The Martins Of Cro' Martin, Vol. I (of II)

The habits of the Irish College were strikingly unlike those of either Oxford or Cambridge. Instead of a large class consisting of men of great fortune and high expectations, he found a very slight sprinkling of such, and even they made up nothing that resembled a party. Separated by age, political distinctions, and county associations, all stronger in the poorer country than in the richer one, they held little intercourse together, and were scarcely acquainted.

If there was less actual wealth, there was also less credit to be obtained by an Irish student. The Dublin shopkeeper acknowledged no prestige in the “gownsman;” he admitted him to no special privilege of book-debts; and as the great majority of the students resided with their families in the capital, there was no room for that reckless extravagance so often prosecuted by those who are temporarily removed from domestic supervision.

Massingbred was at first grievously disappointed. There were neither great names nor great fortunes amongst his new associates. Their mode of life, too, struck him as mean and contemptible. There were clever men reading for honors, and stupid men steering their slow way to a degree; but where were the fast ones? where the fellows who could tool a team or steer a six-oar, who could dash up to town for a week’s reckless life at Crocky’s and Tattersall’s, make their book on the Oaks, or perhaps ride the winner at a steeplechase?

It was all grievously slow. Dublin itself was a poor affair. He had few acquaintances, the theatres were bad, and public amusements there were none. His fellow-students, too, stood aloof from him. It was not that he was richer, better dressed, rode blood horses, dined at Morris-son’s, wore kid gloves, and carried scented pocket-handkerchiefs. It was not that he had a certain air of puppyism as he wended his way across the courts, or sauntered elegantly into chapel. They could have forgiven any or all of these better than one of his offendings, which was his accent. Strange as it may seem, his English voice and English pronunciation were the most unpopular things about him, and many a real defect in his character might have met a more merciful construction had he given no initial “H” to “humble,” and evinced a more generous confusion about his “wills” and “snails.”

Somewhat bored by a life so unlike anything he had ever tried before, – partly, perhaps, stimulated to show that he could do something beside canter his thorough-bred along Sackville Street, or lounge in the stage-box in solitary splendor, – he went in for honors, and, to the surprise of all, succeeded. In fact, he beat two or three of the distinguished men of his time, till, thrown by the chance of events into Nelligan’s division, he found at once his superior, and saw that he was in presence of an intelligence considerably above his own. When he had adventured on the struggle and found himself worsted, he acknowledged defeat with all the generosity of an honorable nature; and forcing his way through the crowd as it issued from the examination-hall, was the very first to grasp Nelligan’s hand and congratulate him on his success.

“That was all got up; he was bursting with jealousy. The fellow could have strangled Nelligan,” muttered one.

“He certainly put a good face on the disaster,” said another, more mercifully given; “though I suppose he feels the thing sorely enough at heart!”

That was exactly what he did not, however. Young Massingbred regarded a college distinction as no evidence whatever of a man’s attainments. He had seen stupid fellows win the prize for which clever ones strove in vain; but, at all events, he regarded such successes as contributing in nothing to the great race of life, and had even a theory that such early efforts were often the very means of exhausting the energies that should be exerted for the high rewards of the world. Besides this, he felt a pleasure in manfully showing that he was above a petty jealousy, and fairly owning himself beaten in a fair struggle.

“You are the better man, Nelligan,” said he, gayly; “I ‘ll not try another fall with you, be assured.”

Strange was it that in this very avowal he had asserted what the other felt in his inmost heart to be an immeasurable superiority over him; and that in the very moment of striking his flag he had proclaimed his victory. To be able to run him so hard for the race and yet not feel the struggle, to strive for the prize and care nothing for defeat, seemed to Nelligan the evidence of an ambition that soared above college triumph, and he could not but envy that buoyant high-hearted temperament that seemed to make light of difficulties and not even feel depressed by a defeat.

Up to this time these two young men had scarcely known each other, but now they became intimate. The very difference in character served to draw them more closely together; and if Nelligan felt a degree of admiration for qualities whose brilliant display opened a new sense of enjoyment to him, the other was delighted with the gentle and almost childlike innocence of the student whose far-soaring intellect was mastering the highest questions of science.

