Lord Kilgobbin

CHAPTER LIII

We have all of us felt how depressing is the sensation felt in a family circle in the first meeting after the departure of their guests. The friends who have been staying some time in your house not only bring to the common stock their share of pleasant converse and companionship, but, in the quality of strangers, they exact a certain amount of effort for their amusement, which is better for him who gives than for the recipient, and they impose that small reserve which excludes the purely personal inconveniences and contrarieties, which unhappily, in strictly family intercourse, have no small space allotted them for discussion.

It is but right to say that they who benefit most by, and most gratefully acknowledge, this boon of the visitors, are the young. The elders, sometimes more disposed to indolence than effort, sometimes irritable at the check essentially put upon many little egotisms of daily use, and oftener than either, perhaps, glad to get back to the old groove of home discussion, unrestrained by the presence of strangers; the elders are now and then given to express a most ungracious gratitude for being once again to themselves, and free to be as confidential and outspoken and disagreeable as their hearts desire.

The dinner at Kilgobbin Castle, on the day I speak of, consisted solely of the Kearney family, and except in the person of the old man himself, no trace of pleasantry could be detected. Kate had her own share of anxieties. A number of notices had been served by refractory tenants for demands they were about to prefer for improvements, under the new land act. The passion for litigation, so dear to the Irish peasant’s heart – that sense of having something to be quibbled for, so exciting to the imaginative nature of the Celt, had taken possession of all the tenants on the estate, and even the well-to-do and the satisfied were now bestirring themselves to think if they had not some grievance to be turned into profit, and some possible hardship to be discounted into an abatement.

Dick Kearney, entirely preoccupied by the thought of his intended journey, already began to feel that the things of home touched him no longer. A few months more and he should be far away from Ireland and her interests, and why should he harass himself about the contests of party or the balance of factions, which never again could have any bearing on his future life. His whole thought was what arrangement he could make with his father by which, for a little present assistance, he might surrender all his right on the entail and give up Kilgobbin for ever.

As for Nina, her complexities were too many and too much interwoven for our investigation; and there were thoughts of all the various persons she had met in Ireland, mingled with scenes of the past, and, more strangely still, the people placed in situations and connections which by no likelihood should they ever have occupied. The thought that the little comedy of everyday life, which she relished immensely, was now to cease for lack of actors, made her serious – almost sad – and she seldom spoke during the meal.

At Lord Kilgobbin’s request, that they would not leave him to take his wine alone, they drew their chairs round the dining-room fire; but, except the bright glow of the ruddy turf, and the pleasant look of the old man himself, there was little that smacked of the agreeable fireside.

‘What has come over you girls this evening?’ said the old man. ‘Are you in love, or has the man that ought to be in love with either of you discovered it was only a mistake he was making?’

‘Ask Nina, sir,’ said Kate gravely.

‘Perhaps you are right, uncle,’ said Nina dreamily.

‘In which of my guesses – the first or the last?’

‘Don’t puzzle me, sir, for I have no head for a subtle distinction. I only meant to say it is not so easy to be in love without mistakes. You mistake realities and traits for something not a bit like them, and you mistake yourself by imagining that you mind them.’

‘I don’t think I understand you,’ said the old man.

‘Very likely not, sir. I do not know if I had a meaning that I could explain.’

‘Nina wants to tell you, my lord, that the right man has not come forward yet, and she does not know whether she’ll keep the place open in her heart for him any longer,’ said Dick, with a half-malicious glance.

‘That terrible Cousin Dick! nothing escapes him,’ said Nina, with a faint smile.

‘Is there any more in the newspapers about that scandal of the Government?’ cried the old man, turning to Kate.

‘Is there not going to be some inquiry as to whether his Excellency wrote to the Fenians?’

‘There are a few words here, papa,’ cried Kate, opening the paper. ‘“In reply to the question of Sir Barnes Malone as to the late communications alleged to have passed between the head of the Irish Government and the head-centre of the Fenians, the Right Honourable the First Lord of the Treasury said, ‘That the question would be more properly addressed to the noble lord the Secretary for Ireland, who was not then in the House. Meanwhile, sir,’ continued he, ‘I will take on myself the responsibility of saying that in this, as in a variety of other cases, the zeal of party has greatly outstripped the discretion that should govern political warfare. The exceptional state of a nation, in which the administration of justice mainly depends on those aids which a rigid morality might disparage – the social state of a people whose integrity calls for the application of means the most certain to disseminate distrust and disunion, are facts which constitute reasons for political action that, however assailable in the mere abstract, the mind of statesmanlike form will at once accept as solid and effective, and to reject which would only show that, in over-looking the consequences of sentiment, a man can ignore the most vital interests of his country.’”’

