Tony Butler

“Everything but the heaviest, Alice,” said the other smiling.

“Well, if he had opened that sorrow, I ‘d have heard him without anger; I’d have honestly told him it was a very vain and fruitless pursuit. But still my own heart would have declared to me that a young fellow is all the better for some romance of this kind, – that it elevates motives and dignifies actions, and, not least of all advantages, makes him very uncompanionable for creatures of mere dissipation and excess.”

“But that, of course, you were merely objective the while, – the source from which so many admirable results were to issue, and never so much as disturbed by the breath of his attachment. Is n’t that so?”

“I ‘d have said, ‘You ‘re a very silly boy if you imagine that anything can come of all this. ‘”

“And if he were to ask for the reason, and say, ‘Alice, are you not your own mistress, rich, free to do whatever you incline to do? Why should you call me a fool for loving you?’”

“Take my word for it, Bella, he ‘ll never risk the answer he ‘d be sure to meet to such a speech,” said the other, haughtily; and Isabella, who felt a sort of awe of her sister at certain moments, desisted from the theme. “Look! yonder they go, Maitland and Rebecca, not exactly arm-inarm, but with bent-down heads, and that propinquity that implies close converse.”

“I declare I feel quite jealous, – I mean on your account, Bella,” said Mrs. Trafford.

“Never mind my interests in the matter, Alice,” said she, reddening; “it is a matter of the most complete indifference to me with whom he walks or talks. Mr. Norman Maitland is not to me one whit more of consequence than is Tony Butler to my sister.”

“That’s a confession, Bella, – a confession wrung out of a hasty moment; for Tony certainly likes me, and I know it.”

“Well, then, the cases are not similar, for Mr. Maitland does not care for me; or, if he does, I don’t know it, nor do I want to know it.”

“Come, darling, put on your shawl, and let us have a breezy walk on the cliffs before the day darkens; neither of these gentlemen are worth the slightest estrangement between such sisters as we are. Whether Tony likes me or not, don’t steal him from me, and I ‘ll promise you to be just as loyal with regard to the other. How I ‘d like to know what they are talking of there!”

As it is not impossible the reader may in some slight degree participate in the fair widow’s sentiment, we mean to take up the conversation just as it reached the time in which the remark was applied to it. Miss Becky Graham was giving her companion a sketchy description of all the persons then at the Abbey, not taking any especial care to be epigrammatic or picturesque, but to be literal and truthful.

“Mrs. Maxwell, – an old horror, – tolerated just because she owns Tilney Park, and can leave it to whom she likes; and the Lyles hope it will fall to Mark, or, possibly, to Bella. They stand to win on either.”

“And which is the favorite?” asked Maitland, with a faint smile.

“You ‘d like to think Isabella,” said Miss Becky, with a sharp piercing glance to read his thoughts at an unguarded moment, if he had such, “but she is not. Old Aunt Maxwell – she ‘s as much your aunt as theirs – detests girls, and has, I actually believe, thoughts of marrying again. By the way, you said you wanted money; why not ‘go in’ there? eight thousand a-year in land, real estate, and a fine old house with some great timber around it.”

“I want to pay my old debts, not incur new ones, my dear Miss Graham.”

“I ‘m not your dear Miss Graham, – I ‘m Beck, or Becky, or I ‘m Miss Rebecca Graham, if you want to be respectful. But what do you say to the Maxwell handicap? I could do you a good turn there; she lets me say what I please to her.”

“I’d rather you’d give me that privilege with yourself, charming Rebecca.”

“Don’t, I say; don’t try that tiresome old dodge of mock flattery. I ‘m not charming, any more than you are honest or straightforward. Let us be on the square – do you understand that? Of course you do? Whom shall I trot out next for you? – for the whole lot shall be disposed of without any reserve. Will you have Sir Arthur, with his tiresome Indian stories, enhanced to himself by all the lacs of rupees that are associated with them? Will you have the gay widow, who married for pique, and inherited a great fortune by a blunder? Will you have Isabella, who is angling for a coronet, but would not refuse you if you are rich enough? Will you have that very light dragoon, who thinks ‘ours’ the standard for manners in Europe? – or the two elder brothers, gray-headed, pale-faced, husky-voiced civil servants, working hard to make a fortune in advance of a liver complaint? Say the ‘number’ and the animal shall be led out for inspection.”

“After all, it is scarcely fair in me to ask it, for I don’t come as a buyer.”

“Well, if you have a taste for that sort of thing – are we out of sight of the windows? – if so, let me have a cigarette like that you have there. I have n’t smoked for five months. Oh! is n’t it a pleasure?”