Massingbred was one of those natures in whom frankness is an instinct. It seems to such a relief to open the secrets of the heart and avow their weaknesses and their shortcomings, as though – by some Moral Popery – they would obtain the benefit of a free confession and go forth the better for their candor.

Not only did he tell Nelligan of his own career and its accidents, the causes for which he was not on good terms with his family, and so on; but he even ventured to discuss the public life of his father, and, in a spirit of banter, swore that to his political subserviency did he owe his whole fortune in life.

“My father was one of the crew when the vessel was wrecked, Nelligan,” said he; “there was plenty of talk of standing by the ship to the last, and perishing with her. Some did so, and they are forgotten already. My father, however, jumped into the long-boat with a few more, and thought that probably they might find another craft more seaworthy; fortunately he was right; at least, assuredly, I ‘m not the man to say he was not.”

“But was there no desertion of principle, Massingbred?” said Nelligan.

“No more than there is a desertion of your old coat when you discover it to be too threadbare to wear any longer. Irish Politics, as the men of that day understood them, had become impracticable, – impossible, I might say; the only sensible thing to do was to acknowledge the fact. My father was keen-sighted enough to see it in that light, and here ‘s his health for it.”

Nelligan was silent.

“Come, Joe, out with it. Your family were honest Unionists. Tell me so frankly, man. Own to me that you and yours look upon us all as a set of knaves and scoundrels, that sold their country, and so forth. I want to see you in a mood of good passionate indignation for once. Out with it, boy; curse us to your heart’s content, and I ‘ll hear it like an angel, for the simple reason that I know it to be just. You won’t, won’t you? Is your anger too deep for words? or are there any special and peculiar wrongs that make your dark consuming wrath too hot for utterance?”

Nelligan was still silent; but the blush which now covered his face had become almost purple. The allusion to his family as persons of political importance struck him, and for the first time, with a sense of shame. What would Massingbred think of them if he knew their real station? what would he think of him for having concealed it? Had he concealed it? Had he ever divulged the truth? He knew not; in the whirlwind of his confusion he knew nothing. He tried to say some words to break the oppressive silence that seemed to weigh him down like an accusation, but he could not.

“I see it all, Nelligan. My foolish affectation of laughing at all principle has disgusted you; but the truth is, I don’t feel it: I do not. I own frankly that the bought patriot is a ruined man, and there is a moral Nemesis over every fellow that sells himself; I don’t mean to say but that many who did so did n’t make the best bargain their brains were worth, and my father for one; he was a man of fair average abilities, – able to say his commonplaces like his neighbors, – and naturally felt that they would sound as well in England as in Ireland; I don’t think he had a single conviction on any subject, so that he really sold a very unsalable article when he vended himself. But there were others, – your Governor, for instance; come, now, tell me about him; you are so devilish close, and I want to hear all about your family. You won’t; well, I’ll give you one chance more, and then – ”

“What then?” asked Nelligan, breathlessly.

“I ‘ll just go and learn for myself.”

“How? what do you mean?” “The easiest way in the world. The vacation begins next Tuesday, and I ‘ll just invite myself to spend the first week of it under your paternal roof. You look terribly shocked, absolutely horrified; well, so you ought. It is about the greatest piece of impertinence I ‘ve heard of. I assure you I have a full consciousness of that myself; but no matter, I ‘ll do it.”

Nelligan’s shame was now an agony. It had never occurred to him in his life to feel ashamed of his station or that of his family, for the simple reason that he had never made pretension to anything higher or more exalted. The distinctions at which he aimed were those attainable by ability; social successes were triumphs he never dreamed of. But now came the thought of how he should stand in his friend’s esteem, when the fact was revealed that he was the son of very humble parents, all whose ways, thoughts, and habits would be apt themes for ridicule and sarcasm. Over and over again had Massingbred annoyed him by the disparaging tone in which he canvassed “small people,” the sneering depreciation in which he held all their doings, and the wholesale injustice by which he classed their sentiments with their good manners. It was the one feature of his friend’s character that gave a check to his unbounded esteem for him. Had he not possessed this blemish, Nelligan would have deemed him nearly faultless.

