl, and let
Jane know what we have heard.”

“The very best thing you could do,” said Mrs. Larkins. So Miss Healey
limped slowly off and told that “delightful Jane” the news.




                               CHAPTER V.
                         MR. RILEY’S PROSPECTS.


By the time Miss Healey, attended by her maid Sarah (although Mrs.
Larkins and her sisters had astonished the proprieties of Kingslough by
opening a library, they would never have dreamt of outraging them by
roaming about the streets after dusk unprotected), arrived at Miss
Riley’s abode, that lady was in bed and asleep, lulled thereto by the
united effects of excitement and that modest tablespoonful of sherry
which Jane always mixed with the gruel she had nightly, for some dozen
years previously, prepared for her mistress.

After mature deliberation Jane decided to let her sleep on.

“It would be only breaking her night’s rest,” she said to Miss Healey,
“and what could an ould lady like her do at this time of night?”

“What, indeed! or even in the morning,” answered Miss Healey, in a tone
of the most profound despondency, whilst Sarah in the rear murmured
sympathetically, “The crayture.”

“But I’ll just slip on my bonnet,” continued Jane, “and turn the key,
and put it in my pocket, and run down and tell the Colonel; some
knowledgeable person ought to know about it,” and suiting her actions to
her words, Jane dived back into the kitchen, took up her bonnet and
shawl, and returning to the front door, resumed her conversation with
Miss Healey, while she tied her strings and threw her shawl about her.
It was thus she made her toilette.

“You’re not afraid of leaving your mistress?” suggested Miss Healey,
delicately interrogative. Three as they were, such a thing had never
happened to one of the sisters, as finding herself alone in the house
after dark.

“Oh! I shan’t be away five minutes, Miss,” answered Jane confidently, as
she closed the door and put the key in her pocket, and trotted off along
the Parade, after bidding Miss Healey “Good night,” leaving that lady
all unconscious that it had been Jane’s regular practice, when her
mistress was settled, and Miss Riley settled very early indeed, to go
out and have a gossip with her friends, not for five minutes only, but
for many fives.

A willing servant, always good-tempered, always ready to wait upon that
poor, feeble old lady, thankful for small wages, content with frugal
fare,—a pattern domestic, but human nevertheless. And being human, the
monotony of that monotonous existence would have been insupportable but
for those stolen half-hours, of the theft of which Nettie O’Hara had
been long aware.

And it was the knowledge of this fact which put a sting into Jane’s
words when speaking of the girl’s elopement. She had trusted
Nettie—perforce perhaps—but still she had trusted her with a confession
of various visits, and interviews, and appointments, which she could not
well confide to her mistress, and Nettie, having a secret herself, had
heard all the servant found to say, and kept her own counsel the while.

Had she chosen any other man than Daniel Brady, and confided her love to
Jane, Jane could have forgiven her; but she had chosen Daniel Brady and
kept her confidence from Jane, therefore that model servant was very
bitter indeed in her denunciation of Miss O’Hara’s slyness.

“And to think that never a one of us should have guessed it,” said Jane,
in declamation to Colonel and Mrs. Perris. “Always with her books, as
the mistress and me thought, taking them with her when she went to
bathe, carrying them to the shore when she had a spare hour, and the
tide was out, sitting in the parlour all by herself with her writing
books and such like, I am sure I could have taken my Bible oath she had
never so much as thought of a sweetheart. And that she should have taken
up with the likes of him. It was lonesome for her,” added the woman,
with a vivid memory of the unutterable loneliness and dreariness of that
silent house recurring as she spoke. “It was lonesome, but sure if she
had only waited, many a gentleman would have been proud and happy to
marry an O’Hara, even if she hadn’t a halfpenny to her fortune.”

“It is a bad business, if true,” said Colonel Perris. “Let us hope it is
not true.”

“I am afeard it is true enough,” Jane, who was beginning to be “wise
afterwards,” exclaimed; “and the poor mistress will never hold up her
head again. Can nothing be done, sir?”

“Not by me,” answered Colonel Perris decidedly. “Miss O’Hara is no
relation of mine, and I cannot interfere;” and feeling that this speech
naturally terminated the interview, Jane, after executing a curtsey,
left the room, and, true to her determination of not leaving Miss Riley
alone for a longer period than she could avoid, hurried back to that
dark, silent house, from out of which Nettie O’Hara had taken whatever
of sunshine her youth and beauty could confer, for ever.

“I will write a line to the General,” said Colonel Perris to his wife,
after a few moments’ silence, “and then wash my hands of the whole
business. Shall I begin my communication as Jane did hers? ‘One says
Miss O’Hara has gone off;’ what a convenient phrase, commits no person,
and imparts an air of mystery to the whole proceeding! I will not commit
myself to the names of informants at all events,” and the Colonel
wrote:—

  “DEAR RILEY,—Rumour will have it that your pretty young cousin has
  eloped with, or been carried off by, Mr. Daniel Brady. I trust Rumour
  is in error, but at the same time think you ought to know what she
  says. Certain it is Miss Nettie disappeared mysteriously this morning,
  and has not since been heard of.

                                              “Yours faithfully,
                                                      “FREDERICK PERRIS”

“That will bring him if Miss Riley’s shaky complaint does not,” remarked
the writer, folding up the letter, which was written on a great sheet of
paper such as one never sees nowadays, sealing it with red wax, and
stamping that wax with a huge crest. “Tim shall ride over with it first
thing to-morrow morning.”

“And then,” suggested Mrs. Perris.

“Then it will be for the family to decide what is best to be done,” said
the Colonel significantly. “I am very much mistaken in Mr. Brady if
there be no need of family interference.”

“Oh! Fred,” exclaimed his wife.

“Well, my dear,” he answered, then finding she made no further remark,
he went on,—“Poor Nettie! She has done an evil day’s work for herself, I
am afraid. So far as I can judge of the affair now, whether she be
married or whether she be not, I would rather have seen her taken out of
the Black Stream dead, than heard the news that woman brought here
to-night.”

“What is this Mr. Brady, then?” inquired his wife.

“Simply the worst man between Kingslough and the Cove of Cork,” was the
reply. “If that description be not comprehensive enough, say the worst
man between Kingslough and St. Petersburg.”

“How could the girl have become acquainted with—with such a person?”

“Why, what sort of guardian was that doting, sightless, decrepit old
woman, for a girl like Nettie? She might have had a hundred lovers and
nobody been the wiser.”

“But, my dear, how many other girls are similarly situated, and it never
occurs to anyone to imagine that harm will happen to them?”

“How many other girls?” he repeated, “very few I should hope.”

“Take Grace Moffat for instance—”

“Grace Moffat! How utterly you mistake the position. It was a leap, I
admit, for him to speak to Nettie O’Hara, but he _dared_ not have said
even so much as good morning to Grace Moffat. You never will understand
Irish ways or Irish ideas. Supposing a respectable man in trade had cast
eyes on Miss Nettie, and offered himself to her family as her future
husband, the Rileys and all who were interested in the girl might have
lamented the necessity, but they would have accepted the man. But
suppose a man in that rank offered himself to Grace Moffat? Why, there
is not a labourer at Bayview who would not resent such an offer as a
personal insult. Grace may marry whom she pleases. With Nettie it was a
question of marrying whom she could. Of what use is beauty in a land
where a poor man fears to admire? I put it to you, Lucy, is there a man
in our station in Kingslough or twelve miles round, who could marry for
love without money, unless he wished to make his wife and himself
miserable.”

“What a misfortune to be an heiress!” sighed his wife.

“That sigh is not fair, Lucy,” he said, eagerly; “you know I should not
have asked the richest woman living to marry me had I not loved her for
herself, but wedding portionless wives with us Irish is just like
looking into shop windows. The articles may be very beautiful, and we
acknowledge they are so, but we cannot afford them; they are not
suitable for poor men. Had this been otherwise, Nettie never would have
been intended for a governess. India, _or_ a situation. If India be
impossible, as it was in her case, then a situation. No man in her own
rank dared have taken her to wife, and so she was fain to flee from the
delights of being a pupil-teacher, even with Daniel Brady; whilst Grace
Moffat, possessed of not one-half her beauty—one-tenth indeed—may pick
and choose, can afford to keep on shilly-shallying with John Riley.”

“My love, you make a mistake,” said Mrs. Perris, rousing herself into a
state of active opposition, “Grace Moffat will be a magnificent woman.”

“Pooh! Lucy, what she may be hereafter signifies nothing, what she is
now signifies everything. With Nettie O’Hara’s beauty and her own
position, she might have married Robert Somerford. As it is—”

“There, do not speak another word. Robert Somerford, indeed! That idle,
good-for-nothing, verse-writing, harp-playing, would-be man of fashion;
Robert Somerford, a man without a fortune, a profession, or a trade; no
match, in my opinion, even for your pink-and-white beauty, certainly no
match for my charming Grace.”

“I see nothing charming about her,” was the reply.

“That is because you are a man,” said Mrs. Perris calmly. “Give her the
chance, and ten years hence she will be the queen of society; but that
is just what men cannot understand. They want a woman ready made. They
cannot believe that the sort of beauty they admire in a girl in her
teens will not last, cannot last. Now Grace’s loveliness will ripen day
by day.”

“You are eloquent,” interrupted her husband, laughing.

“So will other people be on the same subject hereafter,” persisted the
lady.

“Perhaps so,” he replied, “but I cannot say I agree with you. I have no
spirit of prophecy, and in my opinion Grace is as plain as Nettie is
pretty.”

“Pretty, yes; not that I ever did, or ever shall admire a girl whose
only claims to beauty consist in a pink-and-white complexion, eyes as
large as saucers and as blue as the heavens, and long golden curls. I
detest blue eyes and golden hair, and I abominate curls.”

“Well, my dear, we need not quarrel about the matter. I suspect neither
of us will see much more of the poor child’s eyes and curls. I only hope
Riley will give the fellow a good horsewhipping.”

“That would not benefit her,” said Mrs. Perris.

“I am not sure of that,” answered her husband.

Riding into Kingslough the next morning, Mr. John Riley felt quite of
the Colonel’s opinion. There was nothing he desired so much as
opportunity and provocation to thrash the man who had stolen away his
cousin.

An insult had been offered through her to the whole of her relations.
Longingly, when he heard the news, did General Riley’s eyes turn towards
his pistols; then remembering the degeneracy of the days he had lived to
see, he muttered an ejaculation which had little beside brevity to
recommend it, and asked his son, “What are we to do?”

“Follow them,” was the quiet reply; but there was a significance in the
way Mr. Riley wound the thong of his whip round his hand, that gave a
second meaning to his words.

“I wish I could go with you,” said the elder man, “but this confounded
gout always lays me by the heels whenever there is any work to do.”

“Never mind, sir; you may trust me,” answered his son, laying an
unmistakable emphasis on the last four words.

“You had better wait, and have some breakfast, Jack; the old lady never
gives one anything except a cup of weak tea and a slice of brown bread
and butter.”

“No. I will hear what fresh news there may be, and then ask Mrs. Hartley
to give me something to eat.”

“I think you must be in love with that woman,” said his father.

“I am afraid she is the only woman who is in love with me,” was the
reply, uttered lightly, yet with a certain bitterness, and, having so
spoken, Mr. John Riley walked across the hall, mounted his horse, and,
followed by Tim, went down the drive at a smart trot.

Grace Moffat was wont to say, a little contemptuously, that “any man
could ride.” Had her sight been a little more impartial, she would have
acknowledged that few men, even in Ireland, could ride like John Riley.
But Miss Grace had her own ideal of what a male human being should be,
and the lover popular rumour assigned to her did not, in the least
degree, fulfil that ideal. She liked black curly hair, dark dreamy eyes,
a dark complexion, a slight figure; and John’s hair was straight and
brown, his eyes grey and keen, his frame strong and well knit. Her ideal
had hands small and delicate, like those of a woman, feet which it was a
wonder to behold, his voice was soft and pleading, whilst John—well, all
that could be said in John’s favour she summed up in three words,—“He
was good;” and Grace was not the first woman who thought—any more than
she will be the last to think—goodness an exceedingly negative sort of
virtue.

But if Grace did not love John, he loved her. The affection was all
one-sided—it generally is—and the young man comprehended the fact.

As he rode along the hard, firm road, his thoughts keeping time to the
beat of his horse’s feet, he took his resolution. Young though Grace
was, he would ask her to be his wife, and if she refused, he meant to
leave Ireland.

Considering his nation, considering his birth, considering his
surroundings, considering the ideas of those with whom he was thrown in
contact, this young man, with the straight brown hair and features far
from faultless, was gifted with wonderful common sense.

Much, as he loved Grace Moffat, and how he loved her no one save himself
could tell, he could not afford to let any woman spoil the whole of his
future life. He could not drag on his present useless, purposeless
existence, even for the pleasure of perpetually seeing Grace.

He was young: and the years stretched out indefinitely before him. How
could he live through them if he had no goal to reach, no object to
remember having achieved?

This matter of Nettie O’Hara’s put his own affairs into a tangible shape
before him. Suppose, after he had waited and waited, and trusted and
hoped, Grace chose some other man than himself—not like Daniel Brady, of
course, but equally undeserving—what should he do? How should he endure
the days, the months, the years which must succeed?

No! he would end it. Pink-and-white demureness itself, personified, had
made her choice without consulting anybody, and why should not Grace,
who was older and wiser, and who _must_ know, and who did know, that
everybody in Kingslough had assigned her to him.

Ay, there was the mischief. Young ladies do not like to be assigned. If
Kingslough could only have kept silence; but then Kingslough never did
keep silence. Well, he would try; he would take advantage of this
terrible trouble which had befallen her friend, and avail himself of a
time when he knew Grace must be full of sorrow, to speak to her about
her own future and his.

Yes; whether together or apart, it meant hers and his. If she sent him
adrift, he would try to make of that future something even she need not
have been ashamed to share. If he wore the willow, it should be next his
heart—other leaves he would wear where men could see them, where she
might hear of them.

And this feeling governed his reply to Mrs. Hartley, when across the
breakfast-table she said to him gravely,—

“John, you ought to marry Grace Moffat soon.”

“I mean to do so if she consents,” was his answer.

“She is very young,” remarked Mrs. Hartley, who did not quite like his
tone.

“She is old enough to know her own mind,” he retorted quickly, then
added, “I am sick of this uncertainty; she must end it one way or
another.”

“You expect her to say ‘No’?”

“I expect her to say ‘No,’” he agreed.

“But you will not take that as final?”

“I shall take it as final,” he said, after a pause, speaking slowly and
deliberately, “Grace is no coquette. If she likes me she will tell me
so; if she does not—”

“If she does not,” repeated Mrs. Hartley.

“I must find something—not a girl—that will like me and that I can like.
Love is not everything, Mrs. Hartley, though it is a great deal. I
cannot help thinking that the man who lets any woman wreck the whole of
his life for him is very little better than a coward.”

“John Riley,” said the widow solemnly, “you may thank heaven I am an old
woman, or I should marry you whether you liked it or not.”

“Dear Mrs. Hartley,” he answered, “if you were quarter of a century
younger, or I quarter of a century older, I should propose for you at
once. Wherever I am, wherever I go, I shall always esteem it a privilege
to have known you.”

“Do not go anywhere,” she said. “Marry Grace and settle down.” But he
only shook his head, helping himself to another slice of ham the while.

After all, he was a prosaic lover, Mrs. Hartley, spite of her
partiality, could not help admitting. She was a woman, and so overlooked
many facts she might otherwise have been expected to remember.

First, he had ridden eight Irish miles, fasting; and eight miles, on a
bright summer morning, with the fresh wind blowing, was sufficient to
give an appetite to a young fellow, in good health, who was innocent,
moreover, of the then almost universal vice of hard drinking every
night.

Second, this matter of Grace had been to him like a long toothache,
which he could endure no longer. He must either have the tooth out, or
know it could be cured. Grace must decide to have him for her lover, or
do without him altogether. It might be very well for her to have him
hanging about Bayview, accompanying her and her elderly maiden cousin to
flower-shows, launches, picnics, regattas, and other mild dissipations,
but his idle, purposeless life was ruining his worldly prospects.

Had he meant to stay on at Woodbrook till his father’s death left that
already heavily mortgaged estate his property, the case might have been
different, but John Riley intended to do nothing of the sort. He was
fully determined to make money. He was weary of the shifts that cruel
interest compelled his family to practise. He could not be blind to the
fact that by reason of the pressure put upon him, his father was forced
to put a pressure upon his tenants—bad for the land—injurious to them.

There was no money to do anything except pay the interest upon that debt
which had not been incurred by them, which had been hung round the neck
of that lovely estate by a former Riley as reckless as prodigal, as
cruel to those who were to follow after as any Glendare lying in
Ballyknock Abbey.

There was no money—not a shilling to spare; father and son, mother and
daughters, all had to bow under the yoke of that tyrant mortgage. There
was no money to drain; no money to improve the land, and so enable it to
yield its increase. The landlord was poor, and the tenants as a natural
consequence were poor likewise, and John Riley, proud and impulsive,
chafed under the bitterness of his lot, and would have left the country
long before to try and win Fortune’s smiles in other lands, but his love
for Grace prevented him.

Once upon a time—no long time previously to that morning when he sate at
breakfast with Mrs. Hartley, it had seemed to the young man a good thing
to consider that when he married Grace Moffat, he would secure at once
the girl he loved and sufficient money to lighten the mortgage at
Woodbrook, but a casual remark let drop by Miss Nettie O’Hara, who
understood her friend at least as well as her friend understood Nettie,
opened his eyes to the fact that Grace Moffat attached quite as much
importance to her “dot” as any one of her admirers.

“It is a thousand pities Grace’s grandfather left her such a quantity of
money,” said demure but deep-seeing Miss O’Hara; “she would have been so
much happier without a halfpenny. I am certain she will never marry any
man who cannot in some shape or other lay down as much as she.”

Now there was a significance in the way Nettie uttered this sentence
which set Mr. John Riley thinking—what had he to lay down against
Grace’s fortune? Himself—ah! but then there was Grace’s self—and her
fortune still remained.

To the ordinary Irishman of that period—handsome, gallant, well bred,
easy mannered—himself would have seemed a fair equivalent for the most
beautiful woman and the finest fortune combined; but then, John Riley
was not an ordinary Irishman, and Grace had in her foolish little head
certain notions in advance of her time which did not tend to make her
any happier.

For after all to be discreetly trustful is the best quality a woman can
possess, and Grace did not quite trust John Riley any more than she
loved him.

He did not possess the easy assurance—the confident self-assertion which
usually marked his class. He was one of the exceptional men—one cast in
the same mould as those who before and since have fought for their
adopted mother, England, and saved her from defeat on many a hardly
contested battle-field. So far as courage went he was made of the same
stuff as those who fought the Affghans and stormed the Redan, and rode
with the six hundred, and endured the lingering torments of Lucknow, and
never talked of their courage or their patience afterwards; but he was
ignorant of many things calculated, in those days especially, to win, by
reason of their rarity, favour in a woman’s eyes.

Even with his small stock, however, of drawing-room accomplishments, had
he been more demonstrative, had he paraded his abilities, had he, to use
a very homely phrase, made much of himself, perhaps Grace might have
viewed him through more loving spectacles. As it was, she did not care
for him at all in the way he cared for her. She saw the good
kindly-natured John, possessed of encumbered acres and a somewhat plain
face, and she was amiable enough to let him bask in the smiles of an
heiress until such time as it suited the heiress to warn him off.

Without any _malice prepense_, be it clearly understood. If Grace had
her ideal, that ideal certainly was not realized in the person of any
man she ever expected to marry, or thought of marrying. She had not
brought marrying home to herself in any way. She was romantic—given to
solitary wanderings in the twilight and by moonlight along the terraced
walk, bordered by myrtles, strewed with the leaves of the gum cistus
flower, which blooms and fades in a day, fragrant with the scent of
syringa,—that overlooked the bay. There she dreamt her dreams—there she
recited to herself scraps of poetry—detached verses that had caught her
fancy—there she murmured snatches of songs, all melancholy, all
breathing the language of unchanging love and endless constancy.

“Opinion,” remarks one of the wittiest of our living[1] satirists, “does
not follow language—but language opinion;” and if this be true as
regards sentiment likewise, and doubtless it is, we cannot, judging from
our songs, compliment the present generation either on its simplicity or
its romance.

Footnote 1:

  Dead, alas! since the above lines were written.

Foolish enough were the words young ladies warbled forty years since—but
there was a tenderness and a grace and a fitness about the ditties of
that long ago time which we seek in vain in modern verses. One merit at
least was formerly possessed by the music and the story linked to music,
that of intelligibility. Now when the story is intelligible, it is
idiotic.

Not much of an ear could John Riley boast, yet he loved to listen to
Grace’s singing, and hearkened with something between a pang and a hope
to the little thrills of melody into which she would break—just as a
bird breaks into a vocal ecstasy—while they walked through the
rose-laden gardens, or floated, oars uplifted, over the moonlit sea, the
water diamonds dripping from them, making an accompaniment to the last
soft notes of the duet sung by his sister and Grace.

