The Fortunes Of Glencore

Upton smiled dubiously, and Glencore, blushing slightly, said, “You don’t concur in this, I perceive.”

“Not exactly,” said Upton, in his silkiest of tones; “I rather regard these occasions as I should do the generosity of a man who, filling my hand with base money, should say, ‘Pass it if you can!’”

“In this case, however,” resumed Glencore, “he took his share of the fraud, or at least was willing to do so, for I distinctly said ‘No’ to the whole scheme. He grew very warm about it; at one moment appealing to my ‘good sense, not to kick seven thousand a year out of the window;’ at the next, in half-quarrelsome mood, asking ‘if it were any objection I had to be connected with his family.’ To get rid of a very troublesome subject, and to end a controversy that threatened to disturb a party, I said at last, ‘We ‘ll talk it over to-morrow, Clifford, and if your arguments be as good as your heart, then perhaps they may yet convince me.’ This ended the theme, and we parted. I started the next day on a shooting excursion into Calabria, and when I got back it was not of meeting Clifford I was thinking. I hastened to meet the Delia Torres, and then came our elopement. You know the rest. We went to the East, passed the winter in Upper Egypt, and came to Cairo in spring, where Charley was born. I got back to Naples after a year or two, and then found that my uncle had just died, and in consequence of my marrying the daughter of his old and attached friend, Sir Guy Clifford, had reversed the intention of his will, and by a codicil left me his sole heir. It was thus that my marriage, and even my boy’s birth, became inserted in the Peerage; my solicitor, in his vast eagerness for my interests, having taken care to indorse the story with his own name. The disinherited nephews and nieces, the half-cousins and others, soon got wind of the real facts, and contested the will, on the ground of its being executed under a delusion. I, of course, would not resist their claim, and satisfied myself by denying the statement as to my marriage; and so, after affording the current subject of gossip for a season, I was completely forgotten, the more as we went to live abroad, and never mixed with English. And now, Upton, it is this same incident I would utilize for the present occasion, though, as I said before, when it originally occurred it had a very different signification.”

“I don’t exactly see how,” said Upton.

“In this wise. My real marriage was never inserted in the Peerage. I’ll now manage that it shall so appear, to give me the opportunity of formally contradicting it, and alluding to the strange persistence with which, having married me some fifteen years ago to a lady who never existed, they now are pleased to unite me to one whose character might have secured me against the calumny. I ‘ll threaten an action for libel, etc., obtain a most full, explicit, and abject apology, and then, when this has gone the round of all the journals of Europe, her doom is sealed!”

“But she has surely letters, writings, proofs of some sort.”

“No, Upton, I have not left a scrap in her possession; she has not a line, not a letter to vindicate her. On the night I broke open her writing-desk, I took away everything that bore the traces of my own hand. I tell you again she is in my power, and never was power less disposed to mercy.”

“Once more, my dear friend,” said Upton, “I am driven to tell you that I cannot be a profitable counsellor in a matter to every detail of which I object. Consider calmly for one moment what you are doing. See how, in your desire to be avenged upon her, you throw the heaviest share of the penalty on your own poor boy. I am not her advocate now. I will not say one word to mitigate the course of your anger towards her, but remember that you are actually defrauding him of his birthright. This is not a question where you have a choice. There is no discretionary power left you.”

“I ‘ll do it,” said Glencore, with a savage energy.

“In other words, to wreak a vengeance upon one, you are prepared to immolate another, not only guiltless, but who possesses every claim to your love and affection.”

“And do you think that if I sacrifice the last tie that attaches me to life, Upton, that I retire from this contest heart-whole? No, far from it; I go forth from the struggle broken, blasted, friendless!”

“And do you mean that this vengeance should outlive you? Suppose, for instance, that she should survive you.”

“It shall be to live on in shame, then,” cried he, savagely.

“And were she to die first?”

“In that case – I have not thought well enough about that. It is possible, – it is just possible; but these are subtleties, Upton, to detach me from my purpose, or weaken my resolution to carry it through. You would apply the craft of your calling to the case, and, by suggesting emergencies, open a road to evasions. Enough for me the present. I neither care to prejudge the future, nor control it. I know,” cried he, suddenly, and with eyes flashing angrily as he spoke, – “I know that if you desire to use the confidence I have reposed in you against me, you can give me trouble and even difficulty; but I defy Sir Horace Upton, with all his skill and all his cunning, to outwit me.”

