Lord Kilgobbin

‘Mr. Miller’s friends, besides,’ interposed Father Luke, ‘would defend the Church and protect the Holy See’ – and this was said with a half-interrogation.

Miller coughed twice, and said, ‘Unquestionably. We have shown our hand already – look what we have done with the Established Church.’

‘You need not be proud of it,’ cried Miss Betty. ‘If you wanted to get rid of the crows, why didn’t you pull down the rookery?’

‘At least they don’t caw so loud as they used,’ said the priest, smiling; and Miller exchanged delighted glances with him for his opinion.

‘I want to be rid of them, root and branch,’ said Miss Betty.

‘If you will vouchsafe us, ma’am, a little patience. Rome was not built in a day. The next victory of our Church must be won by the downfall of the English establishment. Ain’t I right, Father Luke?’

‘I am not quite clear about that,’ said the priest cautiously. ‘Equality is not the safe road to supremacy.’

‘What was that row over towards Croghan Castle this morning?’ asked Gorman, who was getting wearied with a discussion he could not follow. ‘I saw the constabulary going in force there this afternoon.’

‘They were in pursuit of the celebrated Dan Donogan,’ said Father Luke. ‘They say he was seen at Moate.’

‘They say more than that,’ said Miss Betty. ‘They say that he is stopping at Kilgobbin Castle!’

‘I suppose to conduct young Kearney’s election,’ said Miller, laughing.

‘And why should they hunt him down?’ asked Gorman. ‘What has he done?’

‘He’s a Fenian – a head-centre – a man who wants to revolutionise Ireland,’ replied Miller.

‘And destroy the Church,’ chimed in the priest.

‘Humph!’ muttered Gorman, who seemed to imply, Is this all you can lay to his charge? ‘Has he escaped? asked he suddenly.

‘Up to this he has,’ said Miller. ‘I was talking to the constabulary chief this afternoon, and he told me that the fellow is sure to be apprehended. He has taken to the open bog, and there are eighteen in full cry after him. There is a search-warrant, too, arrived, and they mean to look him up at Kilgobbin Castle.’

‘To search Kilgobbin Castle, do you mean?’ asked Gorman.

‘Just so. It will be, as I perceive you think it, a great offence to Mr. Kearney, and it is not impossible that his temper may provoke him to resist it.’

‘The mere rumour may materially assist his son’s election,’ said the priest slyly.

‘Only with the party who have no votes, Father Luke,’ rejoined Miller. ‘That precarious popularity of the mob is about the most dangerous enemy a man can have in Ireland.’

‘You are right, sir,’ said the priest blandly. ‘The real favour of this people is only bestowed on him who has gained the confidence of the clergy.’

‘If that be true,’ cried Gorman, ‘upon my oath I think you are worse off here than in Austria. There, at least, we are beginning to think without the permission of the Church.’

‘Let us have none of your atheism here, young man,’ broke in his aunt angrily. ‘Such sentiments have never been heard in this room before.’

‘If I apprehend Lieutenant Gorman aright,’ interposed Father Luke, ‘he only refers to the late movement of the Austrian Empire with reference to the Concordat, on which, amongst religious men, there are two opinions.’

‘No, no, you mistake me altogether,’ rejoined Gorman. ‘What I mean was, that a man can read, and talk, and think in Austria without the leave of the priest; that he can marry, and if he like, he can die without his assistance.’

‘Gorman, you are a beast,’ said the old lady, ‘and if you lived here, you would be a Fenian.’

‘You’re wrong too, aunt,’ replied he. ‘I’d crush those fellows to-morrow if I was in power here.’

‘Mayhap the game is not so easy as you deem it,’ interposed Miller.

‘Certainly it is not so easy when played as you do it here. You deal with your law-breakers only by the rule of legality: that is to say, you respect all the regulations of the game towards the men who play false. You have your cumbrous details, and your lawyers, and judges, and juries, and you cannot even proclaim a county in a state of siege without a bill in your blessed Parliament, and a basketful of balderdash about the liberty of the subject. Is it any wonder rebellion is a regular trade with you, and that men who don’t like work, or business habits, take to it as a livelihood?’

‘But have you never heard Curran’s saying, young gentleman? “You cannot bring an indictment against a nation,’” said Miller.

‘I’d trouble myself little with indictments,’ replied Gorman. ‘I’d break down the confederacy by spies; I’d seize the fellows I knew to be guilty, and hang them.’

‘Without evidence, without trial?’

‘Very little of a trial, when I had once satisfied myself of the guilt.’