And there were sights and sounds and scents that for years he could
scarcely endure by reason of the memories they recalled—simple
things—moonlight on the water—a sprig of myrtle starred with white
flowers—a spray of jessamine, nestling in the folds of a white dress—the
words of a familiar song. Well, few people marry their first love, and
if they do, they generally repent that their love was compliant.

But John Riley had not yet fallen on those evil days in which memory was
fraught with bitterness, although vaguely his sense foreshadowed them,
when seated opposite to Mrs. Hartley he ate his breakfast with as much
appetite as though, to quote that lady’s mental observation, there were
no such things in the world as love and disappointment, and marred lives
and broken hearts!




                              CHAPTER VI.
                            ON THE TERRACE.


If, in the postchaise-and-four days, any record was kept of the number
of runaway couples who were overtaken before the matrimonial knot could
be tied, time has failed to preserve those statistics for us. From all
which can be learned, however, it seems difficult to avoid the
conclusion that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred angry parents and
disgusted guardians might as well have saved their money and spared
their cattle.

Given a few hours’ start, swift horses, and sound linch-pins, who could
hope to overtake the fugitives? Most probably irate elders started in
pursuit prompted by two motives,—one because it looked well to follow,
even though the chase was useless,—the other because it gave them
something to do. No reason, beyond these, presents itself sufficient to
account for all the wild racing and chasing that was carried on at one
period of the world’s history.

To a more matter-of-fact generation, it seems unintelligible why old
gentlemen, and still older ladies, should have risen at unwonted hours,
and started off in frantic and hopeless pursuit of a pair of fleeing
lovers, when they might just as well have had out their “second sleep”
in peace, and awaited intelligence beside the domestic hearth, instead
of posting, at considerable inconvenience and expense, over bleak
moorland roads, to obtain the same identical news.

Riding as fast as his horse could take him, to Kilcurragh, Mr. John
Riley had, like other enemies of “Love’s young Dream,” only two ideas in
his mind—to discover the fugitives, and to punish the male offender.

Riding back, extremely slowly, from that undesirable seaport, after
verifying the fact of two persons answering to the description of Nettie
and her companion having left Kilcurragh the previous evening by “that
fastsailing steamship,” so the proprietors worded their bills, ‘Finn
McCoul,’ he felt much like one who, having gone out fox-hunting, has
seen no fox to hunt—who, having taken his gun to shoot, has started
nothing whereat to fire.

Although no vessel followed the ‘Finn McCoul’ for three days, when the
‘Saint Patrick,’ then peacefully lying alongside a Scotch quay, would
steam in the pleasant eventide down the Bay, on her way to that narrow
channel which divides one people from another, it was quite practicable
for Mr. Riley to have chartered some description of ship—say, even a
collier—to take him, in swift pursuit, to the Land of Cakes. That is to
say, it would have been practicable had Mr. Riley possessed enough of
this world’s wealth to pay his expenses; but the young man had no money
to speak of, and supposing the case different, it is improbable that he
would have thrown away bank-notes so foolishly.

No; the evil was done. All the yachts in creation could not make a
better of it now. She had run away with him; she, an O’Hara, connected
with many and many a good family, with one of those wicked, dissolute,
shameless Bradys, who had for years and years been casting off from them
bit by bit, shred after shred, the mantle of family respectability in
which they had once been proud to wrap themselves.

She had gone off, blue eyes, pink cheeks, golden hair, demure looks,
with a man of notoriously bad character, with whom she had scarcely a
chance of happiness; but that was her concern, and now hers only. They
were gone where, at all events, matrimony was very easy. That, in
itself, was a good feature in the case, since, if he did not intend to
marry the girl, why should he take her to a land where unions, very hard
to break, were very easily formed.

When he returned to the few ancestral acres the extravagance of his
progenitors had left him, it would be time enough to require that a more
binding marriage, according to Irish ideas, than a mere acknowledgment
of Nettie being his wife should take place. On the whole, she having
elected to elope, perhaps it was quite as well things were as they were.
There had been no scene; his horsewhip was available for further
service; society would be satisfied that, so far as a Brady could mean
or do rightly, Daniel of that name had meant rightly by, and done
rightly to, Nettie O’Hara. A grave scandal had been averted by Mr.
Brady’s choice of a honeymoon route; nevertheless, Mr. Riley felt
disappointed.

If a man go out to fight, it is intelligible that he should lament
finding no enemy to encounter. To have ridden all those long miles, and
found nothing to do at the end of the journey, was enough to try the
patience of a more patient individual than John Riley. His common sense
told him it was well; his Irish sense felt disgusted. He should have to
return to his father, and, in answer to his expectant “Well?” reply,—

“They started for Scotland yesterday, and as I could not swim across the
channel, here I am, no further forward than I was when I left.”

Still it _was_ better.

John could not help acknowledging this as he gave his horse to Colonel
Perris’ man, and in answer to the Colonel’s inquiry whether he had any
news of his cousin, answered,—

“Oh! it is all right. They left by the Scotch steamer last night. She
might have written, though, I think, and saved me the ride.”

And the same to Mrs. Mynton and Mrs. Lefroy, whom he met on his way to
the Parade, and to Miss Riley, who said she “never could have believed
it of Nettie, never!” adding, “it is very hard on me at my age,” to
which, with a shake of her poor old head and brown front—people had not
then arrived at that pitch of modern civilisation, grey false hair—she
appended,

“Ah! girls were very different when I was young—very.”

Considering the miles of time that stretched behind the period of her
youth and of her age, John Riley might be excused if he muttered to
himself that it was improbable she could have the smallest memory of
what girls had been like at the remote epoch referred to.

Somehow the intense dreariness and patched poorness of that sad house
had never impressed the young man with such a feeling of compassion for
Nettie as he experienced when he found himself once more on the Parade,
with the sea glittering and dancing at his feet. The faded carpets, the
dingy paint, the darned table-covers, the spindle-legged tables, the
dark, high-backed chairs, were fitting accessories to the picture which,
years and years afterwards, remained in his memory of a feeble, palsied,
half-doting old woman, who kept mumbling and maundering on, concerning
the girls of her far away youth, and the ingratitude of Nettie, who had
made, in her desperation, such a leap in the dark.

“It was a miserable home for any young thing,” said John compassionately
to Mrs. Hartley, “and no future to look forward to except that of being
a teacher. I never was very fond of Nettie, but upon my word I do not
think I ever felt so sorry for anybody as I did for the little girl
to-day—thinking of what a life hers must have been.”

“I was always fond of Nettie,” Mrs. Hartley remarked, “and have always
been sorry for her—I am more sorry for her now, however. She has taken a
step in haste, which I feel certain she will repent at her leisure,
through every hour of her future life.”

This was at dinner—twice in that one day had John Riley to avail himself
of the widow’s abundant hospitality. He knew he could not thus make sure
of that of Mr. Moffat—who although an Englishman, a Liberal, and
abundantly blessed with this world’s goods, liked friends to come after
dinner, and to go away before supper, for which reason his daughter’s
suitor usually paid his visits soon after breakfast, soon after
luncheon—a very meagre meal indeed at Bayview, as in many of the houses
across the Channel even to this day—or immediately after dinner, when he
often had a cup of tea all alone with Grace in that pleasant
drawing-room opening on the terrace-walk which commanded so wide and
fair a view of the ever-changing sea.

He wished to have that cup of tea with Grace this evening—the Nettie who
might have disturbed their _tête-à-tête_ would, he knew, never disturb
another at Bayview. He intended to ask Grace one question, and then, why
then he meant to ride back through the night to his own home—a happy man
or a disappointed according to the answer she made.

The consciousness of the throw he meant to make did not tend to render
Mr. Riley an entertaining guest; and Mrs. Hartley, noticing his
abstraction, said, as he rose from table, remarking it was quite time he
was on the road again,—

“You are going to try your fortune this evening.”

“I am; how did you guess that?”

“Never mind, I did guess it.”

“Wish me success,” he said in a low tone, eagerly seizing her hands.

“I wish you success,” she answered slowly. “If you take care of
yourself, you will develope into one of the worthiest men I ever knew.”

“I will try to be worthy of your good opinion, _however it may be_,” he
said with a certain grateful softness in his tone, and then, suddenly
loosing the lady’s hands, he stooped and kissed her.

“Have you gone crazy, John?” she asked, settling her cap, which the
young man’s demonstrativeness had disarranged.

“A thousand pardons,” he entreated; “I could not help it—forgive me,”
and he went—straight, strong, young, erect out into the evening, leaving
her to think of the boy baby she had borne and lost thirty long years
before—thirty long years.

Out into the evening—round to Colonel Perris’ stable, where his horse
stood, nose deep in manger, hunting after any stray oats he might
hitherto have failed to find.

“Take him aisy, Mister John, the first couple of mile,” advised the
groom; “he has been aiting ever since you left him. It’s my belief them
kinats[2] at Kilcurragh niver giv’ the dumb baste bite or sup barrin’ a
wisp of hay and a mouthful of wather. Ride him aisy, giv’ him his time,
or ye’ll break his win’; but, then, what can I tell ye about horse
cattle ye don’t know already? And shure ye have the night, God bless it,
before ye—and thank ye yer honour, and long life to yerself,” and he
pocketed the coin Mr. Riley gave him, and held open the gate for the
gentleman, never adding, as John noticed, a word of hope for Nettie.

Footnote 2:

  Anglicè—misers, skinflints.

Courteous were those Kingslough people, courteous and partial to saying
pleasant things high and low amongst them, but any thought or mention of
the Bradys tried their complaisance.

There was no hope for Nettie. John Riley, taking his horse at a walk
past Glendare Terrace, and so, making his way out of the long straggling
town, felt popular opinion had already given up her case as hopeless.

She had chosen her lot; Kingslough felt the wisest course it could
pursue, in the interest of itself and Nettie, was to ignore the
probabilities of what that lot might be.

A great scandal had occurred—a scandal so great that, prone as
Kingslough was to gossip, it felt disposed to maintain silence over the
affair.

In slight illnesses people love to talk over the symptoms and exaggerate
the danger, but when the sickness becomes mortal, there ensues a
disinclination to speak of it. Silence succeeds to speech, when once the
solemn steps of the great conqueror are heard crossing the threshold. It
is the same when a sore trouble menaces. In the presence of that enemy,
even those whose happiness or misery is in no way concerned in his
approach are fain to keep silence—and silence Kingslough maintained
accordingly about the sad _faux pas_ Nettie O’Hara had made.

But as yet Grace Moffat scarcely grasped the length and the breadth and
the depth of the pit her old companion had dug so carefully for her
future.

“Have you found her, have you brought her back?” Grace asked eagerly as
he entered.

“There is only one person who can bring her back now,” he answered, “and
that is her husband. They went to Scotland yesterday.”

“Oh, Nettie! What could you have been thinking of?” exclaimed the girl.

“I suppose it is the old story, and that she was fond of him,” Mr. Riley
replied.

“You have seen Mrs. Hartley,—what does she say?”

“What can she say? what can anybody say? what is the use of saying
anything? Nettie has done that which cannot be undone, and we must only
hope the match may turn out better than we expect. She has chosen Mr.
Brady and left her friends, and she will have to make the best of Mr.
Brady, if there be any best about him, for the remainder of her life.”

“I think you are extremely heartless,” said Grace indignantly.

“I do not mean to be so,” he replied. “If I could help Nettie out of
this scrape, I would spare no pains in the matter. But there is no help,
Grace. We cannot remake Brady, neither can we undo the fact of her
having gone off with a man who has no one solitary quality to recommend
him beyond his good looks.”

At this point John Riley stopped suddenly and walked towards the window,
while Grace busied herself with the tea-equipage.

The same thought had occurred to both of them. Other people besides
Nettie O’Hara might be influenced by good looks, and, as has previously
been remarked, Grace’s lover did not realize her ideal of manly beauty.

“Where is your cousin, Grace?” asked Mr. Riley, after a moment’s pause.

“Gone to spend the evening with Mrs. Mervyn.” It was a matter of common
occurrence for the worthy lady who presided over Mr. Moffat’s
establishment to spend the evening with some one or other of her
numerous friends. She had a predilection also for paying morning visits
and receiving morning visitors, so that Grace’s time was more frequently
at her own sole disposal than might have been considered quite desirable
had Grace happened to be different to what she was.

But although the young lady’s manners were much less demure than those
of her former friend and companion, she was really a much wiser and more
prudent girl than Nettie. She might have wandered alone along the
world’s wide road, and still come to no harm by the way.

Poor or rich, it would not have mattered to Grace. No man could ever
have made a fool of her. She had her faults, but lack of pride and
self-respect were not to be classed among them.

A girl to be greatly desired for a wife; a girl who would develope into
a woman safely to be trusted with a man’s happiness and a man’s honour;
a girl loyal, faithful, true. She was all this and more; and John Riley
knew her worth, and would have served as long as Jacob did for Rachael,
to gain her in the end.

“Grace,” he began after a moment’s pause, “will you finish your tea and
come out into the garden? I want to speak to you.”

“What do you want to say?”

“I have something particular to ask.”

“What is it?”

“Come out and I will tell you.”

“Tell me now.”

“Cannot you guess?”

She looked at him steadily for an instant, then her eyes dropped, and
her colour rose.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I can guess; but do not ask. Let us remain
friends, as we have always been.”

“That is impossible,” he said, “we must either be more than friends,
or—”

“Or,” she repeated.

“Strangers,” he finished, and there ensued a dead silence which he
suddenly broke by exclaiming vehemently, “Grace, you cannot, you must
not refuse me; I have loved you all my life. I never remember the time
when I did not love you. I do not ask you to marry me yet, not until I
have something to offer you besides myself, I only want you to say,
‘John, I will be your wife some day, and I will care for nobody else
till you come back to claim me.’”

She was as white now as she had been red before.

“Let us go out,” she said, laying her hand on his arm and leading him
through the French window on to the terrace-walk. There was no hope; he
knew it, he felt it, felt it in the touch of her hand, saw it in the
expression of her face. “Why did you thrust this pain upon yourself and
me?” she asked reproachfully. “Did not you know I could never marry you?
Have not you heard me say a hundred times over, that I should never
marry anybody? We have always been good friends, why cannot we remain
good friends still? I will forget what you said just now, and you must
try to forget it too.”

“Must I?” he answered, “well, the time will come when I shall forget
even that, but not until I am dead, Grace. So long as life and memory
remain, I shall never forget you,” and he took the hand which lay on his
arm, and held it tightly for a moment, then suddenly releasing it, he
went on,—

“It was not always so; there was a time, and that not very long past,
when you could not have stabbed me to the heart as you have done
to-night. I do not say you ever loved me much, but you were young, and I
believed you might learn to love me more; but there is no use in talking
about that now, the new love has ousted out the old. You can never be
more than a friend to me; that is the phrase, is it not? But somebody
else may be nearer and dearer than the man who has cared for no one but
you—no one else, Grace, all his life.”

“I do not understand you,” she began, but he interrupted her.

“You understand me perfectly. Until Mr. Somerford——”

“Mr. Somerford and I are nothing to each other,” she interposed eagerly.

“Are not, perhaps, but most probably will be hereafter,” he retorted. “I
know he is the sort of fellow girls go wild about.”

“I have not gone wild about him,” said Grace indignantly. “Are you mad,
John, or do you think I am, to imagine Lord Glendare’s nephew could ever
possibly want to marry me?”

“I imagine your fortune would be extremely acceptable to a man who has
not a sixpence, at all events,” was the almost brutal answer.
Disappointed lovers are not usually over careful about what they say,
and this one proved no honourable exception to the rule.

“The same remark might apply to other men who have not a sixpence
either,” observed the young lady bitterly; “to Mr. John Riley, for
instance.”

He was calm in a moment, hating himself for the words he had uttered,
almost hating her for the retort those words induced.

“Say no more, Grace,” he answered; “you need not drive the knife any
farther home—it has gone deep enough already,” and he turned, and would
have left her, but Grace followed, crying out,—

“I did not mean it—I did not, really; only you provoked me.”

“You meant, however, that you would not marry, that you would not engage
yourself to me,” he said, stopping, and looking mournfully and
reproachfully at her in the gathering twilight.

“I am very sorry,” she was beginning, but he interrupted her.

“Never mind being sorry. I shall be sad and sorry enough for both. You
did mean it then, Grace; you meant truly that you could never come to
love me, never while the winds blow and the dews fall.”

“I do care for you,” she said softly.

“Ay, but not as I want to be cared for,” he replied. “Well, you cannot
help it, I suppose, and I—but that does not matter.”

It was over; he was gone: she stood alone on the terrace. Strewed around
were cistus leaves; through the silence she could hear the sobbing of
the waves as they washed in upon the shore.




                              CHAPTER VII.
                      MR. SOMERFORD’S SUGGESTION.


Persons who knew anything about the Rosemont _ménage_—and the persons
who did meant all resident within an area of twenty miles of that place,
and a considerable number outside the area indicated—were aware that as
a rule on those rare occasions when Lady Glendare honoured Ireland with
her presence, the Hon. Mrs. Somerford “availed herself” of so favourable
an opportunity for visiting her friends.

Lady Glendare and her hon. sister-in-law did not in all respects agree
as sisters-in-law should. To state the case fairly, they hated each
other. This undesirable frame of mind is not uncommon even in much lower
circles, but perhaps civilized and decorous and socially polite hatred
never attained a stronger growth than between the countess and her
husband’s brother’s wife.

Lady Glendare was certainly right in stating that they were not
sisters-in-law, since rigidly they could not be called such near
relatives.

“She is the widow of my late brother-in-law,” was the form of speech in
which Lady Glendare liked to describe Mrs. Somerford’s position; “and as
she is fearfully poor, poorer even than the Somerfords’ widows have
usually been (and that is indeed indicating a deeper depth of poverty
than most people can imagine), Lord Glendare allows her to live at
Rosemont with that great boy of hers, who does nothing, literally
nothing. How it will all end I cannot imagine. He has no fortune, no
profession, he has no chance there of marrying. Better have apprenticed
him to some trade,” and at this juncture, her ladyship, who having come
from a noble stock who boasted a longer pedigree and a more encumbered
rent-roll than the Glendares, always made it a rule to speak pityingly
and depreciatingly of her husband and his family, was wont to fold her
white hands and look up to the ceiling with that pathetic and saintlike
expression of countenance which a great painter having beheld, has
perpetuated in a portrait, copies of which are to be seen in
old-fashioned scrap-books and amateur portfolios to this day.

Lord Glendare had married late in life, middle age for him was over when
he led to the hymeneal altar his beautiful, youthful, and accomplished
bride. On the other hand, the Hon. Robert Somerford had married early,
comparatively speaking, and the son he left was many years older than
Lord Trevor, heir-apparent to the Glendare title and estates. Thus Mrs.
Somerford was Lady Glendare’s senior, and though a sensible woman and a
hard, she had been younger, and she would have liked to remain so. As
that was impossible, she could have wished all other wives and daughters
a shade older than herself. As that likewise was impossible, Mrs.
Somerford felt slightly dissatisfied with the arrangements of
Providence, both as regarded the matter of age and other questions.

Further, Lady Glendare had been a celebrated beauty; the traditions of
her beauty would endure, Mrs. Somerford knew, to the last days of her
life. Even yet she was a very lovely woman, possessed of an exquisite
figure, of a gracious and graceful manner, a woman who had but to come,
to see, or rather to be seen, and to conquer. She took the citadels of
men’s hearts by storm; at sound of her voice, at sight of her smile, the
battlements tottered, the walls fell. Virtue, as represented by Mrs.
Somerford, was no doubt an estimable and discreet matron, but virtue
felt its very existence ignored when Lady Glendare, concerning whose
prudence doubts had been expressed, the straightlacedness of whose
morals people more than suspected, sat in the same room with it.

All this, and the facts of her being my lady, of her first-born having
the prospect of inheriting an estate which, encumbered though it might
be, was still an estate, attached to a sufficiently old and well-known
title, proved gall and wormwood to Mrs. Somerford; but, on the other
hand, there were bitter drops in Lady Glendare’s cup poured into it by
Mrs. Somerford.

In the first place, if Lady Glendare were beautiful, Mrs. Somerford was
clever. Without her good looks the countess would have been a nonentity.
Without any good looks to speak of, had Mrs. Somerford’s lot been that
of an earl’s wife, society must have acknowledged her talents. Added to
this, she was, as Lady Glendare put the matter, the widow of a younger
brother, and it is to be questioned whether an angel could under such
circumstances have given entire satisfaction to the women of her
husband’s family.

Mrs. Somerford not being an angel, gave none to the countess.

Again, Mrs. Somerford affected an austere sort of religion, and the
countess had an uneasy feeling that consequently, despite her unpleasant
manner, in this world, her sister-in-law might have a better chance than
herself of happiness in the next.