There was that in the tone in which he uttered these words, and the exaggerated energy of his manner, that convinced Upton, Glencore’s reason was not intact. It was not what could amount to aberration in the ordinary sense, but sufficient evidence was there to show that judgment had become so obscured by passion that the mental power was weakened by the moral.

“Tell me, therefore, Upton,” cried he, “before we part, do you leave this house my friend or my enemy?”

“It is as your sincere, attached friend that I now dispute with you, inch by inch, a dangerous position, with a judgment under no influence from passion, viewing this question by the coldest of all tests, – mere expediency – ’

“There it is,” broke in Glencore; “you claim an advantage over me, because you are devoid of feeling; but this is a case, sir, where the sense of injury gives the instinct of reparation. Is it nothing to me, think you, that I am content to go down dishonored to my grave, but also to be the last of my name and station? Is it nothing that a whole line of honorable ancestry is extinguished at once? Is it nothing that I surrender him who formed my sole solace and companionship in life? You talk of your calm, unbiassed mind; but I tell you, till your brain be on fire like mine, and your heart swollen to very bursting, that you have no right to dictate to me! Besides, it is done! The blow has fallen,” added he, with a deeper solemnity of voice. “The gulf that separates us is already created. She and I can meet no more. But why continue this contest? It was to aid me in directing that boy’s fortunes I first sought your advice, not to attempt to dissuade me from what I will not be turned from.”

“In what way can I serve you?” said Upton, calmly.

“Will you consent to be his guardian?”

“I will.”

Glencore seized the other’s hand, and pressed it to his heart, and for some seconds he could not speak.

“This is all that I ask, Upton,” said he. “It is the greatest boon friendship could accord me. I need no more. Could you have remained here a day or two more, we could have settled upon some plan together as to his future life; as it is, we can arrange it by letter.”

“He must leave this,” said Upton, thoughtfully.

“Of course, – at once!”

“How far is Harcourt to be informed in this matter; have you spoken to him already?”

“No; nor mean to do so. I should have from him nothing but reproaches for having betrayed the boy into false hopes of a station he was never to fill. You must tell Harcourt. I leave it to yourself to find the suitable moment.”

“We shall need his assistance,” said Upton, whose quick faculties were already busily travelling many a mile of the future. “I ‘ll see him to-night, and try what can be done. In a few days you will have turned over in your mind what you yourself destine for him, – the fortune you mean to give – ”

“It is already done,” said Glencore, laying a sealed letter on the table. “All that I purpose in his behalf you will find there.”

“All this detail is too much for you, Glencore,” said the other, seeing that a weary, depressed expression had come over him, while his voice grew weaker with every word. “I shall not leave this till late to-morrow, so that we can meet again. And now good night.”

CHAPTER XVII. A TÊTE-À-TÊTE

When Harcourt was aroused from his sound sleep by Upton, and requested in the very blandest tones of that eminent diplomatist to lend him every attention of his “very remarkable faculties,” he was not by any means certain that he was not engaged in a strange dream; nor was the suspicion at all dispelled by the revelations addressed to him.

“Just dip the end of that towel in the water, Upton, and give it to me,” cried he at last; and then, wiping his face and forehead, said, “Have I heard you aright, – there was no marriage?”

Upton nodded assent.

“What a shameful way he has treated this poor boy, then!” cried the other. “I never heard of anything equal to it in cruelty, and I conclude it was breaking this news to the lad that drove him out to sea on that night, and brought on this brain fever. By Jove, I ‘d not take his title, and your brains, to have such a sin on my conscience!”

“We are happily not called on to judge the act,” said Upton, cautiously.

“And why not? Is it not every honest man’s duty to reprobate whatever he detects dishonorable or disgraceful? I do judge him, and sentence him too, and I say, moreover, that a more cold-blooded piece of cruelty I never heard of. He trains up this poor boy from childhood to fancy himself the heir to his station and fortune; he nurses in him all the pride that only a high rank can cover; and then, when the lad’s years have brought him to the period when these things assume all their value, he sends for him to tell him he is a bastard.”