Intensely feeling this, Nelligan would have given much for courage to say, “I am one of that very set you sneer at. All my associations and ties are with them. My home is amongst them, and every link of kindred binds me to them.”

Yet, somehow, he could not bring himself to the effort. It was not that he dreaded the loss of friendship that might ensue, – indeed, he rather believed that such would not occur; but he thought that a time might come when that avowal might be made with pride, and not in humiliation, when he should say: “My father, the little shopkeeper of Oughterard, gave me the advantages by which I became what I am. The class you sneer at had yet ambitions high and daring as your own; and talents to attain them, too! The age of noble and serf has passed away, and we live in a freer and more generous era, when men are tested by their own worth; and if birth and blood would retain their respect amongst us, it is by contesting with us more humbly born the prizes of life.” To have asserted these things now, however, when he was nothing, when his name had no echo beyond the walls of a college, would have seemed to him an intolerable piece of presumption, and he was silent.

Massingbred read his reserve as proceeding from displeasure, and jestingly said, —

“You mustn’t be angry with me, Joe. The boldness of men like me is less impudence than you take it for, since – should I fulfil my threat, and pay your father a visit – I ‘d neither show surprise nor shame if he refused to receive me. I throw over all the claims of ceremony; but at the same time I don’t want to impose the trammels on my friends. They are free to deal with me as frankly, ay, and as curtly as I have treated them; but enough of all this. Let us talk of something else.”

And so they did, too, – of their college life and its changeful fortunes; of their companions and their several characters, and of the future itself, of which Massingbred pretended to read the fate, saying: “You’ll be something wonderful one of these days, Joe. I have it as though revealed to me, —you astonishing the world by your abilities, and winning your way to rank and eminence; while I like a sign-post that points to the direction, shall stand stock-still, and never budge an inch, knowing the road, but not travelling it.”

“And why should it be so, Mass, when you have such a perfect consciousness of your powers for success?”

“For the simple reason, my boy, that I know and feel how the cleverness which imposes upon others has never imposed upon myself. The popular error of a man’s being able to do fifty things which he has not done from idleness, apathy, carelessness, and so on, never yet deceived me, because I know well that when a fellow has great stuff in him it will come out, whether he likes or not. You might as well say that the grapes in a wine-vat could arrest their own process of fermentation, as that a man of real genius – and mind, I am now speaking of no other – could suppress the working of his intelligence, and throw his faculties into torpor. The men who do nothing are exactly the men who can do no better. Volition, energy, the strong impulse for action, are part and parcel of every really great intellect; and your ‘mute, inglorious Milton’ only reminds me of the artist who painted his canvas all red to represent the passage of the Egyptians through the Red Sea. Believe me, you must take all untried genius in the same scale of credit as that by which you have fancied the chariots and horsemen submerged in the flood. They are there, if you like; and if you don’t – ”

“Your theory requires that all men’s advantages should be equal, their station alike, and their obstacles the same. Now, they are not so. See, for instance, in our University here. I am debarred from the fellowship-bench – or, at least, from attempting to reach it – because I am a Papist.”

“Then turn Protestant; or if that doesn’t suit you, address yourself to kick down the barrier that stands in your way. By the bye, I did n’t know you were a Roman; how comes that? Is it a family creed, or was it a caprice of your own?”

“It is the religion my family have always professed,” said Nelligan, gravely.

“I have no right to speak of these subjects, because I have never felt strongly enough on them to establish strong convictions; but it appears to me that if I were you – that is, if I had your head on my shoulders – I should think twice ere I ‘d sacrifice my whole future out of respect for certain dogmas that no more interfere with one’s daily life and opinions than some obsolete usage of ancient Greece has a bearing upon a modern suit in Chancery. There, don’t look fretful and impatient; I don’t want to provoke you, nor is it worth your while to bring your siege artillery against my card-house. I appreciate everything you could possibly adduce by anticipation, and I yield myself as vanquished.”