Expressed heterodoxy even amongst men was rare in those days. People did
not perhaps think so much about religion as they do now; but when they
thought about it at all they believed—ay, even people like the
Glendares—that there was something in it; something they would have to
face certainly, and arrange if they could, once the evil days came, when
doctor and lawyers and clergymen would be the only society they could
possibly entertain.

To Lady Glendare the idea of that last sleep in Ballyknock Abbey was
inexpressibly revolting. Hating Ireland as she did, the thought of a
certain village church, black with age, in a vault beneath which dozens
of her progenitors lay, seemed a desirable resting-place by comparison;
but even that was a possibility my lady shivered to contemplate.

Then if it were true, as Mrs. Somerford asserted, that it mattered not
to her where her mortal remains were laid, what an immeasurable
advantage the widow possessed! A woman to whose lips the verse of a hymn
or an appropriate text occurred whenever her eyes opened, could never
feel afraid of awaking in the night. She might be disagreeable, but she
could have no sins to repent of. Mrs. Somerford’s manner always seemed
to imply that, though she spoke of herself generally as a miserable
sinner, she merely did so out of a feeling of delicacy towards others.

She was not as the Glendares, every action of her life seemed to assert;
and she made Lady Glendare, who, if a sinner, was also a very weak
woman, feel her moral and mental deficiencies at every turn.

For all these reasons, and for many more, which it would require much
time to specify, Mrs. Somerford found it, as a rule, convenient to visit
her friends when Lord and Lady Glendare visited Ireland.

Every rule has its exception, however, and at the particular time when
the reader is first requested to visit Rosemont, it was intimated to
Mrs. Somerford that if she and her son could make it convenient to
remain at “home,” so Lady Glendare civilly phrased it, she and the earl
would consider it as a personal favour.

“They want me and Robert,” decided the widow, with a proud smile. “They
want _us_ to help them with the voters.”

And the widow was right. Her brother-in-law was anxious on the subject
of the impending election, and his agent had ventured to hint that Mr.
Somerford was very popular, and that his presence and request might
possibly be the means of influencing many votes.

Nay, he went farther; he insinuated that eventually, perhaps, his
lordship might find it expedient to put forward his nephew in the
Liberal interest, and suggested that it would be therefore prudent to
keep Mr. Somerford well before the constituents, and remind them how
close were the ties that bound him at once to them and the noble house
of Glendare.

To the earl the southern part of the county, for which a Glendare
nominee had sat for seven successive Parliaments, and with few
exceptions, for Parliaments almost countless before that, was the only
thing in Ireland for which he cared.

Had any person except the Marquis of Ardmorne offered him a large sum, a
liberal amount for Rosemont and the other residences he owned in
Ireland, together with the Glendare lands, the Glendare tenantry, the
Glendare rights of wood, moor, and game, and mineral, to say nothing of
shore rights and manorial rights, and rights appertaining to fisheries,
Lord Glendare would—had cutting off the entail been possible—have sold
them all, Ballyknock Abbey and the remains of his ancestors included.

But he would not have sold his interest in the county. Every man has his
toy, if we could only discover where he hides away the plaything; and it
was not possible for one to be long in Lord Glendare’s company without
guessing that the family seat was to him the only one thing besides
money and his children for which he really cared.

He was very fond of all his children excepting Lord Trevor, but it is
problematical whether in the event having been necessary of a choice
between his family seat and his parental feelings, he would not have
sacrificed them to that Moloch in whose fires had been already consumed
money, friendship, reputation, honour, happiness, self-respect.

A pack of hounds could have been kept for a portion of the money that
seat had cost. Even the Jews might have uplifted their grasping hands in
amazement had the sum the return of a Glendare nominee meant been
presented to them in round figures.

Agents had groaned over, tenants had sunk under it, not an agent on the
property for scores of years who did not curse each election as it took
place with a vehemence of denunciation in comparison to which all the
comminations hurled at the heads of Israelitish and Christian creditors
faded into mere commonplace ejaculations of impiety.

One agent, indeed—the gentleman who had the direction of Lord Glendare’s
affairs, and management of his property at the period when Kingslough
was introduced at high noon—had ventured, soon after the earl’s
accession, to remark that in his opinion the seat was more trouble than
it was worth, whereupon his patron turned upon him like a demon and
saluted his ears with such a storm of vehement invective and vile
insinuations, that the agent left the house, vowing one day or other he
would have his revenge on the passionate nobleman.

True, next day, Lord Glendare sent for and actually apologized to him,
and a hollow truce was concluded; and employer and employed, to the
outer world, seemed better friends than ever, but Mr. Dillwyn did not
forget, neither did the earl quite forgive.

So far as a man of his temperament and habits could keep a watch on his
agent, Lord Glendare kept one on Mr. Dillwyn, and Mr. Dillwyn, who had
his own very good reasons for imagining that Mrs. Somerford acted on
emergency as spy for the absent earl—devoted his energies to outwitting
that clever lady, and, all things considered, succeeded tolerably well
in his endeavour.

A master-stroke of genius, however, was that letter to the earl
containing the suggestion mentioned previously. It did not, perhaps,
make the widow believe in him, but it caused her to reflect that perhaps
her interests and his might not be so antagonistic as she at one time
supposed. She had her hopes and her projects, and both centred in
Robert. Besides, her vanity was flattered. Mr. Dillwyn had at last
recognized her presence as a power.

And she was a power, if a disagreeable one. A woman competent to advise,
direct, and assist a beautiful fool like her sister-in-law.

“I shall be somebody yet amongst the Glendares,” thought she,
triumphantly, “and Robert very soon shall be a great somebody.” And all
the time Mr. Dillwyn was weaving his webs, laying his plans, arranging
his plots.

When the Glendare shipwreck came, as come he knew it would, he had no
intention of finding himself on a barren rock, scarce of provisions.

He meant to stand by the vessel to the last. It is more easy, if people
could only believe the fact, to do well for oneself pecuniarily by
apparent loyalty than by open treason; but when the crash came, and the
rotten timbers floated away over the ocean of men’s memories, he
proposed to be found high and safe; high above the waters, safe from
their fury.

It was an understood thing that when my lord and my lady took up their
temporary residence in Ireland, the rules which governed their English
life should be completely reversed; in other words, whatever they did in
London, they left undone in Ireland; whatever they left undone in
London, they were scrupulous to perform in the Blessed Isle.

For instance, in London, they rose in the afternoon and went to bed in
the morning; and in Ireland they were called betimes, and retired to
rest at hours which would, Lady Glendare vainly hoped, restore the once
exquisite beauty of her complexion.

In England they never addressed an inferior save to issue a command, and
in Ireland they entered into conversation with all sorts and conditions
of men, the poorer and raggeder the better; in England they never
walked, in Ireland the use of their limbs was restored to them as if by
a miracle; in England they were always spending, in Ireland it was a
fact that my lady often omitted to carry a purse, while my lord gave
away pence and halfpence, but rarely had occasion to change a note.

In England my lord and my lady beheld each other rarely, in Ireland they
saw a great deal more of each other than either considered essential to
happiness. In England they associated with none save their equals; in
Ireland the hearts of very middle-class people, indeed, were made glad
by invitations to Rosemont, where they instituted mental comparisons
between their own modest homes and an earl’s establishment, which caused
them not to think the ways and modes of life “amongst gentlefolks poor
or rich,” so different after all.

Only it troubled simple gentlefolks to understand where the money went,
as well it might. Some put it down to English extravagance, wherein I
think an injustice was put upon England. Even residents in Ireland have
been known to run through incomes and estates with surprising rapidity;
but then, open house was kept by them, and half a county ate, drank,
lodged at their expense. Certainly open house was not kept at Rosemont.
Half the rooms were usually shut up, even when my lord and lady visited
the ancestral seat.

As for Mrs. Somerford, she and her son contented themselves with a mere
corner of the earl’s great mansion. They dined in the library and sat in
the music-room.

It would not have suited the widow’s purse to maintain an establishment
such as even one-half of Rosemont required to keep in order, so the
shutters of the principal rooms were generally closed; the gilt chairs
with their pale blue coverings were shrouded in brown holland. The
mirrors and the chandeliers were enveloped in wraps, the tassels of the
bellpulls were hid away in bags, as were also those of the
curtain-holders. The statuettes were dressed in muslins. There were some
good pictures on the walls, but no one cared to look at them. Some day,
it might be, a new earl should come to his own, who would put life into
all these sleeping apartments, people them—let in the sunlight—sweep off
the dust; but so far, for generations past, the Glendares had cared
nought for the place, which a former earl had when the title was still
new built large enough to lodge a monarch and his suite, as was the
fashion formerly in Ireland, where once every person who happened to be
anybody, found himself over-housed and under-incomed.

When my lady visited Rosemont, she affected a certain west wing called
the “garden side” by those employed about the place, and it was so far
the garden side of the mansion, that the windows commanded a view of an
old-fashioned parterre, and a glass door opened into a piece of
pleasure-ground which might have delighted the heart of Mr. Disraeli’s
Lady Corisande herself.

There were to be found those old-fashioned flowers one longs for
nowadays and never finds. There were the plants a false civilization, a
perfect subjugation of individual taste to the dictum of interested
tradesmen, have banished beyond our ken. That garden was the only thing
connected with Rosemont my lady loved. There was somewhat of romance
about the place—something which reminded her—so my lady said, to her
London listeners—of the sweet peace of a convent garden, in that bit of
pleasure-ground at Rosemont, enclosed as it was with thick low hedges of
privet, amongst which grew roses and passionflowers, and sweet briar and
honeysuckle.

Assuredly it was a lovely little nook, where, in the earliest spring,
crocuses and snowdrops sprang to life, and following fast in their wake
came “pale primroses” and hepaticas, pink and blue, and the many-faced
polyanthus and daffodil, a flower whose praises Herrick has not
disdained to sing.

But it was later on in the golden summer time, that the garden side of
Rosemont decked itself in the most gorgeous apparel, not merely in
scarlet, and yellow, and blue, as is now the fashion, fleeting we may
hope, but in every rich and tender colour the Creator of all things
beautiful has made to render our earth lovely.

There shone—humbly self-asserting—the gentianella in her dark blue robe
of velvet. There were beds where fairy lilies of the valley made melody
amongst their luxuriant foliage; there grew soft harebells, pale blue,
transparent white; there were flaunting tulips, and showy anemones and
ranunculus, the colours of which dazzled the sight; there were sweet
auriculas and climbing honeysuckle, and a perfect wealth of roses—roses
that have had their day and disappeared before the great, scentless,
coarse, overgrown monstrosities that demand care and admiration from
their lovers in the present generation.

Against the walls of the house were trained myrtles, lemon verbenas,
alpine roses, and the mysterious passion-flower both white and purple.
That garden side of Rosemont was certainly, as my lady said, “beautiful
exceedingly.”

Not that the fact of its being beautiful exceedingly would have
recommended it to any one of the Glendares except in an abstract and
conversational manner. They had none of that passionate love of scenery,
that almost savage fondness for hill and dale, for the wide sea and the
foaming rivulet, for snow-crowned mountains and rock-bound coasts, which
has served to stipple in a background full of romance and sorrow and
pathos to the figure of many a reckless, extravagant, wickedly
improvident Irishman.

But the Glendares were not Irish. They owned the soil, but they were not
of it, they had not even that indefinite sort of attachment for the land
which property usually developes.

They were aliens, every one, not excepting Mr. Robert Somerford, who,
though he had managed to secure for himself so much good-will, cared
really no more for any blade of grass in the emerald isle than he would
have done for roses of Sharon.

He was as adaptable as other members of his family had proved themselves
under various vicissitudes of fortune, but he was also as false.

Unknown to himself, perhaps, but still, certainly his whole life was a
lie—an assumption of qualities he did not possess—of abilities with
which nature had not endowed him, of affections forgotten at his birth.
It was what they believed him to be, and not what he was, that the lower
classes loved. And as regards Grace Moffat? Well, perhaps she too, like
her friend Nettie, had admired a handsome face too easily; perhaps the
accomplishments, unusual at that period, Mr. Somerford had cultivated,
caught her fancy; perhaps—and this is of the three the more likely
solution of the enigma—his close relationship to an earl affected the
imagination of a girl born in a land the inhabitants of which believe in
a lord as implicitly as any Republican who ever breathed.

He was as near the roses as any man could well be who chanced not
actually to be among them. He had been born in the purple, though he
happened not to be clad in it. He had lived much in Dublin and amongst
the gentry of the South of Ireland, and his accent was softer than that
which was obtained in the North—softer, tenderer. It conveyed much
whilst saying little.

On the whole, perhaps, Mr. Robert Somerford was not a safe companion for
a young lady whom her friends might desire to keep heart-whole; but as
regards Grace Moffat, the evil had been wrought. For her earth held no
hero like Lord Glendare’s nephew, for her nature presented no desirable
type of man, save one, and that one assumed the shape of Mr. Robert
Somerford, who, seated in the room which commanded a view of the garden
previously mentioned, was trying, not without success, to win golden
opinions from his uncle’s wife.

To Mr. Robert Somerford, Lady Glendare could afford to be gracious,
amiable, kindly-mannered,—in a word, herself. There were many points in
his favour, the chief perhaps being that there was not the slightest
chance of his ever succeeding to the title and rent-roll of the
Glendares. Between him and the earldom stood the young lords, and an
elder brother of his father, the Honourable Cecil Somerford, who lived
abroad, and was known by the family generally to have formed some
undesirable attachment which rendered a residence in England impossible.

Mr. Robert had thus been preserved from waiting for dead men’s shoes.
Eventually he hoped Lord or Lady Glendare, or the Honourable Cecil, or
some other friend or member of the noble family to which he belonged,
would get him an appointment; meanwhile, it was clearly his interest to
make himself as agreeable and useful to his uncle and his uncle’s wife,
and accordingly he entered heart and soul into the business of
canvassing and bribing voters which had brought the earl to Ireland just
at the time when, as Lady Glendare pathetically put it, “that dear
London was pleasanter even than usual.”

But every one knew the opposition was likely to be bitter as usual, and
more formidable than on previous occasions.

Lord Ardmorne had, of recent years, been purchasing land largely. Farms
and estates Lord Glendare would have bought, had he only possessed
enough money, passed into the hands of his wealthier neighbour. To the
north of Glenwellan lay properties and town-lands, hitherto owned by a
non-resident Englishman, sinfully indifferent to Whigs and Tories alike,
and to how his tenants voted; but he having departed to that very far
country where we may humbly hope politics are forgotten, his heirs
decided to sell his Irish estates, and Lord Ardmorne became their
possessor. This threw a weight into the Tory scale which the Glendare
party could not fail to regard with anxiety, and further there was no
question but that of late years, Kingslough, their own especial
stronghold, had been developing proclivities as unpleasant as they were
unsuspected. It was doubtful on how many votes the Whigs could certainly
reckon even at Kingslough. Already the Glendare star was waning. My lord
had been absent while his rival was present.

Lord Ardmorne was bringing capital into the county, Lord Glendare was
draining it away; Lord Ardmorne spent part of every year in Ireland,
sometimes for years together Ireland never beheld the face of Glendare.

In a word, any one could see the course was not going to be walked over,
and Mrs. Somerford had not hesitated to express her opinion to this
effect, with a certain triumphant bitterness which increased Lady
Glendare’s dislike for her. Not that Mrs. Somerford had ever done
anything to strengthen the family influence, on the contrary; but then
she had, so she modestly put it, no position.

In Lady Glendare’s shoes she could have marched triumphantly to success;
this her tone and manner implied, to the intense disgust of the
countess.

Hours, so it seemed to her ladyship, had passed since breakfast, as she
sat in a low chair near one of the windows, eating strawberries, an
operation which displayed to advantage her beautiful hands. Mr. Robert
Somerford admired his aunt intensely. She might be _passée_, but no one
could deny she was still a very lovely woman, and to a man of his dreamy
sensuous nature, there was something marvellously attractive in the
easy, almost indolent grace of her slightest movement, in the way in
which she made even the eating of strawberries a sight pleasant to
behold.

At a short distance from Lady Glendare, Mrs. Somerford had taken up her
position, severely industrious. She was one of those dreadful people who
never seem happy unless engaged upon some elaborate piece of work.
Making imitation lace chanced to be Mrs. Somerford’s speciality, and as
those were the days of veils, long, wide, and white, she was engaged in
fabricating one.

To Lady Glendare, who could scarcely have specified the difference
between the point and the eye of a needle, this industry appeared
singularly wearisome and aggravating, but her husband felt secretly
envious of his sister-in-law’s resources.

It is not given to every one to do nothing with an exquisite grace; and
clad in the snuff-coloured trousers and dark blue frock-coat which it
always, for some inscrutable reason, pleased him to don when he came to
Rosemont, his lordship drumming an irritable tattoo on the table, was
perhaps conscious that he did not form by any means so pleasing a
feature in the tableau as his wife.

“Ardmorne has given three picnics and two balls,” Mr. Somerford was
remarking.

“What a pity we could not have gone to them,” said her ladyship, whilst
Lord Glendare muttered audibly a commination service over his neighbour,
consisting of two monosyllables.

“Hu—sh!” Mrs. Somerford entreated, holding up her finger.

“It is all very well to say ‘hush,’” retorted her brother-in-law, “but
when a fellow like that, wallowing in money as if it were dirt, shows
fight on our very doorstep, as I may say, it is enough to make any man
swear.”

“I don’t see how swearing can mend the matter,” observed Mrs. Somerford.

Lady Glendare tranquilly conveyed another strawberry to her lips; the
tattoo grew ominously loud; Mrs. Somerford thought it expedient to
devote her attention to a particular stitch she was executing; Robert
Somerford began once more,—

“The question is, with what weapons we can fight him.”

“That is practical, Robert,” said his aunt. “That is precisely the
observation I have been hoping some one would make. Here am I, exiled to
this picturesque but barbarous land, willing to do anything if I am only
told what is required of me. I have canvassed before, I am ready to
canvass again. I will beg, buy, borrow, or steal votes. I can give
balls, I can arrange picnics, though they are a form of entertainment I
detest.”

“If you could only tell one where to get some money,” interrupted the
earl.

“Ah! now you ask me something quite beyond my power,” was the calm
reply. “Had I ever possessed any inventive genius of that kind, it would
have been exhausted years since.”

“There is one way in which you might propitiate the Kingslough worthies,
however, that would not involve any pecuniary outlay,” said Mr.
Somerford, hastily cutting across the retort his uncle was about to
make.

“Indeed!” exclaimed Lady Glendare, raising her eyes and looking at the
speaker with a certain languid interest. “How can such a desirable
object be compassed in so desirable a manner?”

“If you would honour Kingslough by bathing there, I think we might
safely set Ardmorne at defiance,” answered Mr. Somerford, with the
lightest touch of mock deference in his voice.

“Do you mean bathe in the sea?” asked her ladyship, still toying with
the rich, ripe fruit. “I am afraid it would be impossible for me to
‘honour’ Kingslough to that extent. How should you propose my setting
about it? I do not see how I could run across the shingle after the
fashion which prevails in this charming country, with no clothing except
a bathing-dress, cloak, and a pair of slippers, and after a few plunges
return in like manner. No doubt the spectacle might prove amusing to the
bystanders, but it certainly would be anything but agreeable to the
performer.”

“My dear aunt, do you think I should for one moment have asked you, even
in jest, to attempt anything of that kind? No I have been considering
the matter seriously, and mean precisely what I say, namely, that if you
would honour Kingslough so far as to try the effect of sea-bathing on
your health, we might calculate on carrying the town and neighbourhood
by storm. Any of the inhabitants whose houses are close on the shore, I
mean who have back entrances to the sea, would be only too happy to
place them at your service, or, what would be a still better plan, make
use of Miss Moffat’s bathing-box. It is like a little castle built out
on the Lonely Rock. There is always deep water at that point, and the
place is fitted up perfectly, my mother says.”

“Yes, Mr. Moffat has spared no expense,” Mrs. Somerford agreed.

“And who is this Miss Moffat?” asked Lady Glendare.

“She is the only daughter of a gentleman who, although he has the
misfortune to care very little about politics, still has the good
fortune, so far as he does care about politics, to be of our way of
thinking.”

“Dillwyn said he was breaking a horse for her,” observed the earl at
this juncture.

“Dillwyn only told you that to account for his having so valuable an
animal in his possession,” answered Mr. Somerford with sudden heat.

“Do you mean to imply he said that which was perfectly untrue?” asked
his uncle.

“Certainly.”

“Now, Robert,” entreated Mrs. Somerford.

“There can be no doubt Mr. Dillwyn would like extremely to get hold of
Miss Moffat’s fortune, but—”

“I must listen to this,” exclaimed Lady Glendare. “The conversation is
becoming quite interesting. Pray proceed, Robert. Do not be influenced
by Mrs. Somerford’s signs of wisdom. Mr. Dillwyn is a dishonest steward.
According to popular belief there has never been an honest one on the
property, so that is nothing new; but it is new to have an agent in
love. Do tell me all about it.”