“It is not impossible that I think worse of Glencore’s conduct than you do yourself,” said Upton, gravely.

“But you never told him so, I’ll be sworn, – you never said to him it was a rascally action. I’ll lay a hundred pounds on it, you only expostulated on the inexpediency, or the inconvenience, or some such trumpery consideration, and did not tell him, in round numbers, that what he had done was an infamy.”

“Then I fancy you’d lose your money, pretty much as you are losing your temper, – that is, without getting anything in requital.”

“What did you say to him, then?” said Harcourt, slightly abashed.

“A great deal in the same strain as you have just spoken in, doubtless not as warm in vituperation, but possibly as likely to produce an effect; nor is it in the least necessary to dwell upon that. What Glencore has done, and what I have said about it, both belong to the past. They are over, – they are irrevocable. It is to what concerns the present and the future I wish now to address myself, and to interest you.”

“Why, the boy’s name was in the Peerage, – I read it there myself.”

“My dear Harcourt, you must have paid very little attention to me a while ago, or you would have understood how that occurred.”

“And here were all the people, the tenantry on the estate, calling him the young lord, and the poor fellow growing up with the proud consciousness that the title was his due.”

“There is not a hardship of the case I have not pictured to my own mind as forcibly as you can describe it,” said Upton; “but I really do not perceive that any reprobation of the past has in the slightest assisted me in providing for the future.”

“And then,” murmured Harcourt, – for all the while he was pursuing his own train of thought, quite irrespective of all Upton was saying, – “and then he turns him adrift on the world without friend or fortune.”

“It is precisely that he may have both the one and the other that I have come to confer with you now,” replied Upton. “Glencore has made a liberal provision for the boy, and asked me to become his guardian. I have no fancy for the trust, but I did n’t see how I could decline it. In this letter he assigns to him an income, which shall be legally secured to him. He commits to me the task of directing his education, and suggesting some future career, and for both these objects I want your counsel.”

“Education, – prospects, – why, what are you talking about? A poor fellow who has not a name, nor a home, nor one to acknowledge him, – what need has he of education, or what chance of prospects? I’d send him to sea, and if he wasn’t drowned before he came to manhood, I’d give him his fortune, whatever it was, and say, ‘Go settle in some of the colonies.’ You have no right to train him up to meet fresh mortifications and insults in life; to be flouted by every fellow that has a father, and outraged by every cur whose mother was married.”

“And are the colonies especially inhabited by illegitimate offspring?” said Upton, dryly.

“At least he’d not be met with a rebuff at every step he made. The rude life of toil would be better than the polish of a civilization that could only reflect upon him.”

“Not badly said, Harcourt,” said Upton, smiling; “but as to the boy, I have other prospects. He has, if I mistake not, very good faculties. You estimate them even higher. I don’t see why they should be neglected. If he merely possess the mediocrity of gifts which make men tolerable lawyers and safe doctors, why, perhaps, he may turn them into some channel. If he really can lay claim to higher qualities, they must not be thrown away.”

“Which means that he ought to be bred up to diplomacy,” said Harcourt.

“Perhaps,” said the other, with a bland inclination of the head.

“And what can an old dragoon like myself contribute to such an object?” asked Harcourt.

“You can be of infinite service in many ways,” said Upton; “and for the present I wish to leave the boy in your care, till I can learn something about my own destiny. This, of course, I shall know in a few days. Meanwhile you ‘ll look after him, and as soon as his removal becomes safe you ‘ll take him away from this, – it does not much matter whither; probably some healthy, secluded spot in Wales, for a week or two, would be advisable. Glencore and he must not meet again; if ever they are to do so, it must be after a considerable lapse of time.”

“Have you thought of a name for him, or is his to be still Massy?” asked Harcourt, bluntly.

“He may take the maternal name of Glencore’s family, and be called Doyle, and the settlements could be drawn up in that name.”

“I’ll be shot if I like to have any share in the whole transaction! Some day or other it will all come out, and who knows how much blame may be imputed to us, perhaps for actually advising the entire scheme,” said Harcourt.