Thus, half in earnest, half jestingly, Massingbred talked away, little thinking how deeply many a random speech entered into his friend’s heart, taking firm root there to grow and vegetate hereafter. As for himself, it would have been somewhat difficult to say how far his convictions ever went with his words. Any attempt to guide and direct him was, at any time, enough to excite a wilful endeavor to oppose it, and whatever savored of opposition immediately evoked his resistance. The spirit of rebellion was the keynote of his character; he could be made anything, everything, or nothing, as authority – or as he would have styled it, tyranny – decided.

It was just at this very moment that an incident occurred to display this habit of his mind in its full force. His father, by employing much private influence and the aid of powerful friends, had succeeded in obtaining for him the promise of a most lucrative civil appointment in India. It was one of those situations which in a few years of very moderate labor secure an ample fortune for the possessor. Mr. Massingbred had forgotten but one thing in all the arrangement of this affair, which was to apprise his son of it beforehand, and make him, as it were, a part of the plot. That one omission, however, was enough to secure its failure.

Jack received the first tidings of the scheme when it was a fact, not a speculation. It was a thing done, not to do, and consequently a “gross piece of domestic cruelty to dispose of him and his future by an arbitrary banishment to a distant land, linking him with distasteful duties, uncongenial associates,” and the rest of it. In a word, it was a case for resistance, and he did resist, and in no very measured fashion, either. He wrote back a pettish and ill-tempered refusal of the place, sneered at the class by whom such appointments were regarded as prizes, and coolly said that “it was quite time enough to attach himself to the serious business of life when he had tasted something of the pleasures that suited his time of life; besides,” added he, “I must see which way my ambitions point; perhaps to a seat on the Treasury benches, perhaps to a bullock-team, a wood-axe, and a rifle in a new settlement. Of my resolves on either head, or on anything between them, you shall have the earliest possible intimation from your devoted, but perhaps not very obedient, to command,

“J. M.”

His father rejoined angrily and peremptorily. The place had cost him everything he could employ or enlist of friendly patronage; he made the request assume all the weight of a deep personal obligation, and now the solicitation and the success were all to go for nothing. What if he should leave so very gifted a young gentleman to the unfettered use of his great abilities? What if he abstained from any interference with one so competent to guide himself? He threw out these suggestions too palpably to occasion any misconception, and Jack read them aright. “I’m quite ready for sea whenever you are pleased to cut the painter,” said he; and the correspondence concluded with a dry intimation that two hundred a year, less than one half of his former allowance, should be paid into Coutts’s for his benefit, but that no expenditure above that sum would be repaid by his father.

“I ‘ll emigrate; I ‘ll agitate; I ‘ll turn author, and write for the reviews; I ‘ll correspond with the newspapers; I ‘ll travel in Afrifca; I ‘ll go to sea, – be a pirate;” in fact, there was nothing for which he thought his capacity unequal, nor anything against which his principles would revolt. In speculation, only, however; for in sober reality he settled down into a mere idler, discontented, dreamy, and unhappy.

Little momentary bursts of energy would drive him now and then to his books, and for a week or two he would work really hard; when a change as sudden would come over him, and he would relapse into his former apathy. Thus was it that he had lived for some time after the term had come to an end, and scarcely a single student lingered within the silent courts. Perhaps the very solitude was the great charm of the place; there was that in his lonely, unfriended, uncompanionable existence that seemed to feed the brooding melancholy in which he indulged with all the ardor of a vice. He liked to think himself an outcast and forgotten. It was a species of flattery that he addressed to his own heart when he affected to need neither sympathy nor affection. Still his was not the stuff of which misanthropy is fashioned, and he felt acutely the silence of his friend Nelligan, who had never once written to him since they parted.