“I was speaking of Miss Moffat’s fortune,” said Mr. Somerford with an
impatient emphasis on the last word.

“Is it large, and is she nice? Why not marry her yourself?” asked her
ladyship.

“I trust my son will never marry for money,” said Mrs. Somerford, in
accents of dignified rebuke.

“Your son will be a much greater simpleton than I fancy, if he ever
marry without it,” remarked Lord Glendare.

“Pray let Robert finish his romance,” entreated her ladyship. “Mr.
Dillwyn wishes to marry an heiress, and as I understand your tone, the
heiress deserves a better fate, and is conscious of her deserts. Now
tell me about her. It she young?”

“Miss Moffat is young,” said Mrs. Somerford, answering for her son.
“Concerning her appearance opinions are divided. She has a considerable
fortune for a person in her rank of life, and I, for one, think it would
give rise to jealousy and dissatisfaction if Lady Glendare were to
single out for special attention the daughter of a gentleman who is not
particularly popular, and who has herself, as is well known, been
engaged almost from childhood to Mr. John Riley, whose father is an
active supporter of Lord Ardmorne.”

The countess rose, put the plate containing her remaining strawberries
on a table close at hand, and said,—

“Robert, life becomes serious when your mother touches it. I am going
into the park, you can come with me if you like.”

Next moment they were in the old-fashioned garden. A few moments later
they were sauntering slowly along a shaded path which led to the more
pretentious grounds beyond.

“For pity’s sake,” began Lady Glendare, “do not disparage Mr. Dillwyn to
the earl. He may have all the sins in the decalogue, but he has one
virtue,—he refrains from troubling me about the condition of this
interesting peasantry. You want to have the agency and marry Miss
Moffat; Mrs. Somerford wants you to have the agency and not to marry
Miss Moffat. My advice is, marry Miss Moffat, and neither hunger nor
thirst after the agency. You could never give satisfaction, never;
whereas, with this heiress, you might get returned at the next election,
and then almost choose your career. _We_ can do nothing for you, I am
sorry to say. My sons will require all the influence we can bring to
bear to get even a bare living. Who is this unwelcome individual, the
fact of whose existence your mother so triumphantly announced? If you
are wise, do not let him carry off Miss Moffat.”

There is an advantage one has in dealing with selfish people who are not
specially clever. They show what they want almost at the first move of
the game. It may not be in the power of any man to hinder their getting
their way, winning their game, but at all events he is not taken
unawares. Mr. Somerford, who was, perhaps, not one whit cleverer than
her ladyship, though he chanced to be more plausible, understood clearly
what she meant.

She disliked poor relations—she would be glad if he married well—then,
when he had helped himself, she and the earl might, perhaps, lift a
finger to help him on a little farther.

It was not what he had wished—it was not what he had hoped, but he
accepted the position, and answered with an amount of self-depreciation
which, coming from Robert Somerford, would have been really touching,
could any one have believed it in the slightest degree true.

“I should not have the slightest chance of success. Report says the
young lady has already refused Mr. Riley, heir to one of the loveliest
properties in this part of the country, and where he failed it would be
useless for me to try. He had every advantage on his side, whilst I have
nothing in the world to recommend me except the fact of being related to
Lady Glendare.”

“And that fact you wish me to bring to Miss Moffat’s remembrance?”

“No. What I proposed was solely in the interests of our party.”

“And could your own not be served at the same time?” was the shrewd
inquiry.

“No; for once my mother and I are of one mind. I should not care to owe
everything to a wife, however amiable, and I am not quite certain that
Miss Moffat’s nature is all sweetness.”

“Gather me that rose, if you please,” said the countess; and whilst the
young man performed her bidding, she looked at him with a keen, worldly
scrutiny.

That evening she remarked to Lord Glendare, “Robert does not yet know
the precise sum an earl’s nephew is worth in the matrimonial market.”

“I should have thought that a point upon which your ladyship could
afford him important information,” was the bitter reply.

“Young people never believe the words of experience, and for that reason
I maintain a judicious silence,” answered the countess calmly. “My
opinion, however, is, he will only find out how little there is in a
name, even when combined with a brogue and good looks, when he has
outlived the latter.”

Mr. Robert Somerford was certainly not of one mind with her ladyship in
this matter. Months before, he had given the Moffat question his most
serious consideration, and decided that he ought to be able to do
better.

Combined with his romantic and musical tendencies, the young man had a
perfect knowledge of the value of riches. He was, perhaps, as fond of
Grace Moffat as he could be of anything besides himself, but he had no
thought of marrying her—yet.

It might be, it might not be. It was all uncertain as the mystic “He
loves me, he loves me not;” but on the whole Robert Somerford felt
satisfied fate had a higher destiny in store for him than that.




                             CHAPTER VIII.
                   INTRODUCES THE NAME OF AMOS SCOTT.


Great was the consternation at Woodbrook when John Riley announced his
intention of leaving Ireland; greater, if possible, the lamentations
which ensued when he informed his relations that Grace had refused him.

Had it been possible to conceal the fact of his rejection, he would have
done so, but he knew this was impossible, and knowing, made a virtue of
necessity.

The family heart had been so long set upon the match, Grace’s fortune
seemed the solution of so many financial enigmas—the end of such wearing
anxiety—that the news fell upon father and mother and sisters like the
tidings of a bank failure, or the hearing of a will read, from which
their names had been cruelly omitted.

For years the matter had been considered settled. Mr. Moffat had never
troubled himself about his daughter’s future. He considered her as good
as married. Mrs. Riley had treated Grace just as though she were a child
of her own. She was free of the house, came and went without invitation,
or thought of one, as if it belonged to her own father. She and the
Misses Riley lent each other bead and other patterns, made paper mats of
the same design, sang the same songs, exchanged books, played duets
together, and walked about hand linked in hand, or arm twined round
waist. They went to the same little parties, they rode together, they
boated together, they had all been close companions, they had been like
sisters until about a year previously, when Grace took it into her head
to conceive a violent affection for Nettie O’Hara, towards whom she had
never hitherto evinced any extraordinary amount of attachment. Whenever
Nettie had an hour to spare it was spent at Bayview. She could not, it
is true, go out to parties, and ride and drive and boat, and otherwise
comport herself like the Misses Riley, but she could and did occupy a
great deal more of Miss Moffat’s time and attention than those young
ladies approved. And yet what could they say? how was it possible for
them to express their annoyance?

Nettie was their relative—her life not a cheerful one—her future
presented nothing which could tend to make the future brighter. She had
few friends, and those who stood in that position were most of them a
few generations older than herself. Grace was very good to Nettie, gave
her presents, and kind words, and kisses, which were exchanged as freely
and effusively amongst school-girls at that period of the world’s
history as they are now. Every person said how kind it was of the
heiress to take so much notice of a portionless orphan. Some people
hoped it would not make Miss O’Hara discontented with her lot in life,
others doubted whether Miss Moffat was prudent in giving Mr. Riley so
many opportunities of meeting such an extremely pretty girl—Miss Moffat,
as has been stated, not ranking as a beauty amongst the Kingslough
authorities—whilst a very small minority, who had sense enough to keep
their opinions to themselves, adopted the theory that Grace was
beginning to weary of the Rileys, that she was getting old enough to
realize what such extraordinarily close intimacy meant, and what it must
end in some day; that she had taken Nettie into favour as a sort of
counteracting influence, and that if Mr. John Riley, without an
available shilling, should choose to fall in love with Miss Nettie
O’Hara, who had not a penny available or otherwise, Grace Moffat would
not prove inconsolable.

In all of which ideas the majority was partly right and partly wrong.
Grace had no definite scheme of transferring Nettie to Mr. Riley, but
she found her presence at Bayview an intense relief. She liked John
Riley, but she did not want to marry him; she was tired of every one
taking for granted that she would eventually marry him; it was a
pleasure to have a willing listener like Nettie, who believed, or who,
at all events, seemed to believe her, when she said she would never
marry anybody,—never. It was perhaps a still greater pleasure to find
that Nettie’s beau ideal of a hero and hers were identical, so far as
words could make them so.

Till the locket and the ring discoveries excited Grace’s suspicions, she
had not the remotest notion that Nettie owned a lover; but Nettie knew
perfectly well that her friend was in love in a simple, innocent,
romantic, foolish, inconsequent manner with Mr. Robert Somerford; knew
when and where, and how Grace had first seen him, and was intimately
acquainted with the dress Miss Moffat happened to be wearing on that
eventful day.

Miss Moffat had never communicated those particulars in any intelligible
and consecutive manner, but Nettie spelt and put together one thing and
another till she was mistress of the position, then she surreptitiously
conveyed to Bayview an album, some fifty years old or thereabouts, which
contained a vile watercolour daub of a simpering and sentimental-looking
young man, which nevertheless bore an absurd likeness to Mr. Somerford.

It was a picture of nobody in particular, but the eyes were dark and
dreamy, and the hair soft and waving, and the nose well formed, and the
mouth full and undetermined—altogether, a face likely to please girlish
fancies in an age when ladies were always represented with button-hole
mouths, opened just sufficiently to display two pearly teeth and a
morsel of tongue.

Grace asked Nettie if she might copy this work of art, to which Nettie,
who considered nobody would ever be the wiser, replied by cutting out
the page and presenting it to her friend.

Some days later, after they had refreshed their memories with another
look at the inane handsome face, Nettie asked Grace if she did not think
it bore a slight resemblance to “that nephew of Lord Glendare?”

“Now you mention it, I think it does, dear,” Grace answered
hypocritically.

“I fancy so,” Nettie proceeded, “though I never saw him close but once,
and that was the day of Miss Agnew’s wedding; but it is not nearly as
handsome as he.”

“I thought it was,” Grace faintly objected.

“Oh, no—not nearly! Why, Gracie, where can your eyes be?” persisted Miss
O’Hara; and Miss Moffat was brought, by slow degrees, to see how
infinitely better looking her living hero was to this portrait of one
dead and gone years and years before; and thus Nettie fooled the girl to
the top of her bent; and thus, surely and certainly, the thought of John
grew distasteful to the heiress, and unconsciously, almost, a fancy for
Robert Somerford took possession of her.

But she never thought of marrying him. No; sometime, perhaps, she might
die—of consumption she hoped, and he would hear of it, and be sorry when
he remembered the girl whose singing had, he said, almost made him weep.
He would marry some great and titled lady, whose loveliness would be
wonderful, as that of the beauties depicted in Heath’s ‘Book of Beauty,’
or in the engravings that adorned ‘La Belle Assemblée.’

At that period of her life Grace read poetry largely. The number of
“Farewells” she copied into a certain manuscript book, knowledge of the
existence of which was kept secret even from Nettie O’Hara, might have
astonished even a modern editor. The sadder and the more hopeless the
tone, the better the verses pleased Miss Moffat.

She did not often see Mr. Somerford, but what then? The pleasure was all
the greater when she did see him; and ill-natured people would have
added, she had the less opportunity of finding out that her idol had
feet of clay.

There is a time of life when it is a positive luxury to be unhappy.
Grace was unhappy, and rejoiced in her sufferings. It seemed to her that
she was experiencing the common doom, that she was in her own person
enacting a scene out of a life tragedy.

No; she would never marry any one; she could not marry John Riley, “dear
John, so good and kind—and ugly!” she always mentally added.

“A bad, ungrateful girl,” said poor Mrs. Riley, whose heart had often
been kept from utter despair by the bare thought of Grace’s thousands,
and who might naturally be forgiven some extravagance of expression
under the circumstances.

“Deceitful monkey!” ejaculated Miss Riley.

“I did not think she would have served us so, I must say,” remarked the
general.

“I will never speak to her again,” declared the youngest daughter.

“Then you may make up your mind never to speak to me,” exclaimed Mr.
John, happy at last to find some one on whom he could pour out the vials
of his wrath, his regrets, his disappointment, and his disgust at the
utterly prosaic view his family took of the affair.

He was most genuinely in love with Grace; he had, as he truly said,
cared for no one else all his life; and he hated to hear lamentation
made concerning the loss of her fortune, whilst he had not a thought to
spare—love being selfish—save for the loss of her dear self.

“I may as well tell you at once,” he went on, “that the person who says
anything against Grace says it against me; that her enemies are mine,
that her friends shall be mine;” he made a moment’s pause after this,
feeling he had not spoken quite truly in that last clause. “The girl has
a right to choose and to reject. If I did not please her, it was my
misfortune, not my fault; and as for her fortune, concerning which you
all talk as though it were her sole possession worth having, I wish she
had not a penny, that I might prove it is for herself alone I love her.”

Then, with a catch in his voice, which sounded suspiciously like a sob,
John Riley ended his sentence, and left the room.

“I will have a talk with her father,” observed the general.

“I can never forgive her—never,” said Mrs. Riley, solemnly, as though
she were uttering an anathema.

“She will be content, I suppose, when she finds she has driven John out
of the country,” added Miss Riley.

“I wonder,” began a young lady who had not hitherto spoken, “whether,
after all, there is nothing to be said in Grace’s favour. I wonder if
any of us except John really liked her—whether it was not her money we
were all so fond of.”

“Lucy, you are wicked to talk on solemn subjects in that sort of
manner,” said Mrs. Riley.

“There is something in Lucy’s notion, though,” broke out the general.
“This confounded money question seems to shadow every act in one’s life
like an upas tree. The girl is free from anxiety now; she would not have
been free here.”

“Will she be free if she marries Robert Somerford? tell me that,”
interrupted Mrs. Riley, almost tempestuous in her vehemence. “And that
is the English of all this, if you must take her part against your own
children. The arts and devices of some people are almost beyond belief.
There is that Lady Glendare driving over almost every day to
Bayview—coachman—footman—lady’s-maid—lapdog, and who can say what
beside?”

“Carriage and horses most probably,” suggested her husband.

“Don’t be absurd,” retorted the lady. “You know what I mean. She walks
with Miss Grace to the Lonely Rock—she bathes; and the facts are
reported in Kingslough, as if there were a court newsman retained for
the purpose. Mr. Moffat, who scarcely ever asked us to have a glass of
wine and a biscuit in his house, entertains her ladyship at luncheon.
Sometimes my lady breakfasts at Bayview! Miss Moffat accompanied her
ladyship back to Rosemont on Saturday, and returned to Bayview on
Monday! Oh! it makes me ill to think of it, and we cherished that viper
as if she had been a child of our own.”

“Grace may be a fool. Very likely she is, but I do not believe her to be
a viper,” said Miss Lucy stoutly. “It is a fortnight since she refused
John. He told us so himself, and Lady Glendare could not then even have
seen her.”

“But she had seen Mr. Somerford.”

“Well, girls, and which of you but might like to have a chance of
setting her cap at an earl’s nephew,” observed the General. “In my
opinion the earl is a very unprincipled man, and the nephew but a sorry
sort of fellow. Nevertheless, we must not be too hard upon Grace, though
I think” (speaking very slowly and distinctly) “she has broken my
heart.”

And having so spoken—he, like his son, rose and left the room.

And all this time, though Kingslough was well aware that Miss Moffat had
given Mr. John Riley his _congé_—though Kingslough and Glenwellan and
Kilcurragh and many another place in addition were speculating
concerning Mr. Somerford’s chances of winning the heiress—concerning
Miss Moffat’s chances of wedding an extremely good-looking sprig of
nobility—all this time, I say, Mr. Moffat remained in ignorance of his
daughter’s assertion of independence.

As has before been said, he was not hospitable. He disliked the customs
of a country where every man had the run of his friends’ tables. He did
not visit anywhere unless solemnly and ceremoniously invited, and very
seldom then, and he wanted no chance guests in a house the domestic
routine of which might have been wound up and set going by clockwork.

Nevertheless he had been accustomed to see John Riley about the place—to
meet him in the avenue, or on the terrace, or strolling through the
grounds with Grace and Nettie, and after a time it occurred to him that,
spite of Lady Glendare’s frequent presence, there was something or some
one absent who had filled up a gap in his experience.

He thought the matter over with that curious thoroughness which is the
attribute of slow and abstracted natures, and then said, “Grace, what
has become of John? Is he from home? I have not seen him for more than a
fortnight past.”

For a moment Grace paused—then she said, very evenly, “I do not think
you will see John Riley here again at present. He asked me to marry him,
and I refused; that is the reason he has not visited Bayview for a
fortnight past.”

“But, my dear Grace—your mother—”

“My dear papa,” interrupted Grace, “I deny the right of any mother, how
much more the right of a mother who is dead, and who can know nothing of
the feelings of the living, to select a husband for her child. It was
all a mistake; and if mamma were alive, she would, I am sure, be the
first to acknowledge it to be so.”

“At your age, Grace,” began Mr. Moffat.

“At my age, papa,” once again interrupted Miss Grace, “it is of great
importance to know one’s own mind, and I have long known I would never
marry John Riley.”

“But remembering for how long a time it has been considered a settled
matter that you and he were to become man and wife eventually, I think
you ought at all events to have consulted me before rejecting him.”

“I had not any time to consult you, papa,” answered Miss Grace demurely,
“it was just ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ and I said ‘No.’ I never thought you really
liked the Rileys,” went on the girl, “and I do not see why I should
marry John merely because my grandfather had a friendship for the
general. I have always declared I do not intend to leave you or
Bayview,” and she rubbed her cheek caressingly against his sleeve.

“Ah, Gracie, that is all very well _now_,” said Mr. Moffat.

“It is very well for ever, papa,” she replied. “How should I learn to
care for any other home than this? How should I endure such a life as
that the girls lead at Woodbrook. If I am fastidious, papa, remember who
has made me so. It is your own fault if I am as people say I am, proud
and reserved; I, who have not, to quote some of the plain-spoken
Kingslough people, a desirable thing about me except my money.”

“What does Mrs. Riley say to all this, Grace?” asked Mr. Moffat, totally
ignoring his daughter’s last sentence.

“I can only imagine,” the girl replied. “Mrs. Riley and I have not seen
each other since; I do not suppose we ever shall see each other again.”

“Do you mean that because you have refused John, all intimacy between
the families is to cease?” asked her father somewhat anxiously.

“I mean that as he has not been here for more than a fortnight, nor his
sisters, nor his mother, nor his father, it is very likely they all
intend to cut me—but I can bear it,” finished Miss Grace with a toss of
her pretty head.

“I had regarded this marriage as a settled thing,” said Mr. Moffat
thoughtfully.

“So did a great many other people, I believe,” answered his daughter.

“When a girl has a large fortune,” went on Mr. Moffat, “it becomes an
anxious question whom she shall marry.”

“I should have thought that an anxious question whether a girl have a
fortune or not,” Grace remarked.

“I am speaking seriously about a serious matter,” replied her father in
a tone of rebuke. “A portionless girl is at all events certain not to
fall into the hands of a fortune-hunter. There is nothing I should have
such a horror of as seeing a child of mine married to a mere adventurer.
Till now I have never felt a moment’s uneasiness about your future. The
match proposed by your grandfather seemed in every respect suitable, and
now, without even mentioning the subject to me, you have unsettled the
plans of years. So independent a young lady as you aspire to be,” he
added bitterly, “will no doubt choose a husband with as much facility as
you have discarded a suitor, and some day you will come to me and say, I
have accepted Mr. So-and-so, with as much coolness as that with which
you now tell me you have rejected John Riley.”

“You are unkind, you are not fair to me,” said Grace, who was by this
time in tears. “I never thought you much liked the Rileys; you did not
ask them to the house.”

“No,” interrupted Mr. Moffat, “I certainly did not encourage promiscuous
visiting, because I like to feel my house and my time my own, and detest
the practice of living any where except at home, which prevails so much
in this country. I am not a man who delights in general society, and I
do not pretend to say the Rileys are congenial to my taste, but—”

“You think they ought to be to mine,” said Grace, laughing even while
she cried.

“I think they are a family with whom you might have got on extremely
well,” answered Mr. Moffat. “I think John Riley is a young man in whose
hands any girl might safely put her happiness. There is no drawback I
can see to him except the fact of his father’s property being so heavily
encumbered, and your money would have paid that mortgage off, and the
estate might in my opinion then have been doubled in value. I have often
thought how it might be managed.”

“So have the Rileys I am quite sure,” added Grace.

“I believe John’s affection for you to be perfectly disinterested,” said
her father.

“Perhaps it may,” she replied, “but the worst of being an heiress is,
one never thinks anybody is disinterested.”

“Do not talk in that manner, my dear, or you will make me wish Mr. Lane
had never left you a shilling.”

“I have often wished he had left it to those poor slaves he made it out
of,” answered Grace. “Papa, I am sick of money: I should like to feel,
if it were only for an hour, that somebody cared for me for myself
alone.”

“I think many somebodies care for you alone,” he remarked; “myself, for
instance.”

“You—yes of course; but then, you are nobody,” she said, squeezing his
hand.