“You must see, my dear Harcourt, that you are only refusing aid to alleviate an evil, and not to devise one. If this boy – ”

“Well – well – I give in. I’d rather comply at once than be preached into acquiescence. Even when you do not convince me, I feel ashamed to oppose myself to so much cleverness; so, I repeat, I ‘m at your orders.”

“Admirably spoken,” said Upton, with a smile.

“My greatest difficulty of all,” said Harcourt, “will be to meet Glencore again after this. I know – I feel – I never can forgive him.”

“Perhaps he will not ask forgiveness, Harcourt,” said the other, with one of his slyest of looks. “Glencore is a strange, self-opinionated fellow, and has amongst other odd notions that of going the road he likes best himself. Besides, there is another consideration here, and with no man will it weigh more than with yourself. Glencore has been dangerously ill, – at this moment we can scarcely say that he has recovered; his state is yet one of anxiety and doubt. You are the last who would forget such infirmity; nor is it necessary to secure your pity that I should say how seriously the poor fellow is now suffering.”

“I trust he’ll not speak to me about this business,” said Harcourt, after a pause.

“Very probably he will not. He will know that I have already told you everything, so that there will be no need of any communication from him.”

“I wish from my heart and soul I had never come here. I would to Heaven I had gone away at once, as I first intended. I like that boy; I feel he has fine stuff in him; and now – ”

“Come, come, Harcourt, it’s the fault of all soft-hearted fellows, like yourself, that their kindliness degenerates into selfishness, and they have such a regard for their own feelings that they never agree to anything that wounds them. Just remember that you and I have very small parts in this drama, and the best way we can do is to fill them without giving ourselves the airs of chief characters.”

“You’re at your old game, Upton; you are always ready to wet yourself, provided you give another fellow a ducking.”

“Only if he get a worse one, or take longer to dry after it,” remarked Upton, laughing.

“Quite true, by Jove!” chimed in the other; “you take special care to come off best. And now you ‘re going,” added he, as Upton rose to withdraw, “and I’m certain that I have not half comprehended what you want from me.”

“You shall have it in writing, Harcourt; I’ll send you a clear despatch the first spare moment I can command after I reach town. The boy will not be fit to move for some time to come, and so good-bye.”

“You don’t know where they are going to send you?”

“I cannot frame even a conjecture,” sighed Upton, languidly. “I ought to be in the Brazils for a week or so about that slave question; and then the sooner I reach Constantinople the better.”

“Sha’ n’t they want you at Paris?” asked Harcourt, who felt a kind of quiet vengeance in developing what he deemed the weak vanity of the other.

“Yes,” sighed he again; “but I can’t be everywhere.” And so saying, he lounged away, while it would have taken a far more subtle listener than Harcourt to say whether he was mystifying the other, or the dupe of his own self-esteem.

CHAPTER XVIII. BILLY TRAYNOR AS ORATOR

Three weeks rolled over, – an interval not without its share of interest for the inhabitants of the little village of Leenane, since on one morning Mr. Craggs had made his appearance on his way to Clifden, and after an absence of two days returned to the Castle. The subject for popular discussion and surmise had not yet declined, when a boat was seen to leave Glencore, heavily laden with trunks and travelling gear; and as she neared the land, the “lord” was detected amongst the passengers, looking very ill, – almost dying; he passed up the little street of the village, scarcely noticing the uncovered heads which saluted him respectfully. Indeed, he scarcely lifted up his eyes, and, as the acute observers remarked, never once turned a glance towards the opposite shore, where the Castle stood.

He had not reached the end of the village, when a chaise with four horses arrived at the spot. No time was lost in arranging the trunks and portmanteaus, and Lord Glencore sat moodily on a bank, listlessly regarding what went forward. At length Craggs came up, and, touching his cap in military fashion, announced all was ready.

Lord Glencore arose slowly, and looked languidly around him; his features wore a mingled expression of weariness and anxiety, like one not fully awakened from an oppressive dream. He turned his eyes on the people, who at a respectful distance stood around, and in a voice of peculiar melancholy said, “Good-bye.”

“A good journey to you, my Lord, and safe back again to us,” cried a number together.

“Eh – what – what was that?” cried he, suddenly; and the tones were shrill and discordant in which he spoke.