‘Are you so certain that no innocent men might be brought to the scaffold?’ asked the priest mildly.

‘No, I am not. I take it, as the world goes, very few of us go through life without some injustice or another. I’d do my best not to hang the fellows who didn’t deserve it, but I own I’d be much more concerned about the millions who wanted to live peaceably than the few hundred rapscallions that were bent on troubling them.’

‘I must say, sir,’ said the priest, ‘I am much more gratified to know that you are a Lieutenant of Lancers in Austria than a British Minister in Downing Street.’

‘I have little doubt myself,’ said the other, laughing, ‘that I am more in my place; but of this I am sure, that if we were as mealy-mouthed with our Croats and Slovacks as you are with your Fenians, Austria would soon go to pieces.’

‘There is, however, a higher price on that man Donogan’s head than Austria ever offered for a traitor,’ said Miller.

‘I know how you esteem money here,’ said Gorman, laughing. ‘When all else fails you, you fall back upon it.’

‘Why did I know nothing of these sentiments, young man, before I asked you under my roof?’ said Miss Betty, in anger.

‘You need never to have known them now, aunt, if these gentlemen had not provoked them, nor indeed are they solely mine. I am only telling you what you would hear from any intelligent foreigner, even though he chanced to be a liberal in his own country.’

‘Ah, yes,’ sighed the priest: ‘what the young gentleman says is too true. The Continent is alarmingly infected with such opinions as these.’

‘Have you talked on politics with young Kearney?’ asked Miller.

‘He has had no opportunity,’ interposed Miss O’Shea. ‘My nephew will be three weeks here on Thursday next, and neither Mathew nor his son have called on him.’

‘Scarcely neighbourlike that, I must say,’ cried Miller.

‘I suspect the fault lies on my side,’ said Gorman boldly. ‘When I was little more than a boy, I was never out of that house. The old man treated me like a son. All the more, perhaps, as his own son was seldom at home, and the little girl Kitty certainly regarded me as a brother; and though we had our fights and squabbles, we cried very bitterly at parting, and each of us vowed we should never like any one so much again. And now, after all, here am I three weeks, within two hours’ ride of them, and my aunt insists that my dignity requires I should be first called on. Confound such dignity! say I, if it lose me the best and the pleasantest friends I ever had in my life.’

‘I scarcely thought of your dignity, Gorman O’Shea,’ said the old lady, bridling, ‘though I did bestow some consideration on my own.’

‘I’m very sorry for it, aunt, and I tell you fairly – and there’s no unpoliteness in the confession – that when I asked for my leave, Kilgobbin Castle had its place in my thoughts as well as O’Shea’s Barn.’

‘Why not say it out, young gentleman, and tell me that the real charm of coming here was to be within twelve miles of the Kearneys.’

‘The merits of this house are very independent of contiguity,’ said the priest; and as he eyed the claret in his glass, it was plain that the sentiment was an honest one.

‘Fifty-six wine, I should say,’ said Miller, as he laid down his glass.

‘Forty-five, if Mr. Barton be a man of his word,’ said the old lady reprovingly.

‘Ah,’ sighed the priest plaintively, ‘how rarely one meets these old full-bodied clarets nowadays. The free admission of French wines has corrupted taste and impaired palate. Our cheap Gladstones have come upon us like universal suffrage.’

‘The masses, however, benefit,’ remarked Miller.

‘Only in the first moment of acquisition, and in the novelty of the gain,’ continued Father Luke; ‘and then they suffer irreparably in the loss of that old guidance, which once directed appreciation when there was something to appreciate.’

‘We want the priest again, in fact,’ broke in Gorman.

‘You must admit they understand wine to perfection, though I would humbly hope, young gentleman,’ said the Father modestly, ‘to engage your good opinion of them on higher grounds.’

‘Give yourself no trouble in the matter, Father Luke,’ broke in Miss Betty. ‘Gorman’s Austrian lessons have placed him beyond your teaching.’

‘My dear aunt, you are giving the Imperial Government a credit it never deserved. They taught me as a cadet to groom my horse and pipeclay my uniform, to be respectful to my corporal, and to keep my thumb on the seam of my trousers when the captain’s eye was on me; but as to what passed inside my mind, if I had a mind at all, or what I thought of Pope, Kaiser, or Cardinal, they no more cared to know it than the name of my sweetheart.’

‘What a blessing to that benighted country would be one liberal statesman!’ exclaimed Miller: ‘one man of the mind and capacity of our present Premier!’