“Thank you, my dear, for that compliment. What say you then to Lady
Glendare?”

“I do not know what to say, except that I am afraid I am getting
horribly tired of her. I shall be so glad when this detestable election
is over and her ladyship’s bathing at an end. How she does hate the very
sight of the water!” added Grace, laughing at the recollection of Lady
Glendare’s terror. “I asked her one day if she did not enjoy it, and she
repeated the word ‘Enjoy!’ with a shudder more expressive than any form
of speech could have been.”

“Then you have no ambition to live amongst the nobility?” asked Mr.
Moffat.

“No, I should dislike it as much as Lady Glendare does sea-bathing. She
cannot feel more out of her element on the Lone Rock than I did at
Rosemont.”

“I am glad to hear it, Grace,” said her father; “I do not think much
good comes out of girls associating with those in a higher rank than
themselves.”

Conscious that this remark was capable of a more particular application
than the speaker suspected, Grace hung down her head and made no answer.
When next she spoke it was to say,—

“Papa, you are not angry—not really angry, I mean, because I could not
care for John?”

“I am not angry,” he answered, “but I am sorry. Any person may want to
steal you away now.”

“But if I am not to be stolen?” she asked.

Mr. Moffat smiled gravely and said,—

“Ah! Grace, you do not know much about these matters yet—I wish you
could have liked John. But there,” he added speaking more cheerfully,
“perhaps you may change your mind, and marry him in spite of all this.”

“No,” she answered. “And if I wanted to marry him ever so much he would
never ask me again—never.”

“You think that, Grace?”

“I am certain of it—certain—positive. I did not refuse him nicely, papa,
not at all as young ladies do in books; I was rude and said what I ought
not to have said. He vexed me and I vexed him.”

“I trust you did not express any idea of his being influenced by
mercenary considerations,” said Mr. Moffat sharply.

“Yes I did,” confessed the girl penitently.

“Then, Grace, I am angry with you; I shall make a point of going over to
Woodbrook, and apologizing to him for your rudeness. I would not for any
consideration, this had happened. I wonder how you could so far forget
your own dignity as to insult a man who had done you the great honour of
asking you to be his wife, for, whatever you may think, a man can confer
no higher compliment on a woman than that.”

The girl made no reply; she only withdrew her hand from her father’s
arm, and walked slowly away towards the house. That day Lady Glendare
found Miss Moffat in an unusually lively mood. Never before had her
ladyship heard Miss Moffat talk so much or so well.

“She really has something in her,” decided the countess, “and Robert
might do worse; besides Mrs. Somerford does not like her.” For all of
which reasons Lady Glendare determined to promote the match.

Meanwhile another and not an adverse influence was at work.

When Mr. Moffat arrived at Woodbrook, great were the expectations raised
in the bosoms of Mrs. Riley and her daughters by his unlooked-for visit.

He had asked for Mr. John Riley, but the servant ushered him into the
general sitting-room, where Mrs. Riley, surrounded by the Misses Riley,
was engaged in works of industry.

“This is an unlooked-for pleasure,” said that careworn matron, giving
Mr. Moffat both her hands to shake, as though one would not have been
more than enough to satisfy him. “We did not hope to see you here: I
think it very kind of you to call, and to show us we are still to be
friends, although it seems we are not to be relatives.”

Mrs. Riley was not a favourite of Mr. Moffat’s. He liked everything
soft, and quiet, and graceful about a woman—voice, manner, mind, dress,
movement. Mrs. Riley had a pronounced accent, and was neither quiet nor
graceful; a good woman, no doubt, but one who would have made Lady
Glendare shudder. She caused Mr. Moffat to draw back a little farther
into his shell, as he answered,—

“No one can regret Grace’s decision more than I,” (then she has not
changed her mind, thought Mrs. Riley). “It is usually an anxious thing
for a widower to be left with a daughter, more especially if that
daughter have a large fortune, but I never felt anxious about Grace
until now. I was so certain your son would make her a good husband.”

Yes, it was Mrs. Riley’s opinion there were not many young men like John
in the world, and she expressed it.

“But one cannot control a young girl’s fancies,” said Mr. Moffat, who
felt vaguely that the virtues of his daughter seemed to be forgotten in
Mrs. Riley’s praises of her son.

“I am very sorry to hear you say so,” said that lady, pursing up her
lips, “very sorry for Grace’s sake.”

“Do you think I can _make_ Grace like your son?” asked Mr. Moffat, a
little hotly, misinterpreting her meaning, and considering Mr. Riley
would at least gain as much advantage from the match as his daughter.

“Certainly not, Mr. Moffat, but it might be just possible to keep her
from liking other people.”

“If your remark contain any hidden meaning, I am stupid enough not to
perceive it,” said Mr. Moffat, answering her tone rather than her words.

“There is no hidden meaning so far as I am aware,” replied the lady. “We
know the reason why John—”

“Mamma,” interposed Lucy entreatingly.

“Nonsense, child, don’t dictate to me,” said her mother angrily, while
Mr. Moffat added,—

“Pardon me, Miss Lucy, but I think your mother is right. If she is aware
of any reason for Grace’s decision beyond those with which I am
acquainted, I certainly ought not to be kept in ignorance of them.”

“But it is only mamma’s idea, and I do not believe there is anything in
it; I do not, indeed,” persisted Lucy.

“And pray how does it happen you are so much wiser than your elders?”
asked Mrs. Riley snappishly. “The fact is this, Mr. Moffat; Grace
refused John because she likes some one else better.”

“And who is the some one?” asked the perplexed father.

“Mr. Robert Somerford,” said Mrs. Riley, with slow triumph.

“Mr. Robert Somerford! you must be”—crazy, Mr. Moffat had nearly added,
but he substituted “mistaken” for it. “Grace has not seen him
half-a-dozen times in her life.”

“That makes no difference,” was the calm reply.

“I think it makes every difference,” said Mr. Moffat. “Believe me, Mrs.
Riley, you are quite mistaken about this matter.”

“Perhaps so, but if you ask your daughter, I think you will find I am
not mistaken.”

“I should indeed be sorry to mention the subject to my daughter, and I
hope no one else will,” said Mr. Moffat rising. “I have not the least
desire to put such a ridiculous idea into her mind. There is nothing I
should have such a horror of, for her, as an unequal marriage. There is
scarcely a man I know I should less desire to see her husband than Mr.
Somerford. As you say John is at the stables, I will, if you will allow
me, go to him. I entreat of you,” he added earnestly, “not to harbour
this delusion. I am certain Grace is not a girl to give her affections
where they have not been asked, where they are not wanted.”

“Oh! we shall say nothing,” hastily replied Mrs. Riley, who had already
imparted her views on the Somerford question under the seal of secrecy
to at least half-a-dozen friends; “we have our own affairs to attend to,
and find that sufficient, without meddling in the affairs of other
people. I only wish the General was of my mind. What he can be thinking
of to turn knight-errant at his time of life, I cannot imagine.”

“Papa wants to see Nettie’s ‘marriage lines,’ Mr. Moffat,” said Lucy,
noticing their visitor’s perplexed expression, “that is all mamma means.
John and he are going over to-day to Maryville to ask for a private
view.”

“You ought not to speak about such subjects at all, Lucy,” said her
mother; “certainly not in so flippant a manner.”

“Girls are a great plague,” sighed Mr. Moffat. Whether his remark had
any reference to Miss Lucy’s flippancy it is difficult to say.

“Mine are not,” said materfamilias, proudly.

“The present company is always excepted,” answered Mr. Moffat, mentally
adding, as he left the room, “not that I should except you from being
one of the most ill-bred women I ever met. Perhaps, after all, Gracie
has done wisely. I doubt whether she and Mrs. Riley could ever have gone
on smoothly together.”

In the stable-yard he met John, whose face brightened at sight of
Grace’s father, and then became once again overcast when he found Mr.
Moffat had only called to apologize for his daughter’s rudeness.

“Thank you,” the young man said, simply. “Grace did not mean to hurt me,
I am certain, but there was just enough truth in her words to sting and
to rankle. You know, sir,” he went on, “we are poor, and a man who is
poor cannot help thinking about money; but it is not for her money’s
sake I love Grace. Some day she will know that, perhaps. When I am gone
quite away, I wish you would tell her she could not be any dearer to me
if she had millions, nor less dear if she had not a penny.”

“Are you going away, then?”

“Yes, whenever the election is over, I shall leave Ireland. If Grace had
said, ‘yes,’ I should have left it all the same, only with a lighter
heart. I did not want her to marry a pauper. I meant to do something. I
meant somehow to make a name and money; but why should I trouble you
with all this?” and he broke off abruptly. The past had been fair, but
it was dead and cold. The mental refrain of every sentence was, “Never
more.” For ever he should love her, never she would love him; that was
the burden of that weary song he had kept repeating to himself ever
since the night when he left her standing on the terrace, listening to
the moan of the sea.

They walked on together in silence down the back avenue to a pair of
rusty gates, outside of which Mr. Moffat had left his dog-cart.

“John,” asked that gentleman abruptly, at length, “what is it your
mother means about Mr. Somerford?”

“What about him?” said John moodily.

“She seems to think Grace is fond of him.”

“So she is,” was the reply.

“I am certain you are wrong.”

“I am certain I am right; listen to me, sir. I do not say Grace is in
love with the fellow, heaven forbid; but still, I do say he has, to use
a common expression, ‘put her out of conceit’ with every one else. I am
glad you have mentioned the matter, because I can now explain how Grace
happened to be so spiteful to me. I expected to be refused, and yet I
grew half-crazy with rage and jealousy when I was refused. So like a
fool, I told her the new love had ousted out the old, and then, when she
said I was mad to think Lord Glendare’s nephew would ever want to marry
her, I retorted that he might like to marry her money. The fault was
mine, you see,” finished the young man hurriedly. “Grace was not to
blame, and I should have been the one to apologize, not you.”

“What makes you suppose there is anything between Mr. Somerford and
Grace?” that was the one question of absorbing interest to Mr. Moffat.

“I do not suppose there is anything,” answered the young man. “All I
mean is, that with his singing and playing, his handsome face and his
soft, false manners, he has taken her fancy.”

“That will all pass away,” said Mr. Moffat, but John shook his head.

“If she could know him as he really is,” answered the young man, “know
him for a cold, shallow, selfish, unprincipled vagabond, there might be
some hope; but Grace has made a hero of him. She thinks he is without
reproach, that he is pre-destined to retrieve the Glendare fortunes,
that he is the one good fruit of a rotten tree. There, I would rather
say no more about him. Perhaps I am unjust. For her sake I hope I am. I
will come over to bid you and her good-bye before I go. Though we parted
in anger, I think she would like to remember we parted once again as
friends.”

“Yes, you may be positive about that,” Mr. Moffat assured him, and then
they shook hands and separated, John to proceed to Maryville, and
Grace’s father to return to Bayview, a much more perplexed and harassed
man than he had left it.

Was Mr. Somerford the origin of Lady Glendare’s sudden intimacy with and
professed affection for his daughter? He had said, and said truly, to
Mrs. Riley, that he had a horror of unequal marriages, and that Robert
Somerford was not a man to whom he should like to give his daughter; and
yet, when he came to consider the matter calmly, when he found his
objections to the young man were based greatly on prejudice, he began to
see the match was not in reality so unequal as he had at first thought.

Grace was a gentlewoman, possessed of a large fortune, Mr. Somerford was
the nephew of an earl, and had not a sixpence; so far the beam stood
tolerably even. No one had ever spoken of Mr. Somerford as a rake, or a
gambler, or a drunkard. His sins were those of omission. So far as Mr.
Moffat was aware, no sins of commission had ever been charged against
him. The poorer classes idolized him, and Mr. Moffat did not know enough
of the lower classes to be able to judge accurately the value of that
idolatry.

Living entirely amongst his books, mixing little with society, as much a
stranger to the feelings and habits of the country as the day he settled
at Bayview, Irish only by connexion and marriage, Northumbrian by birth,
English by feeling, wealthy by a sequence of unlooked-for events,
indolent, refined, reserved, how should he, who had never been able to
win for himself popularity, understand the utter worthlessness of the
beads, and feathers, and gew-gaws of manner, and word, and presence, by
which popularity is to be bought.

The Glendares were a weak, dissolute, extravagant, heartless race; but
then, Mrs. Somerford, Robert’s mother, was a very dragon of piety,
respectability, pride, and austerity; and after all, if Grace’s fortune
were settled strictly on herself and her children, she might do worse.

Hitherto, he had always looked upon Grace as virtually married to John
Riley, and it was therefore a shock and a wrench to imagine her married
to any one else; but if Grace did not like John, and did like Lord
Glendare’s nephew, why then Mr. Moffat decided he would try to accustom
himself to the change.

After all, Lady Glendare and Mrs. Somerford would be more desirable
relatives than poor, bustling, well-meaning, loud-voiced,
many-daughtered Mrs. Riley.

Further, Grace must marry, and that soon. Those were days as has been
already stated, when girls sooner outgrew their first youth than women
do now, and Mr. Moffat disliked beyond all description the idea of
having, as he mentally expressed it, “a score of lovers hanging about
Bayview.”

The charge of a young maiden, the trouble of keeping undesirable
admirers at bay, love complications, secret engagements, scenes, tears,
loss of appetite, and threatened consumption, all these things were as
much beyond Mr. Moffat’s province as they were outside his taste.

He loved ease and the classics, he detested company, he hated having the
even tenour of his life ruffled even for a moment by the intrusion of an
outside current.

He had been vexed with Grace, and sorry for John Riley, but now he
believed John would get over it, and perhaps it was quite as well Mrs.
Riley should not become his daughter’s mother-in-law.

Mrs. Riley’s voice had that day sounded especially disagreeable. The
bitterness, disappointment, and resentment she feared to express had not
added to its sweetness, and had added to the brusqueness of her manner.

After the sweetness of Lady Glendare, the acid of Mrs. Riley had not
appeared good to Mr. Moffat. How handsome her ladyship still remained,
how exquisitely she dressed! The fashions of those days seem astonishing
to us, but they were the mode then, and people admired them accordingly.
How gracefully she moved! As Robert Somerford said, “there was poetry in
her walk.” On the other hand, what a dowdy Mrs. Riley looked, with her
crushed cap and faded strings, her ill-made dress, and yellow bony
hands.

A long course of mortgage had not tended to improve Mrs. Riley’s
personal appearance. She looked like a house in chancery. Every time he
beheld her, Mr. Moffat beheld likewise fresh dilapidations and—

“Jerry,” said Mr. Moffat at this juncture, suddenly roused from ideal
musings to a sense of the real; “see what is the matter with Finn’s
front off foot. He is easing it.”

Mr. Moffat was driving tandem, and his leader’s foot was slightly beyond
his range of accurate vision.

“Cast a shoe, your honour,” explained Jerry, lifting the foot indicated.

“That is bad, what can we do?”

“I’ll walk him home,” volunteered the groom.

“No, I cannot endure driving alone. Cannot we put him up somewhere?”

“Amos Scott would take good care of him. His place is at the top of the
next loanin.”[3]

Footnote 3:

  Lane.

“You mean Miss Grace’s friend, the man who has a lame boy, and who wears
a blue coat with brass buttons?”

“Yes, your honour.”

“Open the gates then, and I will drive up.”

“There are half-a-dozen gates.”

“Walk on then and open them all. What a cursed country!” thought Mr.
Moffat as his wheels went down on one side and up on the other, and his
horses gingerly picked their way over huge stones, and gravel, and
pieces of rock. “Jerry, does Scott draw his farm-produce down this
charming piece of road?”

“Every ton of it, sir.”

“And his manure back?”

“Ah, it’s little manure he draws. He has his own heap always rotting at
the door, ready to his hand, and it’s good land he has, God bless it.”

“Who is supposed to keep this road in repair?” asked Mr. Moffat,
unheeding this testimony to Mr. Scott’s admirable management, and the
superior quality of his soil.

“Nobody, sir.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“Nobody, sir; it is a divisional, and nobody can stop it, and nobody
cares to mend it. In the winter there is a fine stream running
sometimes; I’ve seen it in flood times up to the horse’s girths.”

“Who is the landlord?”

“The Earl, sir.”

There was only one earl known at Kingslough, his rival being the
marquis.

“If he knew the state this road was in, he would have something done to
it, I should think,” said Mr. Moffat.

“Likely, sir, but it was always so,” remarked the man.

“Always so, always so,” repeated Mr. Moffat to himself, “ay, and
everything always will be so while Ireland is Ireland, and the Irish
remain Irish,” forgetting that he, an Englishman, had fallen into Irish
ways; that the grass on his lawns was suffered to grow long like that in
a meadow, that his hedges and borders were unclipped, that his walks
were unrolled, and his grounds, though beautiful exceedingly, were left
in a state which would have driven an English gardener crazy to behold.

Yes, he was Irish in his ways, without the Irishman’s excuse, for he had
plenty of money, plenty and to spare. He might have given employment to
many and many a labourer, had he transplanted the trim civilization of
his native land across the channel.

If a man have wealth and do not spend it, he may as well be an absentee
as a resident. Some idea of this truth had already dawned upon Grace
Moffat. All the evils Ireland groaned under she heard ascribed to
non-resident landlords, to the rent the land yielded being spent out of
the country; but the girl, thanks perhaps to the comparatively lonely
life she led, and to her intense love for and sympathy with the people,
was beginning to understand that non-residence was only a part of the
evil.

For example, she and her father lived at Bayview; but for all the money
they spent, or good they did in Ireland, they might as well have lived
at Jericho. The Rileys again, who was the better for their presence?
They lived off the soil; they killed their own sheep, they ate their own
poultry, they grew their own vegetables, they wore the same clothes, so
it seemed to Grace, month after month, and year after year. All this
certainly might be their misfortune, indeed Miss Moffat knew no choice
was left to them in the matter; but the man who held the mortgage on
their property, and for whose sake the Woodbrook tenants groaned under a
yoke scarcely less severe than that laid upon the necks of the farmers
who rented land from the Glendares, lived at Kilcurragh alone, with an
aged servant, in a large dilapidated house, giving nothing away, living
upon as little as he could.

If he expended a hundred a year, it was the extent of his outgoings.

Then Grace thought about Mrs. Hartley. She, though English, resided in a
land where the exigencies of society did not require a large expenditure
of money, and accordingly Mrs. Hartley did not live up to her income;
did not, in fact, use a fourth of it.

The poor, Miss Moffat could not fail to see, were the real benefactors
of their country. They gave their labour, and out of their poverty they
were liberal; they gave the ready handful of meal, the bannock of
griddle bread, the sieve-full of potatoes, the drink of milk, the
abundance of their sympathy, the cheerful courtesy of their manners, the
smiling promptitude of their charity; and Grace, who was a little shy,
whom neither the lower nor the higher classes exactly understood, seeing
everything, laid it to heart, and made a trembling vow that when she
came to her own, when she attained the advanced age of one-and-twenty,
she would try to use her wealth aright, and see whether even a woman
might not do something to regenerate the country she loved so dearly.

If Mr. Moffat had ever entertained any romantic ideas of the same
description, they were dead and buried years before this story opens.

Taking the world round, no matter how many persons a man begins with
being attached to, he generally ends in liking himself better than any
of them.

To this rule Mr. Moffat proved no exception. Grace and himself now
formed the only prominent figures in his life’s design, and at that time
Grace stood a little behind himself.

Not a bad man, not a dishonourable, but yet he buried his talent in the
ground, and returned no interest for all wherewith his Lord had trusted
him.

The people, by which phrase I mean those whose rank was socially lower
than his own, liked him very well indeed.

He was a “foreigner,” and consequently could not be supposed to
understand their ways; but they found him always civil. He was a
“gentleman,” if a very quiet one. He rarely addressed them, but when he
did, “he was civil and well-spoken.”

“He never made free.” On the whole, Mr. Moffat was popular, allowances
being readily made for his love of books and solitude.

Specially he was liked amongst the Glendare tenantry. Once or twice he
had spoken to the “Aggent,” as Mr. Dillwyn was generally styled, and
effected good by his mild interference.

With beaming face, Mrs. Scott, a middle-aged woman, whose face was
framed in the universal white frilled cap, and who wore a blue-checked
apron, came out to meet him.

“Is your husband at home, Mrs. Scott?” asked her visitor.

“No, sir; he has gone to Rosemont, to see th’ Airl. We’ll get our lease
promised now, plaize God.”

“My leader has cast a shoe,” explained Mr. Moffat. “May I leave him here
for an hour or two?”

“An’ welcome, sir; shall I unloose him?”

“You, Mrs. Scott! certainly not; Jerry can attend to him. There, easy
man, easy. Mind how you pull off that bridle.”

Afterwards it occurred to Mr. Moffat, with a feeling as near remorse as
he was capable of experiencing, that if he had not been quite so wrapped
up that summer’s day in himself and his leader, he might have uttered a
word of warning to the farmer’s hard-working wife.