A warning gesture from Craggs imposed silence on the crowd, and not a word was uttered.

“I thought they said something about coming back again,” muttered Glencore, gloomily.

“They were wishing you a good journey, my Lord,” replied Craggs.

“Oh, that was it, was it?” And so saying, with bent-down head he walked feebly forward and entered the carriage. Craggs was speedily on the box, and the next moment they were away.

It is no part of our task to dwell on the sage speculations and wise surmises of the village on this event. They had not, it is true, much “evidence” before them, but they were hardy guessers, and there was very little within the limits of possibility which they did not summon to the aid of their imaginations. All, however, were tolerably agreed upon one point, – that to leave the place while the young lord was still unable to quit his bed, and too weak to sit up, was unnatural and unfeeling; traits which, “after all,” they thought “not very surprising, since the likes of them lords never cared for anybody.”

Colonel Harcourt still remained at Glencore, and under his rigid sway the strictest blockade of the coast was maintained, nor was any intercourse whatever permitted with the village. A boat from the Castle, meeting another from Leenane, half way in the lough, received the letters and whatever other resources the village supplied. All was done with the rigid exactness of a quarantine regulation; and if the mainland had been scourged with plague, stricter measures of exclusion could scarcely have been enforced.

In comparison with the present occupant of the Castle, the late one was a model of amiability; and the village, as is the wont in the case, now discovered a vast number of good qualities in the “lord,” when they had lost him. After a while, however, the guesses, the speculations, and the comparisons all died away, and the Castle of Glencore was as much dreamland to their imaginations as, seen across the lough in the dim twilight of an autumn evening, its towers might have appeared to their eyes.

It was about a month after Lord Glencore’s departure, of a fine, soft evening in summer, Billy Traynor suddenly appeared in the village. Billy was one of a class who, whatever their rank in life, are always what Coleridge would have called “noticeable men.” He was soon, therefore, surrounded with a knot of eager and inquiring friends, all solicitous to know something of the life he was leading, what they were doing “beyant at the Castle.”

“It’s a mighty quiet studious kind of life,” said Billy, “but agrees with me wonderfully; for I may say that until now I never was able to give my ‘janius’ fair play. Professional life is the ruin of the student; and being always obleeged to be thinkin’ of the bags destroyed my taste for letters.” A grin of self-approval at his own witticism closed this speech.

“But is it true, Billy, the lord is going to break up house entirely, and not come back here?” asked Peter Slevin, the sacristan, whose rank and station warranted his assuming the task of cross-questioner.

“There ‘s various ways of breakin’ up a house,” said Billy. “Ye may do so in a moral sinse, or in a physical sinse; you may obliterate, or extinguish, or, without going so far, you may simply obfuscate, – do you perceave?”

“Yes!” said the sacristan, on whom every eye was now bent, to see if he was able to follow subtleties that had outwitted the rest.

“And whin I say obfuscate,” resumed Billy, “I open a question of disputed etymology, bekase tho’ Lucretius thinks the word obfuscator original, there’s many supposes it comes from ob and fucus, the dye the ancients used in their wool, as we find in Horace, lana fuco medicata; while Cicero employs it in another sense, and says, facere fucum, which is as much as to say, humbuggin’ somebody, – do ye mind?”

“Begorra, he might guess that anyhow!” muttered a shrewd little tailor, with a significance that provoked hearty laughter.

“And now,” continued Billy, with an air of triumph, “we’ll proceed to the next point.”

“Ye needn’t trouble yerself then,” said Terry Lynch, “for Peter has gone home.”

And so, to the amusement of the meeting, it turned out to be the case; the sacristan had retired from the controversy. “Come in here to Mrs. Moore’s, Billy, and take a glass with us,” said Terry; “it isn’t often we see you in these parts.”

“If the honorable company will graciously vouchsafe and condescind to let me trate them to a half-gallon,” said Billy, “it will be the proudest event of my terrestrial existence.”

The proposition was received with a cordial enthusiasm, flattering to all concerned; and in a few minutes after, Billy Traynor sat at the head of a long table in the neat parlor of “The Griddle,” with a company of some fifteen or sixteen very convivially disposed friends around him.