‘Does he say that they wrote to Donogan?’ cried Kilgobbin, whose patience had been sorely pushed by the Premier’s exordium.

‘Let me read on, papa.’

‘Skip all that, and get down to a simple question and answer, Kitty; don’t read the long sentences.’

‘This is how he winds up, papa. “I trust I have now, sir, satisfied the House that there are abundant reasons why this correspondence should not be produced on the table, while I have further justified my noble friend for a course of action in which the humanity of the man takes no lustre from the glory of the statesman” – then there are some words in Latin – “and the right hon. gentleman resumed his seat amidst loud cheers, in which some of the Opposition were heard to join.”’

‘I want to be told, after all, did they write the letter to say Donogan was to be let escape?’

‘Would it have been a great crime, uncle?’ said Nina artlessly.

‘I’m not going into that. I’m only asking what the people over us say is the best way to govern us. I’d like to know, once for all, what was wrong and what was right in Ireland.’

‘Has not the Premier just told you, sir,’ replied Nina, ‘that it is always the reverse of what obtains everywhere else?’

‘I have had enough of it, anyhow,’ cried Dick, who, though not intending it before, now was carried away by a momentary gust of passion to make the avowal.

‘Have you been in the Cabinet all this time, then, without our knowing it?’ asked Nina archly.

‘It is not of the Cabinet I was speaking, mademoiselle. It was of the country.’ And he answered haughtily.

‘And where would you go, Dick, and find better?’ said Kate.

‘Anywhere. I should find better in America, in Canada, in the Far West, in New Zealand – but I mean to try in Australia.’

‘And what will you do when you get there?’ asked Kilgobbin, with a grim humour in his look.

‘Do tell me, Cousin Dick, for who knows that it might not suit me also?’

Young Kearney filled his glass, and drained it without speaking. At last he said, ‘It will be for you, sir, to say if I make the trial. It is clear enough, I have no course open to me here. For a few hundred pounds, or, indeed, for anything you like to give me, you get rid of me for ever. It will be the one piece of economy my whole life comprises.’

‘Stay at home, Dick, and give to your own country the energy you are willing to bestow on a strange land,’ said Kate.

‘And labour side by side with the peasant I have looked down upon since I was able to walk.’

‘Don’t look down on him, then – do it no longer. If you would treat the first stranger you met in the bush as your equal, begin the Christian practice in your own country.’

‘But he needn’t do that at all,’ broke in the old man. ‘If he would take to strong shoes and early rising here at Kilgobbin, he need never go to Geelong for a living. Your great-grandfathers lived here for centuries, and the old house that sheltered them is still standing.’

‘What should I stay for – ?’ He had got thus far when his eyes met Nina’s, and he stopped and hesitated, and, as a deep blush covered his face, faltered out, ‘Gorman O’Shea says he is ready to go with me, and two fellows with less to detain them in their own country would be hard to find.’

‘O’Shea will do well enough,’ said the old man; ‘he was not brought up to kid-leather boots and silk linings in his greatcoat. There’s stuff in him, and if it comes to sleeping under a haystack or dining on a red-herring, he’ll not rise up with rheumatism or heartburn. And what’s better than all, he’ll not think himself a hero because he mends his own boots or lights his own kitchen-fire.’

‘A letter for your honour,’ said the servant, entering with a very informal-looking note on coarse paper, and fastened with a wafer. ‘The gossoon, sir, is waiting for an answer; he run every mile from Moate.’

‘Read it, Kitty,’ said the old man, not heeding the servant’s comment.

‘It is dated “Moate Jail, seven o’clock,”’ said Kitty, as she read: ‘“Dear Sir, – I have got into a stupid scrape, and have been committed to jail. Will you come, or send some one to bail me out. The thing is a mere trifle, but the ‘being locked up’ is very hard to bear. – Yours always, G. O’Shea.”’

‘Is this more Fenian work?’ cried Kilgobbin.

‘I’m certain it is not, sir,’ said Dick. ‘Gorman O’Shea has no liking for them, nor is he the man to sympathise with what he owns he cannot understand. It is a mere accidental row.’

‘At all events, we must see to set him at liberty. Order the gig, Dick, and while they are putting on the harness, I’ll finish this decanter of port. If it wasn’t that we’re getting retired shopkeepers on the bench, we’d not see an O’Shea sent to prison like a gossoon that stole a bunch of turnips.’

‘What has he been doing, I wonder?’ said Nina, as she drew her arm within Kate’s and left the room.

‘Some loud talk in the bar-parlour, perhaps,’ was Kate’s reply, and the toss of her head as she said it implied more even than the words.