They were as innocent as children of the world’s ways, those men and
those women, and happy as children in their innocence, till they had to
pay the penalty of such ignorance.




                              CHAPTER IX.
                          AT THE CASTLE FARM.


Amongst his friends and acquaintances Amos Scott’s homestead was
considered a marvel of convenience and luxury, whilst by gentle and
simple alike Mr. Scott himself was regarded as a very fortunate man—one
with whom the world had prospered exceedingly. As his neighbours
expressed his lot, “He was born on a sunny morning,” and the sunshine
had through forty years scarcely ever been obscured by a cloud.

He farmed the land his fathers had farmed before him. He married the
woman of his choice, and that woman chanced to have a stocking full of
money to her dowry; his children—all save one Reuben—were strong,
straight, healthy; he was respected and well liked by his equals, his
superiors, and his inferiors. He paid for his two sittings at the
Presbyterian Meeting-house, and the minister drank tea with him and his
wife thrice a year at all events. The murrain had left his cattle
untouched; all his children, old enough to have sounded such depths of
knowledge, could read and write. Reuben, indeed, thanks to Grace Moffat,
boasted a much wider range of learning. He was the “scholard” of the
family, and the family entertained an openly-expressed expectation that
some day—thanks again to Miss Gracie—he would be a schoolmaster, and a
secret hope that, thanks to his own abilities and the still not to be
despised contents of the typical stocking, he might enter the ministry.

It was entirely as a social question, as a matter of rising in the
world, that Amos Scott desired this result. To him the ministry merely
represented a body of men who taught the same creed as that he believed,
and who, not labouring with their hands, filled a better position than
any mere farmer might hope to occupy. He, Amos Scott, was too staunch a
Presbyterian to regard the clergy from any superstitious or popish point
of view. He always considered himself and men like him as true
descendants of the seven thousand who refused to bow their knee to
Baal—who, being certainly of the elect, nevertheless threw good works in
to swell the credit of the account their faith had previously
balanced—and he and the thousands of his fellows who at that time
doggedly, and bigotedly, and unchristianly, as it may seem, entered
their daily protest against Popery, as surely—from a political point of
view—stood between their country and destruction as the Derry
Apprentices saved Ireland to England.

Whether Ireland was grateful, or England is grateful, history alone can
decide. When that history which has still to be written is published,
the staunch and sturdy Presbyterians of the Black North may possibly
receive their due meed of praise; but staunch and sturdy people, who
hold strong opinions, and like exhibiting them to the world, are apt
sometimes to be voted bores, both by those who differ from them, and
those who are indifferent to everything, and it is very possibly for
this reason, and no better one, that statesmen and peacemakers, and
those who consider the Roman Catholic religion “picturesque,” and suited
to the “Celtic nature,” and adapted to afford comfort and happiness to
“poor, warmhearted, enthusiastic persons,” have all considered and do
all consider the stiff-necked Protestantism of the Irish
minority—powerful, though a minority—one of the chief causes of the
“Irish difficulty.”

Certainly, in the North, at the time of which I write, the Roman
Catholics had but a poor life.

What with the favourite form of drunken expletive which consigned the
Pope to regions hot and gloomy; what with party tunes, Orange
processions, and that which is hardest perhaps of all to bear, the
visiting the sins of a system on individuals, and assuming them capable
of any crime merely because they belonged to a special Church, it was
not easy for “Papists,” as the rival sects loved to style Roman
Catholics, to order their course aright.

They were the few amongst the many in the North. In the South the tables
were turned, and Protestants did not find it easy to please the
warmhearted peasantry, who had then, as now, a fancy for cold lead and
firing from behind hedges.

But it is with the North we are concerned, with Ulster when the Church
as by law established stood much in the position of Saul. She counted
her thousands, but Calvin his tens of thousands. Nineteen-twentieths of
the people went to “Meeting.” I should like to see the man who to this
day dare call a “Meeting-house” “Chapel” in Ulster. They were a hard,
stubborn, honest people, who kept the Lord’s Day with an almost New
England strictness, who prayed to the Lord standing, and who sang His
praises sitting, and who were, it should please almost any person to
imagine, a race the Lord Himself, Who knows all hearts, might have
loved, so keen was their sense of duty, their feeling of responsibility,
their love of justice, their respect for appointed powers.

To men accustomed to more artificial society, their manners might seem a
trifle brusque, their words too plain to be always pleasant; but
underneath a rough exterior, hearts beat leal and noble.

Here and there, not at long intervals, but within any one human being’s
ken, might have been picked out men and women capable of as noble deeds,
of as grand sacrifices, as any which are deemed worthy of being
chronicled in romance, and one of those men was Amos Scott, and one of
those women was his wife.

At any hour of the day or night had Grace Moffat tapped at their door,
and said,—

“We are in sore trouble, we want all the help you can give,” without a
second thought, though they were a close-fisted pair, sparing on
themselves, devoted to bargains, given to haggling about halfpence—the
contents of the magical stocking would have been poured into her lap,
and had need occurred Amos would have threshed out his corn, and sold
his cows, and parted with his pigs, and handed the proceeds to the young
lady, with as little thought of having acted with marvellous generosity
as a child, in as fine a spirit of chivalry as moved those poor,
weatherbeaten fishermen who, some seventy years ago, rowed a gallant
gentleman—gallant, if mistaken—out of sight of land, and then, resting
on their oars, pulled forth the paper offering one thousand pounds
reward for their passenger, and asked him if he “knew any body answering
to that description.” He had thought his disguise perfect, fancied
himself safe in it, and behold his whole safety lay and had lain in the
honour of those men who were carrying him to the sloop destined to bear
one most unfortunate to France and liberty.

And yet to look at Amos Scott and his wife was to destroy the idea of
all romance in connexion with them. Hearty and healthy were they both:
strong, bony, large-framed, hard-featured. He had been a
ruddy-complexioned, bashful fair-haired gossoon when he first beheld his
future wife, the buxom, strapping daughter of a village innkeeper. Dark
brown was her hair in those days, thick and long enough to twine in
ropes round the back of her head; dark brown, also, were her eyes, and
she had a large, frank mouth, and large white even teeth, and a
complexion delicate, and clear, and beautiful, like most other girls of
her nation; but the years had come and gone since then, and the
“gossoon” was a middle-aged man, and his wife’s hair was tucked away
under one of those caps which cease to be picturesque when once the
starch is out of them, and she had wrinkles after the manner of her
class—everywhere—and she had lost some of her teeth, and her voice
was—well—I love the accent, the honest, friendly accent of the lower
classes in that romantic, and picturesque, and sorrowful land; but Mr.
Moffat, being an Englishman, though partially acclimatized, did not
admire it any more than he admired the dung-heap—graced with a sow and a
dozen young ones—that rose to the left hand of the “causeway,” or the
sodden, rotting straw, wherein were scratching and pecking some thirty
fowls that lay to the right of the said causeway, marking the spot
whence a previous midden had been removed.

“Won’t you come in, sir, and sit down off your feet?” asked Mrs. Scott
hospitably, anxious to show a gentleman, whose nature she did not in the
least understand, all the hospitality in her power; but Mr. Moffat, with
a gesture almost of dread, declined the proffered civility.

Once had he been seduced into that abode, once by Grace, and he always
thought afterwards, with horror, of the sufferings endured within the
walls of Mr. Scott’s mansion.

Cheese had been produced for their delectation,—Cheese, a species of
food Mr. Moffat, being a man of weak digestion and given to considering
his ailments, loathed. Further, it was new cheese, such as the Irish eat
at births and funerals (washing it down with whisky), new cheese, dotted
with caraway seeds, and with this Mrs. Scott set out oaten bread, and
butter fresh and good, but butter made with Mrs. Scott’s own hands,
which did not look inviting, and butter-milk and sweet-milk: and he was
expected to eat.

If Mr. Moffat were not genial, and I am not aware his worst enemy ever
laid that virtue in the form of a vice to his charge, at all events he
was courteous. The feast was spread so humbly and so willingly, with
such a simple hospitality and belief that because it chanced to be the
best the house held it would be received kindly, that Mr. Moffat could
not choose but break a piece off the oat cake and eat it.

“Do you know poor papa can scarcely ever touch butter and _never_ eats
cheese,” said Grace to Mrs. Scott, gaily helping herself to a great
piece of cake and an enormous slice of butter, “and you know I do not
like caraways—you always make my cheese without them,” which speech
contained an allusion to the fact of its being Mrs. Scott’s annual
custom to present Miss Moffat with a cheese of her own manufacture.

Great were the ceremonies attendant on that presentation, which was
always performed by Mrs. Scott in person, and the cheese invariably
proved remarkably good. Perhaps, had Grace beheld the _modus operandi_
of its manufacture, she might not have regarded the article as a
delicacy, for all Mrs. Scott’s progeny assisted at the tub, and little
hands, not so clean as might have been desired, dabbled in the whey.

What the eye does not see, the heart, however, does not grieve over, and
Ireland is not the only country in which mothers, impressed by a fatal
delusion that their offspring can touch nothing without improving it,
permit children to meddle with and dabble in affairs more important than
the separation of curd from whey.

As for those youngsters at the Tower Farm, Grace loved them every one.
All the later babies she had nursed and cooed over. One of them was
called after her, Grace Moffat Scott, and had it been possible for such
a suggestion to be made to the Presbyterian mind, she would gladly have
stood godmother to the new arrival.

As it was, Amos Scott’s convictions saved her from assuming any such
responsibility, and Miss Moffat, thus debarred from any public evidence
of affection, had to content herself with fondling the infant so long as
it was little, and tossing it up to the ceiling the while it cooed and
shrieked an ecstatic accompaniment, and letting it, as age advanced,
come like the rest to see what she had in her pockets, what “comforts
and lozengers,” were there lying _perdu_ for subsequent delectation.

Often on Saturdays Nettie O’Hara and she had made up a picnic party all
by themselves, and taking their luncheon with them, so as to alleviate
the pangs of hunger, held high festival among the ruins of the tower
which gave a name to Amos Scott’s farm.

Dear to Grace was every inch of that farm, one of the delights of her
childhood had been to accompany her nurse thither. There were not so
many importunate urchins then to claim Mrs. Scott’s attention, and every
moment of her time could therefore be devoted to her little lady guest.

For her—the motherless, black-frocked, grave, old-fashioned orphan—were
saved the reddest and sunniest apples in the orchard; for her was baked
the first “bannock” that could be manufactured out of new potatoes; for
her always was kept a comb of honey; for her the “strippings” from the
best cow, which Grace, who was warned at home that new milk “would make
her yellow,” regarded in the light of a forbidden indulgence, and drank
rapturously out of the lid of a tin can; for her, surreptitious rides on
Pat, the donkey, and Rob, the venerable black pony, over whose decease
she subsequently wept bitter tears; for her a hundred thousand welcomes;
for her the best that house held, while she was still so little as to be
unable to guess how much out of their small means these people were
giving her, how royally in their own poor way they were entertaining a
child who it seemed scarcely likely would ever directly or indirectly
benefit them in any way.

Not out of interested motives, however, did they welcome the little
maiden; not because of any return they looked for did they welcome her
to the farm, and make her free of house and byre, of stable, garden,
orchard, and paddock. In those early days they wanted nothing from any
one: in the latter days, when we make their acquaintance, they still
wanted nothing from any one save a renewal of their still unexpired
lease from Lord Glendare, and for that they were willing and able to
pay. The rent had never yet been more than a temporary trouble to Amos
Scott. The land was exceptionally good. The amount he paid for it
exceptionally low. Stiff premiums had indeed twice been paid by Amos and
his father, but they were able to afford them.

There is a great deal in “starting square.” They had done so, and by
dint of prudence, economy, and hard labour, were enabled to keep
themselves that ten pounds before the world which means affluence,
instead of that ten pounds behind which means perpetual pauperism.

And for these reasons and many more, had Grace been thrice the heiress
she was, and of age, and holding her whole fortune in her own hand, it
would have made no difference (pecuniarily) to the Scotts. They did not
want gifts or loans, they could earn as much as they needed and desired,
indeed, would have accepted nothing more. They could pay for their
children’s schooling, and spared them to go to school except in the very
height of hay-making, reaping, or potato-digging. Had Miss Moffat or her
father offered to be at the sole expense of educating one of the
children, they would have resented the idea almost as an insult, but
when Grace, in her own quiet way, proposed to do a still greater thing,
namely, teach the feeble one of the flock all that she knew herself, the
parents caught at the notion; and the girl herself, still almost a
child, gave her lessons with a sweet patience, with a determined
perseverance, with a thoroughness and kindly encouragement Nettie O’Hara
might have envied.

But she did nothing of the kind; she only laughed at Grace’s fancy for
playing at schoolmistress.

“You can’t think, dear, how much I learn myself in teaching him,” said
Grace, not in the least disturbed by her friend’s ridicule.

Once again Nettie laughed.

“If I had your fortune, I should not care how little I knew.”

“You would like to know how to spend it though,” said Grace, with a
pretty sense of responsibility.

“Oh! somebody else will do that for you.”

“Never,” answered Grace, “never; Nettie, how often am I to tell you no
one shall ever persuade me to leave Bayview and papa?”

“But your papa will spend it for you,” said Nettie, hastily drawing back
her foot from the conversational hole into which she had unwittingly
thrust it.

Now came Grace’s turn to laugh.

“Dear papa does not know how to spend his own,” she exclaimed; “and
perhaps when I have money, I shall know as little what to do with it as
he. But oh! Nettie, I hope I shall learn; I am trying so hard to
understand what is wanted most in this world.”

“Money for everybody, I think,” Nettie retorted, a little bitterly.
After all, the difference was great between the embryo heiress and the
embryo governess. Perhaps Grace felt it to be so, for she embraced her
friend tenderly, and Nettie certainly saw the distinction clearly, and
attributed to it results that did not always accrue from the premises
she imagined.

For instance she always fancied the welcome to Castle Farm was more
cordial to Grace than to herself, because Grace had money and she none;
whereas the Scotts would have greeted Grace the same had she not owned a
stiver, and liked Nettie even less than was the case, had some
benevolent person left her ten thousand a year.

Wonderfully quick are the wisest of the lower orders all the world over
at reading character; shrewd even beyond their class are the Irish, and
more especially the northern Irish, in detecting the faintest token of a
false ring in the human coin. And, spite of her beauty, which had won
such golden opinions from the gentlemen and ladies of Kingslough—both
being for once unanimous in the matter—the Scotts thought it was a pity
“Miss Grace was so wrapt up in that Miss Nettie.”

Nevertheless, in their own way, both husband and wife were unaffectedly
grieved when they heard of the trouble Nettie had wrought for herself,
and it was with subdued voice and grave face that Mrs. Scott said to her
chance visitor, while Jerry took that “contrary divil Finn,” as he
styled him, into the stable,—

“Miss Grace’ll have heard, sir, that Miss Nettie—Mrs. Brady, begging her
pardon, has come home.”

“I do not think she has,” answered Mr. Moffat, with a sudden repression
of manner which did not escape Mrs. Scott’s notice. “When did she come?
where is she?”

“Where should she be, sir, but in her husband’s house?—bad luck to
him—that’s where she is; and as for when she come home, I was over at my
cousin’s two days ago—she’s in great trouble, having just buried her
husband, the Lord help her, and nine children to fill and to find—and as
I was coming home through the gloaming I met them on the car, Mr. Dan
driving. He nodded to me and gave me the time of day. They were walking
the horse down the Abbey brae, but she had her face covered with a veil
and looked neither one way nor another. I thought to myself, ‘that’s a
coming home for an O’Hara.’ She has made a rough bed for herself to lie
on, and a purty creature, too.”

“Mrs. Scott,” said Mr. Moffat, “I wish you would answer me one question
straightforwardly and in confidence, entirely in confidence you
understand. What is this man Brady? what has he done, what has he left
undone, to have such a mark placed against his name? As you are aware, I
do not put myself in the way of hearing idle gossip; I disapprove of
people who are never happy except when meddling in their neighbours’
business, but you know how it was with my little girl and Miss
O’Hara—and—”

“God bless Miss Grace, she’ll want to be running off after Miss Nettie
the minute she hears of her home-coming; but don’t let her, sir, don’t.
Miss Nettie has made her bed, and neither man nor woman can help her to
unmake it now, and don’t let Miss Grace try to meddle or to make. Don’t
put it in anybody’s power to say Dan Brady ever spoke a word to her, or
she to him.”

“Yes—yes, my good woman,” interposed Mr. Moffat testily, “I know all
that, I know everybody is in the same story about Mr. Daniel Brady, but
what I want to hear is, what has he done? Why do the well-educated and
highly-civilized population of Kingslough denounce this really decidedly
good-looking and rather well-mannered young man, as though he were a
sinner past redemption? What has the man done?”

“Is it about Brady, sir, ye’re asking that question,” joined in a male
voice at this juncture; and, looking round, Mr. Moffat beheld Amos
Scott, who had just returned home. “If so be it is, I’ll make free to
answer it myself? What has he done? what hasn’t he done, except what it
was his right to do? that is more to the point. They say he forged his
grandfather’s will; he broke his mother’s heart; he had a grudge against
a man, and swore that about him which sent him beyond the seas; he has
always the best of a bargain; ay, and there’s not a father in the county
whose heart hadn’t need to be sore if he saw one of his girls even say,
‘Good mornin’, to Daniel Brady.”

“That’s it, is it?” commented Mr. Moffat, briefly. He knew enough of the
people he lived among to understand the full significance of the latter
part of Mr. Scott’s sentence. Parents had as a rule sufficient faith in
their daughters to leave them to take care of themselves, and as a rule
their daughters justified the trust reposed in them. Nevertheless girls
were sometimes deceived, and the man who made it his occupation to lure
them to “misfortune,” so the tender phrase went, was not likely to
receive much toleration at the hands of the masses.

In a country like Ireland, where women have an exceptional liberty of
action, speech, and manner—a liberty unknown even in England—it is
natural that fathers, brothers, and husbands should resist the smallest
encroachment on such freedom; should cast a libertine out from familiar
intercourse with their families as though he were a leper.

If a man was bad let him consort with bad company, and refrain from
bringing social and moral destruction into decent houses.

Mr. Daniel was bad and had consorted with bad company, and no
respectable man cared to have much intimate acquaintance with him; and
to his other sins he had now added the offence of having run off with a
very lonely and pretty girl.

For that offence, however, Mr. Moffat felt no desire to quarrel with
him. On the whole, he was perhaps rather pleased than otherwise that
Nettie had chosen for her husband one whose position and character
rendered further acquaintance between her and his daughter impossible.

Nettie had been as great a pest to him as it was possible for a young
girl to prove to an elderly gentleman who spent much of his time in his
library. It would be absurd to say that he grudged the preserves, and
biscuits, and milk, the tea, and the bread and butter, wherewith Grace
was wont to entertain her friend, but he did dislike Nettie’s perpetual
presence. Golden curls, blue eyes, pink-and-white cheeks, did not make
up his ideal of feminine perfection, and had he admired and liked Nettie
ever so much, and he neither particularly liked nor admired her, it
would still have been a burden and a weariness to him to see her so
perpetually about the house.

To him she appeared as obnoxious and strange a visitor to have
constantly hovering round the premises as a strange cat prowling over
his flower-beds seems to a careful gardener.

He had never hoped to get completely rid of her, and yet, lo! in a
moment, Mr. Brady had procured his deliverance. On the whole, therefore,
Mr. Moffat was not disposed to judge Mr. Brady severely. Perhaps, on the
whole, he felt pleased to think his code of morals was objectionable;
possibly he did not fret because Mr. Brady had placed himself, and, as a
matter of course, his wife, out of the pale of decent society.

Miss Nettie had chosen, and for the future Bayview would be free of that
young lady at all events.

Such were the thoughts that passed through Mr. Moffat’s mind while Amos
Scott continued a rambling tirade against Mr. Brady and his sins of
omission and commission.

“You must have been away betimes this morning,” he remarked at length,
feeling it would be only civil before he went to refer to some matter
personal to his host.

“No, sir, I met th’ Airl a couple of miles on the other side of
Kingslough, and would you please to tell Miss Grace it is all right? he
has promised me the new lease.”

“You will have to pay for it, though, I suppose,” answered Mr. Moffat.

“Yes, sir; but thank God we have a pound or two to the fore, and we
would rather pinch a bit, if need was, than leave th’ ould place.”

“That is natural,” remarked Mr. Moffat; and then, his leader having been
comfortably disposed of by Jerry, he bade good-day to Mr. and Mrs.
Scott, and slowly retraced his way to the main road, muttering
maledictions against the “divisional” as he went.




                               CHAPTER X.
                       MR. DANIEL BRADY RECEIVES.