“Tell me about Mrs. Butler, – who is she?”

“She is Mrs. Butler; and her husband, when he was alive, was Colonel Butler, militarily known as Wat Tartar. He was a terrible pipeclay; and her son Tony is the factotum at the Abbey; or rather he was, till Mark told him to shave, a poodle, or singe a pony, or paint a wheelbarrow – I forget; but I know it was something he had done once out of good-humor, and the hussar creature fancied he’d make him do it again through an indignity.”

“And he – I mean Butler – stands upon being a gentleman?”

“I should think he does; is not his birth good?”

“Certainly; the Butlers are of an old stock.”

“They talk of an uncle, Sir Ramrod, – it is n’t Ramrod, but it’s like it, – a tiresome old fellow, who was envoy at Naples, and who married, I believe, a ballet-dancer, and who might leave Tony all his fortune, if he liked, – which he doesn’t.”

“Having no family of his own?” asked Maitland, as he puffed his cigar.

“None; but that doesn’t matter, for he has turned Jesuit, and will leave everything to the sacred something or other in Rome. I ‘ve heard all that from old Widow Butler, who has a perfect passion for talking of her amiable brother-in-law, as she calls him. She hates him, – always did hate him, – and taught Tony to hate him; and with all that it was only yesterday she said to me that perhaps she was not fully justified in sending back unopened two letters he had written to her, – one after the loss of some Canadian bonds of hers, which got rumored abroad in the newspapers; the other was on Tony’s coming of age; and she said, ‘Becky, I begin to suspect that I had no right to carry my own unforgiveness to the extent of an injury to my boy, – tell me what you would do.’”

“And what was your answer?”

“I’d have made it up with the old swell. I’d say, ‘Is not this boy more to you than all those long-petticoated tonsured humbugs, who can always cheat some one or other out of an Inheritance?’ I ‘d say, ‘Look at him, and you’ll fancy it’s Walter telling you that he forgives you.’”

“If he be like most of his order, Miss Becky, he ‘d only smile at your appeal,” said Maitland, coldly.

“Well, I ‘d not let it be laughing matter with him, I can tell you; stupid wills are broken every day of the week, and I don’t think the Jesuits are in such favor in England that a jury would decide for them against an English youth of the kith and kin of the testator.”

“You speak cleverly, Miss Graham, and you show that you know all the value that attaches to popular sympathy in the age we live in.”

“And don’t you agree with me?”

“Ah, there’s a deal to be said on either side.”

“Then, for Heaven’s sake, don’t say it. There – no – more to the left – there, where you see the blue smoke rising over the rocks – there stands the widow’s cottage. I don’t know how she endures the loneliness of it. Could you face such a life?”

“A double solitude – what the French call an egoisme à deux– is not so insupportable. In fact, it all depends upon ‘the partner with whom we share our isolation.’” He threw a tone of half tenderness into the words that made them very significant, and Rebecca gave him one of her quick sudden glances with which she often read a secret motive. This time, however, she failed. There was nothing in that sallow but handsome face that revealed a clew to anything.

“I ‘ll have to ask Mrs. Butler’s leave before I present you,” said she, suddenly.

“Of course, I ‘ll await her permission.”

“The chances are she’ll say no; indeed, it is all but certain she will.”

“Then I must resign myself to patience and a cigar till you come out again,” said he, calmly.

“Shall I say that there’s any reason for your visit? Do you know any Butlers, or have you any relationship, real or pretended, with the family, that would make a pretext for coming to see her?”

Had Miss Graham only glanced as keenly at Maitland’s features now as she had a few moments back, she might have seen a faint, a very faint, flush cross his cheek, and then give way to a deep paleness. “No,” said he, coldly, “I cannot pretend the shadow of a claim to her acquaintance, and I can scarcely presume to ask you to present me as a friend of your own, except in the common acceptation given to the word.”

“Oh, I’ll do that readily enough. Bless your heart, if there was anything to be gained by it, I ‘d call you my cousin, and address you as Norman all the time of the visit.”

“If you but knew how the familiarity would flatter me, particularly were I to return it!”

“And call me Becky, – I hope! Well, you are a cool hand!”

“My friends are in the habit of amusing themselves with my diffidence and my timidity.”

“They must be very ill off for a pastime, then. I used to think Mark Lyle bad enough, but his is a blushing bash-fulness compared to yours.”

“You only see me in my struggle to overcome a natural defect. Miss Graham, – just as a coward assumes the bully to conceal his poltroonery; you regard in me the mock audacity that strives to shroud a most painful modesty.”