‘Heaven forbid!’ cried Gorman. ‘We have confusion enough, without the reflection of being governed by what you call here “healing measures.”’

‘I should like to discuss that point with you,’ said Miller.

‘Not now, I beg,’ interposed Miss O’Shea. ‘Gorman, will you decant another bottle?’

‘I believe I ought to protest against more wine,’ said the priest, in his most insinuating voice; ‘but there are occasions where the yielding to temptation conveys a moral lesson.’

‘I suspect that I cultivate my nature a good deal in that fashion,’ said Gorman, as he opened a fresh bottle.

‘This is perfectly delicious,’ said Miller, as he sipped his glass; ‘and if I could venture to presume so far, I would ask leave to propose a toast.’

‘You have my permission, sir,’ said Miss Betty, with stateliness.

‘I drink, then,’ said he reverently, ‘I drink to the long life, the good health, and the unbroken courage of the Holy Father.’

There was something peculiarly sly in the twinkle of the priest’s black eye as he filled his bumper, and a twitching motion of the corner of his mouth continued even as he said, ‘To the Pope.’

‘The Pope,’ said Gorman as he eyed his wine —

‘“Der Papst lebt herrlich in der Welt.”’

‘What are you muttering there?’ asked his aunt fiercely.

‘The line of an old song, aunt, that tells us how his Holiness has a jolly time of it.’

‘I fear me it must have been written in other days,’ said Father Luke.

‘There is no intention to desert or abandon him, I assure you,’ said Miller, addressing him in a low but eager tone. ‘I could never – no Irishman could – ally himself to an administration which should sacrifice the Holy See. With the bigotry that prevails in England, the question requires most delicate handling; and even a pledge cannot be given except in language so vague and unprecise as to admit of many readings.’

‘Why not bring in a Bill to give him a subsidy, a something per annum, or a round sum down?’ cried Gorman.

‘Mr. Miller has just shown us that Exeter Hall might become dangerous. English intolerance is not a thing to be rashly aroused.’

‘If I had to deal with him, I’d do as Bright proposed with your landlords here. I’d buy him out, give him a handsome sum for his interest, and let him go.’

‘And how would you deal with the Church, sir?’ asked the priest.

‘I have not thought of that; but I suppose one might put it into commission, as they say, or manage it by a Board, with a First Lord, like the Admiralty.’

‘I will give you some tea, gentlemen, when you appear in the drawing-room,’ said Miss Betty, rising with dignity, as though her condescension in sitting so long with the party had been ill rewarded by her nephew’s sentiments.

The priest, however, offered his arm, and the others followed as he left the room.

CHAPTER XXXIX

AN EARLY GALLOP

Mathew Kearney had risen early, an unusual thing with him of late; but he had some intention of showing his guest Mr. Walpole over the farm after breakfast, and was anxious to give some preliminary orders to have everything ‘ship-shape’ for the inspection.

To make a very disorderly and much-neglected Irish farm assume an air of discipline, regularity, and neatness at a moment’s notice, was pretty much such an exploit as it would have been to muster an Indian tribe, and pass them before some Prussian martinet as a regiment of guards.

To make the ill-fenced and misshapen fields seem trim paddocks, wavering and serpentining furrows appear straight and regular lines of tillage, weed-grown fields look marvels of cleanliness and care, while the lounging and ragged population were to be passed off as a thriving and industrious peasantry, well paid and contented, were difficulties that Mr. Kearney did not propose to confront. Indeed, to do him justice, he thought there was a good deal of pedantic and ‘model-farming’ humbug about all that English passion for neatness he had read of in public journals, and as our fathers – better gentlemen, as he called them, and more hospitable fellows than any of us – had got on without steam-mowing and threshing, and bone-crushing, he thought we might farm our properties without being either blacksmiths or stokers.

‘God help us,’ he would say, ‘I suppose we’ll be chewing our food by steam one of these days, and filling our stomachs by hydraulic pressure. But for my own part, I like something to work for me that I can swear at when it goes wrong. There’s little use in cursing a cylinder.’