At one time, a pernicious habit obtained across the channel, a habit
which unfortunately appears to have latterly been imported into England,
of bestowing Christian names on country-seats. A son, fond of his
mother, bought a property possessed of some old Irish cognomen, and
forthwith the place became Kittymount, or Hannah Ville, or Jinny Brook,
or St. Margaret’s. Sometimes men also came in for their share of this
delicate attention, and Robertsford, and Williamsford, and Mount George,
or Knock Denis, perpetuated the name of some favoured member of the
race.

To this custom Maryville, the seat of Mr. Daniel Brady, owed its
nomenclature.

A certain heiress, in the days when the Bradys owned a considerable
amount of property, married a younger son of that family.

With her money a small estate, on which stood an unpretending cottage
residence, was purchased, a large house erected, a park fenced in,
gardens laid out, lodge and lodge-entrance provided, and then Mr. and
Mrs. Theophilus Brady took up their abode at Maryville.

Acre after acre the principal estate changed hands; one by one the older
branches of the family died out. My Lord Ardmorne owned all the broad
lands that had once belonged to the old Bradys, but Maryville still
remained to the descendants of Theophilus. The porter’s lodge was in
ruins, the gates hanging on one hinge stood wide, the park was a
wilderness, in the gardens weeds grew knee-deep, and the currant and
gooseberry trees were smothered with bind-weed and convolvulus.

As for the house, a few of the rooms were habitable, and these Mr.
Daniel Brady occupied. He lived there all alone, in company with an
elderly housekeeper, whose age and looks were sufficient guarantee for
her propriety; lived there, a man at war with society, a man who was at
feud with the world, a man who said he was determined some day to get
the better of society, and make those who had once snubbed him glad of
his company.

“It is all a question of money,” he said openly. “If they thought I was
rich, they would be glad enough to ask me to their houses, hang them.”

However great a cad a man may be, it is extremely unlikely he should
acknowledge the fact, even to himself. Indeed, he is always the only
person who remains entirely unconscious of the circumstance, and
therefore, although Mr. Brady was aware that for a considerable period
those of his race who had preceded him had found themselves neglected by
the upper ten of Kingslough and its neighbourhood, that for generations
his people had dropped out of the rank of gentry, and that his own
existence was virtually tabooed by persons who made the slightest
pretension to respectability; still he persisted this social ostracism
originated in circumstances entirely independent of character; that the
Bradys had gone down, not because they were, in their humbler way, as
bad, and wild, and reckless, and selfish, and self-willed as the
Glendares, but because his great-grandfather had married a shopkeeper’s
daughter, and his aunt had elected to go off with the particularly
handsome son of a small farmer, who was no higher in rank than a
labourer, while his mother, sick, doubtless of the Bradys and people
like them, chose for her second husband an Englishman who made her
comfortable, though he did drop his h’s, and whose connexion with
himself Mr. Daniel utterly repudiated.

After her marriage, the youth, then in his very early teens, was taken
by his maternal grandfather, who, spite of wars and rumours of wars,
spite of various threats expressive of an intention to kick his grandson
out of his house, spite of the contempt he felt for “that cur,” as he
habitually designated Daniel, left to that young man everything of which
he died possessed, and passing by his daughter, devised and bequeathed
his small corn-mill, his farm, held at an almost nominal rent for a long
term, his furniture, his horses, and his blessing to the youthful
reprobate.

No one ever believed Mr. Farrell signed that will knowing its contents.
Most people went so far as to believe he never signed it at all, and
amongst the latter number was included the heir’s mother. This idea and
a stormy interview with her first-born were the proximate causes of her
death. She had three children by her second marriage, and counted no
doubt on inheriting the greater portion of her father’s property, which
in turn she would be able to bequeath to them. From the day of Mr.
Farrell’s funeral, she never held up her head. Gradually she drooped,
and pined, and died of a broken heart, that disease which doctors try to
diagnose in vain.

Clear of all relations, possessed of a sum of money which, if really
small, seemed comparatively large to a man whose family had for so long
a time been drifting in a rotten boat along the river of incapable
expenditure to the river of ruin, Mr. Daniel Brady removed his
grandfather’s furniture to Maryville, which had long stood empty, gave
the man who had rented the land during his minority notice to quit, let
his corn-mill to a Scotch Irishman, whose soul was not above grinding
and meal, as was the soul of the heir, and began to lead that life for
which he had long panted—a life of cheap debauchery, of economical
villany, of consistent moneymaking.

Looking at the moss-covered drive, at the rusty gates, at the desolate
park, at the weed-covered gardens, a stranger might have said, rashly,
“The owner of this place must be a beggar.”

But Mr. Brady knew what he was about. A well-kept avenue, gates that
opened noiselessly, grass closely mown, gardens filled with fruit and
flowers, all these things would have cost much whilst they returned
nothing. They could return nothing to a man who wanted no help such as
the appearance of wealth occasionally enables people to obtain. What he
seemed would not, he was shrewd enough to understand, have the smallest
weight with a community who mentally counted every sixpence of his
inheritance the moment he laid claim to it. What he had would, he knew,
be regarded ultimately with respect. Perhaps the Irish may not like
moneyed men, but certainly they reverence them.

The almighty dollar will exercise its influence as well amongst persons
who swear against it as amongst those who swear by it. Mr. Daniel Brady
was no fool in worldly matters, and he had early recognized the truth of
that maxim which states, “Money is power.”

What would the end find him? A pretentious snob, or a grubbing miser?
The soil on which both grow is the same. The earth of which he was made
could be moulded as readily into one as the other. He had youth in his
favour, and youth is pliable. If a selfish, self-indulgent, insolent,
meanly extravagant braggart be preferable in the reader’s opinion to a
wretched old miser, there is a chance for Mr. Daniel Brady exhibiting
himself in the former character. At the time this story opens, however,
he was in training for a miser. He was that most wonderful thing in
creation, a young man niggardly even over his pleasures, calculating
even concerning the things his soul most longed for, who was never led
away by the voice of praise, or turned by that of censure, who had no
impulses of generosity, kindliness, remorse; a wonderful thing, but not
an uncommon. The world has a great many Daniel Bradys travelling through
it, though we may reck not of their existence.

If the characters of men could be revealed when they give up their
railway-tickets at the end of their morning journeys, it might surprise
a good many unsuspecting people to discover the number of unmitigated
scoundrels who have lent them the _Times_, or discoursed to them about
the state of the weather and the funds.

Mr. Brady was an unmitigated scoundrel. The higher orders tabooed his
existence; the middle regretted he had come to Maryville; the lower
hated him.

Now the love of the lower orders is often open to be viewed with
suspicion. Meretricious qualities may win it, adventitious circumstances
secure it. About their hate there is no such mistake. They hate a man
because of such and such qualities, which he possesses or does not
possess, and there is an end of the matter. Had Mr. Brady announced to
the beggars of Kingslough and its neighbourhood that on a given day he
would distribute fifty pounds in charity, they would have known he had
an ulterior object in view.

As it was, he never gave them a halfpenny, and that seemed a vice to the
majority in those remote days, ere the Marquis of Townshend had begun
his crusade against mendicants.

Then most people gave according as he or she could, gave to beggars who
asked, and gave to the decent and reticent poor who would not ask, but
whom they sought out and assisted.

Not a practicable thing to do, perhaps, at this time of the world, when
the workhouse doors stand hospitably open to receive those who like to
enter in and relinquish hope. Certainly not a practicable thing to do
now, when the labouring classes say they are the dictators; that they
will have pence, and sixpences, and sovereigns out of the pockets of
capitalists, whether capitalists lose or gain; but then—then—ah!
heaven,—what was not a gift thrown to a half-naked beggar? It meant a
day’s food. What good did not the present stealthily bestowed on a
family too proud too ask, too lonely to have friends, effect? It enabled
struggling people to turn many an ugly corner, to keep a home, poor
though it was, together, and avoid that last vague necessity of “going
out on the world,” a phrase which expresses in such few words a fearful
calamity.

But neither openly nor by stealth did Mr. Brady perform any of those
small acts of charity so universal and so needful at that time in his
country, and his sins of omission were as duly set down to the debit of
his account by an observant and exacting population as those of
commission.

The very beggars hated him. The idiots, who then wandered loose about
every town and village in Ireland, never with grotesque gesture and
jabbering tone entreated a halfpenny of him. Instinctively the blind,
knowing the sound of his horse’s hoofs slunk on to the side path, or
close up beside a wall or a hedge, on his approach; the ragged,
shoeless, homeless children never ran after that rider, praying him to
throw them a “farden;” the deaf and dumb, who, according to popular
belief, had “knowledge,” and whom it was not well to anger, looked at
him menacingly and raised clenched fists when he had passed; whilst
“Trust in the Lord,” so named because he was the religious begging
impostor of Kingslough, maddened the young man by piously folding his
hands when Mr. Brady crossed his path, and uttering ejaculatory and
audible prayers for all sinners, more especially “for this sinner, who
may be called the chief of them all.”

As for Katty Clancy, who had begged her bread, and worn the same scanty
petticoat, and covered her shoulders with the same washed out, ragged,
picturesque, patchwork counterpane for forty long years, “a dissolute
orphan,” as she styled herself, till the absurdity of the lament was
pointed out by Mrs. Hartley; as for Katty, Mr. Daniel Brady hated that
woman with a completeness of detestation to which no words could do
justice.

Others of her profession refrained from asking him for alms, but she
took a delight in doing so, and in flinging some bitter taunt or jibe
back in his face when he refused, generally with an oath, to give her
one copper.

Their conversations were usually carried on somewhat as follows:—

“Good mornin’, Mr. Brady, isn’t that the beautiful day, God bliss it?
Yer astir airly. An’ where is it yer honour’s goin’ to in sich a hurry?”

“To ——,” Mr. Brady replied, mentioning what Lord Stowell, in one of his
judgments, styled a “favourite place of consignment.”

“Ach, well yer honour, it’s a long journey, and I wish ye safe there,”
said Katty, with persistent courtesy, and then Mr. Brady, muttering an
oath, walked off, while Katty solemnly shook her head, and said _sotto
voce_, “There’s many a true word spoken in jest, and it’s my belief, Dan
Brady, ye are thravellin’ that road as fast as time will let ye.”

Before Nettie O’Hara, however, Mr. Brady had contrived to appear the
incarnation of every manly virtue. He told the girl how much he loved
her, spoke of his own lonely life at Maryville, of his solitary home, of
the unjust stories his enemies had circulated to his prejudice, of the
manner in which he was excluded from society for no reason in the world
except that some of his family had made mésalliances, and that he
himself was poor.

“But I mean to be rich one of these days, Nettie,” he finished, “if you
will only help me—if you will only try to grow fond of me.”

Nettie, unhappily, had no occasion to try to grow fond of him. She loved
his handsome face, and the notion of sharing his lonely home had no
terrors for her.

She knew and he knew, it would be idle to ask her friends’ consent.
Indeed, he did not want it. He wanted her and he had got her. Flight was
sudden at the last, but Nettie had long understood she meant to go off
with him some day.

And that day, and many, many other days had come and gone, and Nettie
was home at Maryville, walking about the weed-covered garden, when her
relatives the Rileys, father and son, paid their first visit to the
house.

Amongst the other rarities and attractions Maryville had once boasted
were a fish-pond and a sundial. The first was green with slime and
choked with the leaves of water-plants, whilst round the rotting pillar
of the dial climbed briony and convolvulus.

Beside the pond, with one hand resting on the slate time-teller, Nettie
stood motionless. She did not hear the footsteps of her relatives as
they fell silently on moss-covered walks and grass-grown paths. She was
dressed in white, she had a blue ribbon round her waist, and another of
the same colour kept back her hair—her long, bright, beautiful hair.
Never afterwards did General Riley forget that picture, never could he
quite efface from his memory the sight of that girl, almost a child,
standing amongst that wilderness of rank vegetation, looking across the
pond at a belt of dark firs which separated this portion of the gardens
from the open park beyond.

“Nettie,” John said softly; then with a start she turned and saw them, a
colour rising in her face, and smiles dimpling her cheeks the while.

“Oh, General! Oh, John! this is kind of you,” she said eagerly; “I did
not think—that is, I did not hope—” and then she stopped and looked at
them both, and General Riley looked at his son, and John at his father,
perplexed as to what they were to do next.

“Are you quite well, Nettie?” asked the young man, after a moment’s
pause, looking a little doubtfully in her face, which, now the flush
caused by their sudden appearance had died away, looked paler and
thinner than ever he remembered to have seen it.

“Yes, very well, thank you,” with an unnecessary emphasis on the very.
“I am a little tired; we only came home the evening before last, and you
know I am not much accustomed to travelling.”

“Did you like Scotland?”

“Greatly, but I think I like Ireland best.” There was a wistful anxious
look in the blue eyes that neither man could help noticing, and Nettie
perceiving that they did so, went on to ask, quickly, “How is Grace?”

“Well, I believe,” John answered.

“You believe?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I have not seen Grace for some weeks. The fact
is, she has refused me, and I am going away. You have not been in the
neighbourhood, or you would have heard all about that long ago.”

Nettie did not reply, she stood looking at the fir-trees with great
serious eyes. She seemed prettier then than John had ever before thought
her—poor little girl.

“We were told we should find Mr. Brady here,” broke in General Riley at
this juncture. “I suppose the servant made some mistake.”

“_Then you did not come to see me!_” she exclaimed, taking her eyes from
the firs and fastening them on their faces.

“Of course we came to see you,” said John falsely, but kindly. He could
not endure the dumb anguish of her expression.

“You did not,” she said vehemently. “Don’t tell untruths to me, John
Riley; you have come to talk to my husband about me, and to meddle in my
concerns, but you did not come to see me as relations should come to see
one another. You think I have disgraced myself by marrying out of your
rank—yours, what is it?—and you do not want to visit me yourselves or to
let your sisters do so. When my husband has a large property like yours,
and money to keep it up, which he will have, and you never will, then I
shall be able to pick and choose my friends, but till then I must be
content to live without any.”

Then, with a catching sob, she stopped, her eyes flashing, her cheeks
aflame, while John Riley, preventing his father answering, and passing
over the sting her words held, said,—

“No one will be better pleased than we to hear you and your husband are
happy and prosperous, Nettie. It would be useless to deny that we did,
and do, regret the step you have taken, but that step has been taken,
and it behoves us, as your nearest male friends, to see that its
consequences prove as little disastrous to you as may be.”

“You are very kind,” said Nettie sarcastically.

“Our intentions are so, at all events,” answered John, with a temper and
a humility which touched even Nettie.

“I believe,” she said, “you are the best person in the world, and I am
sure your intentions are always good and kind, but you have made a
mistake this time. It is not well to meddle between man and wife.”

“When were you made man and wife?” asked the General, charging like an
old soldier direct to the point he wanted to reach.

“What business is that of yours, General Riley?” she retorted. “It was
not you Mr. Brady married.”

“Be reasonable, Nettie,” interposed John. “On my word we do not want to
make or to meddle; we only desire to protect. If we fail in our duty
now, the day may come when you will say to us, ‘I was but a girl,
ignorant of the world, and you left me to bear the consequences of my
rashness; you never advised, you never helped me.’ All we want to know
is that you have been so securely married no doubt can be thrown upon
the matter, and afterwards——” he stopped.

“What about afterwards?” she asked.

“We must leave afterwards to take care of itself, having done all it
seemed possible in the present.”

“Do you think I am not married, then?” she asked; “that I would come
back to Kingslough if—if——”

“There is no necessity for you to get into a passion with us, Nettie,”
interrupted her cousin. “We think no evil of you, but you are only a
young and inexperienced girl, and to put the argument in a nutshell, we
have taken this matter up, and mean to have it put in proper form.”

“You had better see my husband, then,” she exclaimed. “I do not suppose
he will give you much of a welcome, but if you choose to insult a man in
his own house, you have only yourselves to thank if you meet with scant
courtesy,” and with her head up in the air, and her blue ribbons
floating, and her golden curls glinting in the sunlight, Nettie led them
out of the garden, and by a side door, into a small sitting-apartment,
which had, in the days when Maryville was in its glory, been an inner
drawing-room or boudoir—my lady’s closet, perhaps, where she conducted
her correspondence, or worked at her embroidery.

A second door led to the drawing-room, which was bare of all furniture,
unless a huge chandelier, a cracked girandole, and a rickety sofa could
be so considered; but the door was closed, and the Rileys could not see
the nakedness of the land.

Instead, they beheld an apartment furnished with a few chairs and a
couple of tables, the floor covered with a somewhat faded Kidderminster
carpet; but, taking one thing with another, the place did not look
poverty stricken or uncomfortable.

“It is not much of a home I am able to welcome you to,” said Nettie,
turning defiantly upon her relations, “but at least it is clear of
debt.”

“Nettie,” replied John Riley, “you cannot hurt us, so say what you
please; at the same time I would ask if you think it worth while to try
and insult those who have no object in being here beyond that I have
stated.”

“Some day, child,” added the General, “you may understand it is better
to be honestly indebted than dishonestly clear of debt.”

“I never could understand paradoxes,” said Nettie, and she sat down
beside the window, her white hands linked together in her lap, and her
pretty head averted from her visitors till Mr. Brady, for whom she had
sent, entered.

Ere long Mr. Brady appeared. He came in with a slight swagger, looking a
little nervous, but handsome and defiant as ever.

“This is a pleasure I did not hope for so soon,” he began. “Glad to see
you, General. How do you do, Squire?” and he extended his hand to the
visitors, but General Riley crossed his behind his back, and John thrust
his in his pockets.

It was not a pleasant position for any one of the four, most unpleasant
of all, perhaps, for Nettie, and yet she alone was equal to the
occasion.

“Do you mean, John Riley,” she said, turning upon him like a fury, “that
you refuse, having voluntarily come into this house, to shake hands with
its master, my husband?”

“No man will be more ready than I, Nettie, to give my hand to Mr. Brady
when he has proved himself worthy to take it,” John answered steadily.

“I understand you,” answered Mr. Brady, “this is a business visit?”

“Strictly so,” was the reply.

“You had better leave us to discuss business, Annette,” said Mr. Brady
slowly. “Pray be seated, gentlemen;” then after the sound of Nettie’s
footsteps had died away he went on, “Now what do you want? what is it?”

“We want to know if you are married to my cousin?” said John.

“You had better have put that question to her.”

“We have.”

“And what answer did she give you?”

“She evidently considers she is legally your wife.”

“Then, what more do you want?”

“Proof that her idea is correct.”

“Supposing I refuse to give it?”

“We will make you give it, sir,” interposed the General.

“Two to one is scarcely fair,” remarked Mr. Brady, “still curiosity
makes me inquire how you propose to make me open my mouth if I choose to
keep it shut?”

“I do not know—” the General was beginning, when his son interrupted him
with—

“One moment, father. I hope you misunderstood Mr. Brady’s reply. This is
not a matter, I should think, about which he would wish to keep us in
the dark. It is absolutely essential,” he went on, speaking to Mr.
Brady, “that we should understand my cousin’s position.”

“Why?”

“Because if she be not your wife already, you must immediately make her
so.”

“Again I ask, why?”

“Do you suppose we should allow her to remain with you an hour longer
excepting as your wife?”

“I really do not see how you are to help yourselves.”

“Mr. Brady,” began John, “I cannot believe you are speaking seriously. I
think you must be trying to annoy us by persisting in what is at best
but a very sorry sort of jest. We have not come here to reproach you for
the scandal you have caused a respectable family, for the advantage you
have taken of an ignorant and unprotected girl. We merely desire to know
if you have made her the only reparation in your power. Is she legally
your wife?”

“That is a question I decline to answer.”

“Is she not your wife?”

“That, likewise, is a question I decline to answer.”

“You villain!” exclaimed the General, “we will find means to make you
answer,” and he was advancing with raised hand and threatening gesture
towards Mr. Brady, when his son stepped between them.

“We shall not do any good by using violence, father,” he said, putting a
curb on his own temper, and clenching his fingers, which were itching to
grasp his riding-whip, and lay it about the shoulders of the
self-possessed scoundrel who stood before him, smiling contemptuously.

“There is only one course left open for us to pursue now; we must take
Nettie away, and get legal advice as to what we ought to do next.”

“I apprehend your legal adviser will say that even loving relatives like
you cannot separate husband and wife,” replied Mr. Brady.

“It will be for you then to prove that you are her husband.”

“And what if Annette refuses to go?”

“She will not remain here when I tell her how she has been deceived,”
was the answer, and John Riley took up his hat and whip, and was
following his father to the door, when Mr. Brady stopped them.

“A moment,” he said; “do not be in such a hurry, gentlemen. If you,
General, will kindly restrain your temper, and you, Mr. Riley, will
kindly hold your tongue, perhaps some arrangement may be come to. I have
declined,” he went on, after a pause, “to tell you whether the young
lady in whose affairs you have interfered so officiously is my wife or
not, for the extremely simple reason that I am not at all clear on the
point myself. I think she is my wife if I like to claim her; I think she
is not my wife if I choose to repudiate her. It is an awkward position
for her, certainly, and I do not imagine it can be a pleasant one for
her relatives.”