She looked full at him for an instant, and then burst into a loud and joyful fit of laughter, in which he joined without the faintest show of displeasure. “Well, I believe you are good-tempered,” said she, frankly.

“The best in the world; I am very seldom angry; I never bear malice.”

“Have you any other good qualities?” asked she, with a slight mockery in her voice.

“Yes, – many; I am trustful to the verge of credulity; I am generous to the limits of extravagance; I am unswerving in my friendships, and without the taint of a selfishness in all my nature.”

“How nice that is, or how nice it must be!”

“I could grow eloquent over my gifts, if it were not that my bashfulness might embarrass me.”

“Have you any faults?”

“I don’t think so; at least I can’t recall any.”

“Nor failings?”

“Failings! perhaps,” said he, dubiously; “but they are, after all, mere weaknesses, – such as a liking for splendor, a love of luxury generally, a taste for profusion, a sort of regal profusion in daily life, which occasionally jars with my circumstances, making me – not irritable, I am never irritable – but low-spirited and depressed.”

“Then, from what you have told me, I think I’d better say to Mrs. Butler that there ‘s an angel waiting outside who is most anxious to make her acquaintance.”

“Do so; and add that he ‘ll fold his wings, and sit on this stone till you come to fetch him.”

“Au revoir, Gabriel, then,” said she, passing in at the wicket, and taking her way through the little garden.

Maitland sat discussing in his own mind the problem how far Alcibiades was right or wrong in endeavoring to divert the world from any criticism of himself by a certain alteration in his dog’s tail, rather opining that, in our day at least, the wiser course would have been to avoid all comment whatsoever, – the imputation of an eccentricity being only second to the accusation of a crime. With the Greeks of that day the false scent was probably a success; with the English of ours, the real wisdom is not to be hunted. “Oh, if it were all to be done again, how very differently I should do it!”

“Indeed, and in what respect?” said a voice behind his shoulder. He looked up, and saw Beck Graham gazing on him with something of interest in her expression. “How so?” cried she, again. Not in the slightest degree discomposed or flurried, he lay lazily back on the sward, and drawing his hand over his eyes to shade them from the sun, said, in a half-languid, weary tone, “If it were to do again, I ‘d go in for happiness.”

“What do you mean by happiness?”

“What we all mean by it: an organized selfishness, that draws a close cordon round our home, and takes care to keep out, so far as possible, duns, bores, fevers, and fashionable acquaintances. By the way, is your visit ended, or will she see me?”

“Not to-day. She hopes to-morrow to be able. She asks if you are of the Maitlands of Gillie – Gillie – not ‘crankie,’ but a sound like it, – and if your mother’s name was Janet.”

“And I trust, from the little you know of me, you assured her it could not be,” said he, calmly.

“Well, I said that I knew no more of your family than all the rest of us up at the Abbey, who have been sifting all the Maitlands in the three kingdoms in the hope of finding you.”

“How flattering! and at the same time how vain a labor! The name came to me with some fortune. I took it as I ‘d have taken a more ill-sounding one for money! Who wouldn’t be baptized in bank stock? I hope it’s not on the plea of my mother being Janet, that she consents to receive me?”

“She hopes you are Lady Janet’s son, and that you have the Maitland eyes, which it seems are dark, and a something in their manner which she assures me was especially captivating.”

“And for which, I trust, you vouched?”

“Yes. I said you were a clever sort of person, that could do a number of things well, and that I for one did n’t quarrel with your vanity or conceit, but thought them rather good fun.”

“So they are! and we ‘ll laugh at them together,” said he, rising, and preparing to set out “What a blessing to find one that really understands me! I wish to heaven that you were not engaged!”

“And who says I am?” cried she, almost fiercely.

“Did I dream it? Who knows? The fact is, my dear Miss Becky, we do talk with such a rare freedom to each other, it is pardonable to mix up one’s reveries with his actual information. How do you call that ruin yonder?”

“Dunluce.”

“And that great bluff beyond it?”

“Fairhead.”

“I ‘ll take a long walk to-morrow, and visit that part of the coast.”

“You are forgetting you are to call on Mrs. Butler.”

“So I was. At what hour are we to be here?”

“There is no question of ‘we’ in the matter; your modesty must make its advances alone.”

“You are not angry with me, cariasima Rebecca?”

“Don’t think that a familiarity is less a liberty because it is dressed in a foreign tongue.”

“But it would ‘out;’ the expression forced itself from my lips in spite of me, just as some of the sharp things you have been saying to me were perfectly irrepressible?”

“I suspect you like this sort of sparring?”