“I ‘d scarcely have left him here,” said he to himself one day; “had he been in my position, I ‘d hardly have quitted him under such circumstances. He knew all about my quarrel with my father. He had read our letters on each side. To be sure he had condemned me, and taken the side against me; still, when there was a breach, and that breach offered no prospect of reconciliation, it was but scant friendship to say good-bye, and desert me. He might, at least, have asked me down to his house. I ‘d not have gone; that ‘s certain. I feel myself very poor company for myself, and I ‘d not inflict my stupidity upon others. Still, he might have thought it kind or generous. In fact, in such a case I would have taken no refusal; I’d have insisted.”

What a dangerous hypothesis it is when we assume to act for another; how magnanimously do we rise above all meaner motives, and only think of what is generous and noble; how completely we discard every possible contingency that could sway us from the road of duty, and neither look right nor left on our way to some high object! Jack Massingbred, arguing thus, ended by thinking himself a very fine fellow and his friend a very shabby one, – two conclusions that, strangely enough, did not put him into half as much good-humor with the world as he expected. At all events, he felt very sore with Nelligan, and had he known where to address him, would have written a very angry epistle of mock gratitude for all his solicitude in his behalf; very unfortunately, however, he did not know in what part of Ireland the other resided, nor did his acquaintance with provincial dialect enable him to connect his friend with a western county. He had so confidently expected to hear from him, that he had never asked a question as to his whereabouts. Thus was it with Massingbred, as he sauntered along the silent alleys of the College Park, in which, at rare intervals, some solitary sizar might be met with, – spare, sad-looking figures, – in whose features might be read the painful conflict of narrow fortune and high ambition. Book in hand generally, they rarely exchanged a look as he passed them; and Massingbred scanned at his ease these wasted and careworn sons of labor, wondering within himself was “theirs the right road to fortune.”

Partly to shake off the depression that was over him by change of place, and in part to see something of the country itself, Massingbred resolved to make a walking-tour through the south and west of Ireland, and with a knapsack on his back, he started one fine autumn morning for Wicklow.

CHAPTER VIII. SOME KNOTTY POINTS THAT PUZZLED JOE NELLIGAN

This true history contains no record of the evening Mr. Scanlan passed at the Osprey’s Nest; nor is it probable that in any diary kept by that intelligent individual there will yet be found materials to supply this historical void. Whether, therefore, high events and their consequences were discussed, or that the meeting was only devoted to themes of lighter importance, is likely to remain a secret to all time. That matters beneath the range of politics occupied the consideration of the parties was, however, evident from the following few lines of a note received by young Nelligan the next morning: —

“Dear Joe, – I dined yesterday at the ‘Nest,’ and we talked much of you. What would you think of paying a visit there this morning to see the picture, or anything else you can think of? I ‘ve a notion it would be well taken. At all events, come over and speak to me here.

“Ever yours,

“M. SCANLAN.”

“I scarcely understand your note, Maurice,” said young Nelligan, as he entered the little room where the other sat at breakfast.

“Have you breakfasted?” said Scanlan.

“Yes, an hour ago.”

“Will you taste that salmon? Well, then, just try Poll Hanigan’s attempt at a grouse-pie; let me tell you, there is genius in the very ambition; she got the receipt from the cook at Cro’ Martin, and the imitation is highly creditable. You ‘re wrong to decline it.” And he helped himself amply as he spoke.

“But this note?” broke in the other, half impatiently.

“Oh – ay – the note; I ‘m sure I forget what I wrote; what was it about? Yes, to be sure, I remember now. I want you to make yourself known, up there. It is downright folly, if not worse, to be keeping up these feuds and differences in Ireland any longer; such a course might suit the small politicians of Oughterard, but you and I know better, and Martin himself knows better.”

“But I never took any part in the conflict you speak of; I lived out of it, – away from it.”

“And are therefore, exactly suited to repair a breach to which you never contributed. I assure you, my boy, the gentry – and I know them well – will meet you more than half-way. There is not a prouder fellow living than Martin there; he has throughout his whole life held his head higher than any man in our county, and yet he is quite ready to make advances towards you. Of course, what I say is strictly between ourselves; but my opinion is, that, if you like it, you may be as intimate up there as ever you were at old Hayes’s, at the Priory.”