“Well, sir?” said General Riley, to whom this speech was specially
addressed.

“To make the thing secure for her we certainly ought to go through some
sort of ceremony, otherwise I do not see how she is either to prove that
she is married or unmarried. It is an awkward affair for me, too. I am a
poor man. I had enough burdens before, without hampering myself with a
wife. I cannot say I have much taste for domestic felicity; and after
the specimen of good breeding you have given me to-day, I can imagine
many things more desirable than a connexion with the Riley family.”

“In heaven’s name what are you driving at?” asked the General. “We do
not want a dissertation on your tastes and prejudices, we want to know,
in a word, whether you will marry Nettie, or whether you will leave us
to seek our remedy elsewhere.”

“Meaning at law?”

“Meaning at law, and also that I will give you a thrashing you shall
remember to your dying day,” said John Riley.

“I requested you to hold your tongue, did I not?” retorted Mr. Brady
coolly. “As I was saying,” he continued, addressing the General, “the
holy state of matrimony is not one into which I have the least desire to
enter, more especially with such a remarkably useless young lady as your
relative; still I am willing to meet your views. I am not desirous of
raising any scandal, and if you like to make it worth my while I will
take her for better for worse.”

“Make it worth your while?” repeated the General.

“Yes, you do not expect me to do something for nothing, do you? I shall
have to board and clothe a young woman for the remainder of her days,
and resign my liberty in addition. I do not want, however, to drive a
hard bargain, or take advantage of your difficulty. The girl has, I
believe, a hundred pounds or so of her own. Make it up five hundred, and
I will send for the minister here, or marry her in church, whichever you
like.”

“I’ll see you——”

To what lot or in what place General Riley intended to say he would see
the speaker may be imagined, but can never now be exactly known, for
while he was uttering these words the door between the outer and the
inner drawing-room opened, and Nettie herself appeared.

“Take me away, John,” she said, “take me anywhere out of this house,
away from him.”

“You have been listening,” observed Mr. Brady, disconcerted for the
first time.

“Yes, it was my affair and I had a right to hear. Take me away, John,
from that bad, false man. Do you understand what I say? Oh! and I was so
fond of him, and I believed him. I did,” and she burst into a fit of
hysterical weeping, and her face, her shamed, grief-stained face,
covered with her hands, hurried from the room.

“Go after her, John,” said the General, “and keep her in the garden till
I have settled this matter one way or other.”

“And hark ye, mister,” called out Mr. Brady, “she does not leave this
place without my consent; ay, and, for all her crying, she does not want
to leave it.”

Which last clause was hard to believe in the face of Nettie’s passionate
entreaties for John to take her away, away at once.

“And to think of how I trusted him,” she moaned. “If the whole world had
spoken ill of him it could not have changed me. I thought I knew him
better than anybody, and this is the end of it all, this is the end.”

And so she moaned on for some fifteen minutes, whilst John stood leaning
against a tree.

In truth he did not know what to say. His heart was full of compassion
for her, but he could not think of a word of comfort good to speak. She
had done so evil a thing for herself that he did not see how any one
could make a better of it, and so, whilst she, seated amongst the long
rank grass, made her bitter lamentations, sobbed her tears, and bewailed
her lot, John Riley did, perhaps, the kindest and wisest thing possible
under the circumstances, he held his peace, he let her alone.




                              CHAPTER XI.
                             NETTIE AT BAY.


At last General Riley appeared.

“It is all right, I am thankful to say,” he announced to his son, in a
low tone. “He will marry her.”

“But I will not marry him!” exclaimed the person most interested in the
matter. “I would rather work, beg, starve, die, than be thrust in this
way on any man.”

“You ought to have thought of all this before you went away with him,”
said the General bluntly. “We have made the best of a very bad business
for you, and I must beg of you not to undo our work by any temper, or
airs, or romantic nonsense. There is nothing left for you but to marry
him, and a good thing it is that he is willing to take you for his
wife.”

Swiftly Nettie rose from the ground and stood slight and erect before
him. With one hand she swept back her hair, with the other she wiped the
tears from her cheeks. Pretty she did not look, with her swollen eyelids
and her face disfigured by grief and weeping; but there was something in
the helplessness of her defiance, in the hopelessness of her struggle,
in the prospective misery of her fate, in the utter ruin she had wrought
for herself, so young, that made both men feel heart-sick at thought of
their own inability to put this terrible wrong right.

“Are you going to turn against me?” she said, speaking to John. “Are you
going to say there is nothing left for me to do but marry a man who does
not want me, whose wife I thought I was, or you would never have seen me
back here? Will you not help me, John? will you not take me away?”

“God knows, Nettie, I would help you if I only knew how. I would take
you away if I knew where to take you, if I thought it would not make a
worse scandal than there has been, and put everything more wrong than it
is already.”

“I would go anywhere you told me,” she went on pitifully. “I would go
where nobody knew me, and I would be a good girl and work hard.”

“You could not go anywhere that people would not know all about it after
a little time,” answered her cousin. “There is only one thing for a girl
who has made a mistake like yours, dear, to do, and that is, marry. What
my father says is very true, you may be glad enough that Mr. Brady is
willing to marry you.”

“Willing to marry me?” Nettie repeated drearily. “_Willing_ to marry
_me_? There go, both of you,” she added, turning upon them in a very
access of passion. “I never want to see you again. I never wish to hear
the voice of one belonging to me. If you had been in trouble, such
trouble, I would have helped you; but there is nobody who cares for my
trouble, nobody, no, not one.”

“Crying again, Annette,” exclaimed Mr. Brady, who, having only waited
behind General Riley in order to refresh himself with a glass of whisky
after their stormy interview, at this point joined the trio. “What is
the matter now?” and he put his hand on her shoulder and would have
drawn her towards him, but she shrank away, and looking at him through
her tears, with hot angry eyes, began,—

“They say _you_ are willing to marry _me_, and expect me to be thankful.
They never asked me if _I_ was willing to marry _you_.”

“There is no compulsion,” said Mr. Brady coolly; “you need not if you do
not like.”

“Like? and you say that to me who have given up everything for you?”

“I am ready to marry you within the hour,” said Mr. Brady, with a shrug.
“Can I say fairer than that, gentlemen? If Miss Annette like teaching
better than marrying, far be it from me to balk her taste; if she like
me better than teaching, I am ready to stand to what I have said, and
make her Mrs. Brady.”

“And you do not care,” said Nettie, speaking with dry, parched lips and
cheeks fever-flushed, “you do not care, and you call yourselves men?”

“We do care, Nettie,” answered John Riley, “and it is because we are men
that we have tried to do all that lay in our power for you. It seems
hard to you, and it is hard. You are angry with Mr. Brady and with us,
but by-and-by you will thank us for advising you to marry him.”

“I never was an advocate for coaxing dogs to eat mutton,” remarked Mr.
Brady, with a sneer. “I have offered to marry this independent young
lady, and as she does not like to have me, why she had better leave me,
that is if she has a clear idea as to where she means to go afterwards.”

“I will go to Bayview, to Grace Moffat.”

“I would, and let us know how Mr. Moffat receives you,” he laughed.

“My aunt, my poor old aunt that I deceived, she would not turn me from
her door,” sobbed Nettie.

“Perhaps not, you might see.”

“Then, if all else fail,” she flashed out, “I will trust to Mrs.
Hartley’s charity. I will ask her to take me in and find me work. I am
neither kith nor kin to her, and she would think it no disgrace to
shelter a girl who had been deceived like me. She would get me a
situation in some place, and I will put the sea between myself and all
of you, and none of you will ever hear of me again.”

Mr. Brady looked at the General and his son. He beheld consternation
written on their faces.

At last Nettie was mistress of the position. She had mentioned the name
of the only friend she knew who would be willing and able to save her,
and the idea of the scandal which might ensue if she carried out her
threat of appealing to Mrs. Hartley was as little agreeable to her
relations as to the man who had flung a shadow over her life.

The girl was desperate, her pride had been humbled, her vanity hurt, her
temper aroused, her love wounded, slighted. She meant to leave him, she
did _not_ want to be forced on any man. Mr. Brady suddenly awoke to a
consciousness of both facts, and to a knowledge, also, that it would not
suit him to lose her.

Never again would he, could he, hold such another card in his hands as
Nettie O’Hara. If he played so as to let her and her wrongs slip away
from his control, if once he permitted her to make a party against him,
and backed by Mrs. Hartley he knew she could, he vaguely comprehended he
would have raised a devil whom he might find it difficult to lay.

Besides, he was not yet tired of Nettie; her thoughts had not been his
thoughts, her sole companionship had proved slightly monotonous; she had
put, unwitting, a sort of restraint upon him; but still, if Daniel Brady
had ever an affection for a woman into which a higher kind of love
entered, he felt it for Nettie O’Hara.

Had Nettie only been possessed of the world’s wisdom in those days when
surreptitiously she met him on the sea-shore, amongst the ruins of
Ballyknock Abbey, and in the glens where, in her lonely childhood, she
gathered wild strawberries, and made for herself swords and parasols and
butterfly cages of rushes; had she, I say, then understood the ways of
the world and the minds of men, she would never have gone off with
Daniel Brady, trusting to his love to keep her safe, trusting to his
gratitude to repay her for her faith.

After all, affairs of the heart are best to be put on a “commercial
basis.”

When one man is, to use a vulgar expression, “chiselled” by another, the
first dose of comfort administered by his friends is, “But why had you
no agreement?”

If the unhappy wretch suggests that he thought he had to do with a man
of honour, or an honest man, or a sincere Christian, he is at once
informed, “It is well in money-matters to treat every man as if he were
a rogue.”

And in love? you ask. Well, in love it may be as well to advise young
persons about to form engagements for life to look upon all charming
suitors as possible villains. It is not an amiable trait in the
character of man or woman that which leads him (or her) to make himself
(or herself) beyond all things safe, but it is necessary, nevertheless.

Suppose a man loses his money, or a woman her character, who shall
recoup him, or her?

The colonies or the workhouse for the one; the streets or that
exhilarating place of abode, a Refuge, for the other.

And yet, perhaps, neither might be a greater fool nor a greater sinner
than Amos Scott on the one hand, or Annette, commonly called Nettie
O’Hara, on the other.

Each had trusted to a promise. It is a foolish way some people have, as
though there were something in the nature of a promise that made it as
secure as a deed. Each found reason to repent that trust. Nettie’s
repentance had begun already. Dimly she understood there had been a time
when her terms would have ruled the day, when her beauty and her birth
might have asked what they liked from this far-seeing lover, and
received a charmed yea for answer.

But that time was gone and past. She could never dictate (legitimately)
terms to any man again. She had lost caste, friends, and what was,
perhaps, worse than either, her “future.” For even if she appealed to
Mrs. Hartley and tried by that lady’s help to begin her life over again,
she never could wipe out the blot on her former life; not all the waters
of Lethe could wash out from her past that morning’s work, when,
trusting to one untrustworthy, she went off to seek her ruin.

All this the girl dimly comprehended, grasped in a feeble passionate
despair. No longer meek and demure, no longer smiling and
self-contained, she stood there at bay, and for the moment, as has been
said, she was mistress of the position.

True she could help herself little, but she could injure Mr. Brady much,
and inflict, besides, considerable annoyance on her relatives. The
bright hair might remain bright as ever, the blue eyes might look soft
and sweet as before, but something had been aroused in Nettie O’Hara
that might never slumber again.

“I want to leave Kingslough,” she went on, pursuing her advantage, “and
I will leave it. I wish never to see one of you more, and I never will
if I can help it.”

“But, Nettie, dear, only consider,” began her cousin, while the General
muttered, “Never heard such nonsense in all my life,” but Mr. Brady,
cutting across both their sentences, said,—

“Will you kindly walk to the other end of the garden? I should like to
say a word or two to Mrs. Brady alone.”

She looked up at him quickly, and answered, as they complied, “I am not
Mrs. Brady, and never will be.”

“You are,” he persisted, “and you can’t help yourself. You are my wife
if I choose to claim you, and I do. You are mine, and I mean to keep
you. Little as you may think it, I am too fond of you to let you go.”

“Fond!” she repeated contemptuously.

“Yes,” he said, “fond. If I hadn’t been, do you think I would have made
the fool of myself I have? What did I want with a wife? Why should I
have burdened myself with you if it was not for fondness’ sake? If you
had not listened, you would have known nothing of this. Listeners, you
know, never hear any good of themselves. You are married to me safe
enough, but I wanted to bring down the confounded pride of your people a
peg or two, and I wanted, also, to get some money out of them for you
and myself if I could manage it. That is the whole truth of the
business, so you need not fret any more.”

“I do not believe a word of it,” was Nettie’s candid reply, “but I do
not intend to fret, and I will go to Mrs. Hartley, and neither you nor
all the Rileys in creation shall hinder me.”

“I thought you loved me,” he said, with an impatience he tried to
control, but could not.

“Thought I loved you?” she echoed, “thought! I never loved anything
before except a kitten, and I never mean to love anything again.”

“And yet you want to go and make a talk and a scandal over the place,
and curse my life and your own.”

“Make a talk and a scandal? No. I only want to leave a man who could
treat a girl as you have treated me. Did not I ask you if we were safely
and truly married? and did you not swear to me on the Bible that not all
the bishops in England could make us more man and wife than we were?”

“Nor could they,” commented Mr. Brady.

“And,” went on Nettie, “when I asked you to give me some writing that I
could show to Grace and my aunt, and John, if he wanted to see it, you
told me you would satisfy them all; that no writing would be of so much
use as your simple acknowledgment that I was your wife; and this is how
you acknowledge me. Well, I deserved it, I suppose, but I did not
deserve it from you.”

She ought not to have “stood upon the order of going,” but have gone, if
she meant to leave him. Her words were bitter, and her anger keen, but
neither was bitter nor keen enough to win the day when once she began to
argue with a man to whom her heart still clung, whom she loved as she
had “never loved anything before.”

“You did not deserve it,” he answered, more quietly, for he saw she was
wavering in her determination, and knew that now compliance was a mere
question of time, “and I am sorry that for the sake of gratifying myself
and annoying your upstart relations I placed you even for a moment in a
false position. A man cannot say more than that he is sorry, can he?
Give me your hand, and say you forgive and forget.”

But she twitched her fingers out of his, and sobbed, “It was cruel, it
was cruel.”

“It was,” he agreed, “but remember, I never intended you to know
anything about the matter. You would not have heard had you not
listened. Put yourself in my place. Had a couple of women treated you as
those two men treated me, should you not have tried to serve them out if
you could?”

“And did not I stand up for you?” she exclaimed. “Oh! I would have been
faithful to you till death, but you—”

“Annette, as true as death you are my wife. You are so much my wife,
that if you went away from me now you could not marry any one else, and
neither could I.”

“It does not matter,” she said. “I do not want to marry any one else, I
only want to go away.”

“Well, then, go,” he exclaimed. “I will never beg and pray a woman to
stay with me against her will. You are married to me safe enough, but I
am ready, for all that, to satisfy you and your people by going through
the ceremony again if you like. If you do not like, go to your friend
Mrs. Hartley, and see what she will do for you. Only remember one thing,
if you elect to leave me now, never ask me to take you back again. I
would not do it if you came covered with diamonds.”

She was but a young thing, for all her defiance; for all her anger she
was but as a reed in his hands, and so, when he gave her free leave to
go, bade her spread her wings and return to that waste of waters from
which she had flown to him, as to an ark of refuge, Nettie covered her
face and wept aloud.

“There is nothing to cry about,” he remarked. “It is a matter for your
own choice. Come now, be reasonable. What more could I do than I have
done? What more could I offer than I have offered?”

Still no answer.

“Annette, do not keep on fretting,” he entreated; “try to put out of
your mind every thing you heard me say to-day. I did not mean a word of
it; I did not, upon my honour. I was angry and offended, and spoke
without thought, but you should not bear malice. You will forgive and
forget, won’t you?”

“I will for—give,” she said, after a pause, with a sob between each
word.

“And forget,” he added, but Nettie shook her head doubtfully.

“I am not good at forgetting,” she answered. Poor Mrs. Hartley, could
she only have heard that reply, it would have made her hair stand on
end!

“I’ll chance that,” said Mr. Brady generously, and he walked off to the
spot where the General and his son stood, surveying a wilderness wilder
than any their own neglected estate could show.

“We have made up that little difference,” he said, with a smile and an
easy familiarity which caused John Riley to wince, “and now I am ready
to go through the rest of the business when and where you please. It is
quite unnecessary, I may remark. At any rate we had better agree that it
is, but that to satisfy your scruples I have agreed to ceremony number
two. We may as well be married by the minister here, or at Woodbrook,
which you please. It will make less talk than going to church, and you
can have as many witnesses as you like. In for a penny in for a pound.
Of course Mrs. Brady remains here. If she is to remain in my house I do
not intend her to leave it except in my company. Scandal about your
relation could not hurt me, but scandal about my wife I won’t have;
besides, you have no place to take her to;” and Mr. Daniel Brady laughed
triumphantly.

“Come, gentlemen,” he went on, “it is of no use making the worst of a
bad business. You have checkmated me, I confess; and yet, still, I bear
no malice. Bad blood is an evil thing, especially amongst relations. Can
I offer you any refreshment—no? Then, Mr. Riley, I depend on your seeing
the minister and arranging everything to your own satisfaction. You will
shake hands with me now, I suppose,” and he stretched out his hand; but
neither the General nor his son availed himself of the opportunity
afforded.

A dark look crossed Mr. Brady’s face, as he said, in a tone of defiant
mockery,—

“At least, you can never say it was not offered to you twice in one
day.”

“I believe you to be a consummate blackguard,” remarked John Riley
bluntly; “but still, for Nettie’s sake, I am willing to shake hands and
let bygones be bygones.”

“And you, General?” asked Mr. Brady. Without a word the General
stretched out his hand. “You won’t repent it,” remarked Mr. Brady
consolingly.

“I shall be back as soon as I can bring a minister,” said John. Those
were the days when marriage in Ireland was almost as easy as in
Scotland.

“The sooner the better,” observed Mr. Brady; and he stood watching the
pair as they trotted slowly down the moss-covered avenue, muttering to
himself, “Now they are reckoning me up;” but he was mistaken, for the
iron had entered too deeply into their souls to be lightly spoken of.

One thing, however, was significant. A mile from Maryville a stream,
bright and sparkling, crossed the road.

“Hold my horse for a minute, John,” said the General; and dismounting,
he put the hand Daniel Brady had grasped into the rivulet, and let the
water flow over it.

“That is a good example, father,” he remarked laughing; “and I think I
will follow it;” then, as he remounted, he said, in a changed tone, “God
help Nettie,” to which the General responded, “Amen.”

Next day, one of the Woodbrook servants having driven into town to
execute various commissions, called on his way back at “The Library,”
for a book for Miss Lucy, who was the only reading sister of the Riley
family.

After replying to such anxious inquiries concerning the health of Mrs.
Riley and the General, and the young ladies, and Mr. John, and an
antiquated gardener, and still more antiquated nurse, who had lived with
the family for a few generations, nominally as servants, but in reality
as masters, Patrick, who all the time had been panting to open his
budget, began,—

“Ye’ll likely have heard the news, ladies?”

“That Miss Nettie, I mean Mrs. Brady, has come home, Patrick. Oh, yes!
we knew that long ago,” said Miss Healey, with dignity.

“It was not that same I meant, Miss; they have been married again.”

“Married again!” exclaimed the two sisters who could hear, in chorus;
“bless us, wasn’t one marriage enough?”

“The Gineral would have it, miss—ma’am: says he to Brady, says he, ‘I
don’t like hole-and-corner weddings,’ says he, ‘and as you are an
Irishman and have chosen an Irish wife, why, to make all sure, you had
better marry her again, fair and above-board;’ and so he did.”

“When were they married? who married them? who was present?” the sisters
were literally breathless with excitement, and shrieked out their
questions, unheeding Miss Kate, whose inquiries of “What is he saying?”
“What is the matter?” “Who is dead?” “Is it the General? Dear, what can
have happened?” formed a running accompaniment to the trio which was
being performed by Mrs. Larkins, Miss Healey, and Patrick.

“’Deed an’ they were just married at Maryville, and Mr. McKenna married
them; and Mr. John, and me, and Mr. McKenna’s clerk, were the
witnesses.”

“And were none of your ladies there?” inquired Mrs. Larkins.

“I do not think—asking your pardon, ma’am, for being so free—that it
would be a very seemly thing for any of our ladies to be seen going to
Maryville.”

From which remark it will be understood that Nettie’s relations did not
intend to visit her, and that popular opinion already applauded their
resolution.

And so Nettie’s return and marriage made a nine days’ talk, and caused a
nine days’ wonder, at the expiration of which time another event
occurred, which made a greater talk still.


                             END OF VOL. I.

                       PRINTED BY TAYLOR AND CO.,
               LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
      spelling.
 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.