“Delight in it”

“So do I. There’s only one condition I make: whenever you mean to take off the gloves, and intend to hit out hard, that you ‘ll say so before. Is that agreed?”

“It’s a bargain.”

She held out her hand frankly, and he took it as cordially; and in a hearty squeeze the compact was ratified.

“Shall I tell you,” said she, as they drew nigh the Abbey, “that you are a great puzzle to us all here? We none of us can guess how so great a person as yourself should condescend to come down to such an out-o’-the-world spot, and waste his fascinations on such dull company.”

“Your explanation, I ‘ll wager, was the true one: let me hear it.”

“I called it eccentricity; the oddity of a man who had traded so long in oddity that he grew to be inexplicable, even to himself, and that an Irish country-house was one of the few things you had not ‘done,’ and that you were determined to ‘do’ it.”

“There was that, and something more,” said Maitland, thoughtfully.

“The ‘something more’ being, I take it, the whole secret.”

“As you read me like a book, Miss Rebecca, all I ask is, that you ‘ll shut the volume when you ‘ve done with it, and not talk over it with your literary friends.”

“It is not my way,” said she, half pettishly; and they reached the door as she spoke.

CHAPTER VIII. SOME EXPLANATIONS

If there was anything strange or inexplicable in the appearance of one of Maitland’s pretensions in an unfrequented and obscure part of the world, – if there was matter in it to puzzle the wise heads of squires, and make country intelligences look confused, – there is no earthly reason why any mystification should be practised with our reader. He, at least, is under our guidance, and to him we impart whatever is known to ourselves. For a variety of reasons, some of which this history later on will disclose, – others, the less imminent, we are free now to avow, – Mr. Norman Maitland had latterly addressed much of his mind to the political intrigues of a foreign country: that country was Naples. He had known it – we are not free to say how, at this place – from his childhood; he knew its people in every rank and class; he knew its dialect in all its idioms. He could talk the slang of the lazzaroni, and the wild patois of Calabria, just as fluently as that composite language which the King Ferdinand used, and which was a blending of the vulgarisms of the Chiaja with the Frenchified chit-chat of the Court. There were events happening in Italy which, though not for the moment involving the question of Naples, suggested to the wiser heads in that country the sense of a coming peril. We cannot, at this place, explain how or why Maitland should have been a sharer in these deeds; it is enough to say that he was one of a little knot who had free access to the palace, and enjoyed constant intercourse with the king, – free to tell him of all that went on in his brilliant capital of vice and levity, to narrate its duels, its defalcations, its intrigues, its family scandals and domestic disgraces, – to talk of anything and everything but one: not a word on politics was to escape them; never in the most remote way was a syllable to drop of either what was happening in the State, or what comments the French or English press might pass on it. No allusion was to escape on questions of government, nor the name of a minister to be spoken, except he were the hero of some notorious scandal. All these precautions could not stifle fear. The menials had seen the handwriting on the wall before Belshazzar’s eyes had fallen on it. The men who stood near the throne saw that it rocked already. There was but one theme within the palace, – the fidelity of the army; and every rude passage between the soldiery and the people seemed to testify to that faithfulness. Amongst those who were supposed to enjoy the sovereign confidence – for none in reality possessed it – was the Count Caffarelli, a man of very high family and large fortune; and though not in the slightest degree tinctured with Liberalism in politics, one of the very few Neapolitan nobles who either understood the drift, or estimated the force of the party of action. He foresaw the coming struggle, and boded ill of its result. With Mr. Maitland he lived in closest intimacy. The Italian, though older than the Englishman, had been his companion in years of dissipation. In every capital of Europe these two men had left traditions of extravagance and excess. They had an easy access to the highest circles in every city, and it was their pleasure to mix in all, even to the lowest Between them there had grown what, between such men, represented a strong friendship, – that is, either would readily have staked his life or his fortune; in other words, have fought a duel, or paid the play-debts of the other. Each knew the exact rules of honor which guided the conduct of the other, and knew, besides, that no other principles than these held any sway or influence over him.

Caffarelli saw that the Bourbon throne was in danger, and with it the fortunes of all who adhered to the dynasty. If all his prejudices and sympathies were with monarchy, these would not have prevented him from making terms with the revolution, if he thought the revolution could be trusted; but this was precisely what he did not, could not believe.

“Ceux qui sont Bleus restent Bleus” said the first Napoleon; and so Caffarelli assured himself that a canaille always would be a canaille. Philip Égalité was a case in point of what came of such concessions; therefore he decided it was better to stand by the monarchy, and that real policy consisted in providing that there should be a monarchy to stand by.