CHAPTER LIV

While Lord Kilgobbin and his son are plodding along towards Moate with a horse not long released from the harrow, and over a road which the late rains had sorely damaged, the moment is not inopportune to explain the nature of the incident, small enough in its way, that called on them for this journey at nightfall. It befell that when Miss Betty, indignant at her nephew’s defection, and outraged that he should descend to call at Kilgobbin, determined to cast him off for ever, she also resolved upon a project over which she had long meditated, and to which the conversation at her late dinner greatly predisposed her.

The growing unfertility of the land, the sturdy rejection of the authority of the Church, manifested in so many ways by the people, had led Miss O’Shea to speculate more on the insecurity of landed property in Ireland than all the long list of outrages scheduled at assizes, or all the burning haggards that ever flared in a wintry sky. Her notion was to retire into some religious sisterhood, and away from life and its cares, to pass her remaining years in holy meditation and piety. She would have liked to have sold her estate and endowed some house or convent with the proceeds, but there were certain legal difficulties that stood in the way, and her law-agent, McKeown, must be seen and conferred with about these.

Her moods of passion were usually so very violent that she would stop at nothing; and in the torrent of her anger she would decide on a course of action which would colour a whole lifetime. On the present occasion her first step was to write and acquaint McKeown that she would be at Moodie’s Hotel, Dominick Street, the same evening, and begged he might call there at eight or nine o’clock, as her business with him was pressing. Her next care was to let the house and lands of O’Shea’s Barn to Peter Gill, for the term of one year, at a rent scarcely more than nominal, the said Gill binding himself to maintain the gardens, the shrubberies, and all the ornamental plantings in their accustomed order and condition. In fact, the extreme moderation of the rent was to be recompensed by the large space allotted to unprofitable land, and the great care he was pledged to exercise in its preservation; and while nominally the tenant, so manifold were the obligations imposed on him, he was in reality very little other than the caretaker of O’Shea’s Barn and its dependencies. No fences were to be altered, or boundaries changed. All the copses of young timber were to be carefully protected by palings as heretofore, and even the ornamental cattle – the shorthorns, and the Alderneys, and a few favourite ‘Kerries,’ – were to be kept on the allotted paddocks; and to old Kattoo herself was allotted a loose box, with a small field attached to it, where she might saunter at will, and ruminate over the less happy quadrupeds that had to work for their subsistence.

Now, though Miss Betty, in the full torrent of her anger, had that much of method in her madness to remember the various details, whose interests were the business of her daily life, and so far made provision for the future of her pet cows and horses and dogs and guinea-fowls, so that if she should ever resolve to return she should find all as she had left it, the short paper of agreement by which she accepted Gill as her tenant was drawn up by her own hand, unaided by a lawyer; and, whether from the intemperate haste of the moment, or an unbounded confidence in Gill’s honesty and fidelity, was not only carelessly expressed, but worded in a way that implied how her trustfulness exonerated her from anything beyond the expression of what she wished for, and what she believed her tenant would strictly perform. Gill’s repeated phrase of ‘Whatever her honour’s ladyship liked’ had followed every sentence as she read the document aloud to him; and the only real puzzle she had was to explain to the poor man’s simple comprehension that she was not making a hard bargain with him, but treating him handsomely and in all confidence.

Shrewd and sharp as the old lady was, versed in the habits of the people, and long trained to suspect a certain air of dulness, by which, when asking the explanation of a point, they watch, with a native casuistry, to see what flaw or chink may open an equivocal meaning or intention, she was thoroughly convinced by the simple and unreasoning concurrence this humble man gave to every proviso, and the hearty assurance he always gave ‘that her honour knew what was best. God reward and keep her long in the way to do it!’ – with all this, Miss O’Shea had not accomplished the first stage of her journey to Dublin, when Peter Gill was seated in the office of Pat McEvoy, the attorney at Moate – smart practitioner, who had done more to foster litigation between tenant and landlord than all the ‘grievances’ that ever were placarded by the press.

‘When did you get this, Peter?’ said the attorney, as he looked about, unable to find a date.

‘This morning, sir, just before she started.’

‘You’ll have to come before the magistrate and make an oath of the date, and, by my conscience, it’s worth the trouble.’

‘Why, sir, what’s in it?’ cried Peter eagerly.

‘I’m no lawyer if she hasn’t given you a clear possession of the place, subject to certain trusts, and even for the non-performance of these there is no penalty attached. When Councillor Holmes comes down at the assizes, I’ll lay a case before him, and I’ll wager a trifle, Peter, you will turn out to be an estated gentleman.’