To play that mock game of popularity, the being cheered by the lazzaroni, was the extent of toleration to which the king could be persuaded. Indeed, he thought these vivas the hearty outburst of a fervent and affectionate loyalty; and many of his Ministers appeared to concur with him. Caffarelli, who was Master of the Horse, deemed otherwise, and confessed to Maitland that, though assassination was cheap enough in the quarter of Santa Lucia, there was a most indiscriminating indifference as to who might be the victim, and that the old Marquess of Montanara, the Prefect of the Palace, would not cost a carlino more than the veriest follower of Mazzini.

Both Caffarelli and Maitland enjoyed secret sources of information. They were members of that strange league which has a link in every grade and class of Neapolitan society, and makes the very highest in station the confidant and the accomplice of the most degraded and the meanest This sect, called La Camorra, was originally a mere system of organized extortion, driving, by force of menace, an impost on every trade and occupation, and exacting its dues by means of agents well known to be capable of the greatest crimes. Caffarelli, who had long employed its services to assist him in his intrigues or accomplish his vengeances, was a splendid contributor to its resources. He was rich and munificent; he loved profusion, but he adored it when it could be made the mainspring of some dark and mysterious machinery. Though the Camorra was not in the remotest degree political, Caffarelli learned, through its agency, that the revolutionary party were hourly gaining strength and courage. They saw the growing discontent that spread abroad about the ruling dynasty, and they knew how little favor would be shown the Bourbons by the Western Powers, whose counsels had been so flatly rejected, and whose warnings despised. They felt that their hour was approaching, and that Northern Italy would soon hasten to their aid if the work of overthrow were once fairly begun. Their only doubts were lest the success, when achieved, should have won nothing for them. It may be as in Forty-eight, said they; we may drive the king out of Naples as we drove the Austrians out of Milan, and, after all, only be conquering a larger kingdom for the House of Savoy. Hence they hesitated and held back; nor were their fears causeless. For what had revolution poured forth its blood like water in Paris? To raise up the despotism of the Second Empire!

Caffarelli was in possession of all this; he knew what they hoped and wished and feared. The Camorra itself numbered many professed revolutionists (“Reds,” as they liked to be called) in its sect, but was itself untinctured by politics. The wily Count thought that it was a pity so good an organization should be wasted on mere extortion and robbery. There were higher crimes they might attain to, and grander interests they might subserve. Never, perhaps, was the world of Europe so much in the hands of a few powerful men. Withdraw from it, say, half a dozen, – one could name them at once, – and what a change might come over the Continent! Caffarelli was no assassin; but there are men, and he was one of them, that can trifle with great crimes, just as children play with fire; who can jest with them, laugh at them, and sport with them, till, out of mere familiarity, they forget the horror they should inspire and the penalty they enforce. He had known Orsini intimately, and liked him; nor did he talk of his memory with less affection that he had died beneath the guillotine. He would not himself engage in a crime that would dishonor his name; but he knew there were a great number of people in the world who could no more be punctilious about honor than about the linen they wore, – fellows who walked in rags and dined off garlic. Why should they stick at trifles? They had no noble escutcheons to be tarnished, no splendid names, no high lineage to be disgraced. In fact, there were crimes that became them, just as certain forms of labor suited them. They worked with their hands in each case. Amongst the Camorra he knew many such. The difficulty was to bring the power of the sect to bear upon the questions that engaged him. It would not have been difficult to make them revolutionists, – the one word “pillage” would have sufficed for that; the puzzle was how to make them royalists. Mere pay would not do. These fellows had got a taste for irregular gain. To expect to win them over by pay, or retain them by discipline, was to hope to convert a poacher by inviting him to a battue. Caffarelli had revolved the matter very long and carefully; he had talked it over scores of times with Maitland. They agreed that the Camorra had great capabilities, if one only could use them. Through the members of that league in the army they had learned that the troops, the long-vaunted reliance of the monarchy, could not be trusted. Many regiments were ready to take arms with the Reds; many more would disband and return to their homes. As for the navy, they declared there was not one ship’s company would stand by the Sovereign. The most well-affected would be neutral; none save the foreign legions would fight for the king. The question then was, to reinforce these, and at once, – a matter far more difficult than it used to be. Switzerland would no longer permit this recruitment. Austria would give none but her criminals. America, it was said, abounded in ardent adventurous spirits that would readily risk life in pursuit of fortune; but then the cause was not one which, by any ingenuity, could be made to seem that of liberty. Nothing then remained but Ireland. There there was bravery and poverty both; thousands, who had no fears and very little food, ready for any enterprise, but far readier for one which could be dignified as being the battle of the Truth and the cause of the Holy Father.