To have heard him amongst his labourers that morning, it was plain to see that they were not in the category of machinery. On one pretext or another, however, they had slunk away one by one, so that at last he found himself storming alone in a stubble-field, with no other companion than one of Kate’s terriers. The sharp barking of this dog aroused him in the midst of his imprecations, and looking over the dry-stone wall that inclosed the field, he saw a horseman coming along at a sharp canter, and taking the fences as they came like a man in a hunting-field. He rode well, and was mounted upon a strong wiry hackney – a cross-bred horse, and of little money value, but one of those active cats of horseflesh that a knowing hand can appreciate. Now, little as Kearney liked the liberty of a man riding over his ditches and his turnips when out of hunting season, his old love of good horsemanship made him watch the rider with interest and even pleasure. ‘May I never!’ muttered he to himself, ‘if he’s not coming at this wall.’ And as the inclosure in question was built of large jagged stones, without mortar, and fully four feet in height, the upper course being formed of a sort of coping in which the stones stood edgewise, the attempt did look somewhat rash. Not taking the wall where it was slightly breached, and where some loose stones had fallen, the rider rode boldly at one of the highest portions, but where the ground was good on either side.

‘He knows what he’s at!’ muttered Kearney, as the horse came bounding over and alighted in perfect safety in the field.

‘Well done! whoever you are,’ cried Kearney, delighted, as the rider removed his hat and turned round to salute him.

‘And don’t you know me, sir?’ asked he.

‘‘Faith, I do not,’ replied Kearney; ‘but somehow I think I know the chestnut. To be sure I do. There’s the old mark on her knee, how ever she found the man who could throw her down. Isn’t she Miss O’Shea’s Kattoo?’

‘That she is, sir, and I’m her nephew.’

‘Are you?’ said Kearney dryly.

The young fellow was so terribly pulled up by the unexpected repulse – more marked even by the look than the words of the other – that he sat unable to utter a syllable. ‘I had hoped, sir,’ said he at last, ‘that I had not outgrown your recollection, as I can promise none of your former kindness to me has outgrown mine.’

‘But it took you three weeks to recall it, all the same,’ said Kearney.

‘It is true, sir, I am very nearly so long here; but my aunt, whose guest I am, told me I must be called on first; that – I’m sure I can’t say for whose benefit it was supposed to be – I should not make the first visit; in fact, there was some rule about the matter, and that I must not contravene it. And although I yielded with a very bad grace, I was in a measure under orders, and dared not resist.’

‘She told you, of course, that we were not on our old terms: that there was a coldness between the families, and we had seen nothing of each other lately?’

‘Not a word of it, sir.’

‘Nor of any reason why you should not come here as of old?’

‘None, on my honour; beyond this piece of stupid etiquette, I never heard of anything like a reason.’

‘I am all the better pleased with my old neighbour,’ said Kearney, in his more genial tone. ‘Not, indeed, that I ought ever to have distrusted her, but for all that – Well, never mind,’ muttered he, as though debating the question with himself, and unable to decide it, ‘you are here now – eh! You are here now.’

‘You almost make me suspect, sir, that I ought not to be here now.’

‘At all events, if you were waiting for me you wouldn’t be here. Is not that true, young gentleman?’

‘Quite true, sir, but not impossible to explain.’ And he now flung himself to the ground, and with the rein over his arm, came up to Kearney’s side. ‘I suppose, but for an accident, I should have gone on waiting for that visit you had no intention to make me, and canvassing with myself how long you were taking to make up your mind to call on me, when I heard only last night that some noted rebel – I’ll remember his name in a minute or two – was seen in the neighbourhood, and that the police were on his track with a warrant, and even intended to search for him here.’

‘In my house – in Kilgobbin Castle?’

‘Yes, here in your house, where, from a sure information, he had been harboured for some days. This fellow – a head-centre, or leader, with a large sum on his head – has, they say, got away; but the hope of finding some papers, some clue to him here, will certainly lead them to search the castle, and I thought I’d come over and apprise you of it at all events, lest the surprise should prove too much for your temper.’

‘Do they forget I’m in the commission of the peace?’ said Kearney, in a voice trembling with passion.

‘You know far better than me how far party spirit tempers life in this country, and are better able to say whether some private intention to insult is couched under this attempt.’

‘That’s true,’ cried the old man, ever ready to regard himself as the object of some secret malevolence. ‘You cannot remember this rebel’s name, can you?’

‘It was Daniel something – that’s all I know.’

A long, fine whistle was Kearney’s rejoinder, and after a second or two he said, ‘I can trust you, Gorman; and I may tell you they may be not so great fools as I took them for. Not that I was harbouring the fellow, mind you; but there came a college friend of Dick’s here a few days back – a clever fellow he was, and knew Ireland well – and we called him Mr. Daniel, and it was but yesterday he left us and did not return. I have a notion now he was the head-centre they’re looking for.’

‘Do you know if he has left any baggage or papers behind him?’

‘I know nothing about this whatever, nor do I know how far Dick was in his secret.’

‘You will be cool and collected, I am sure, sir, when they come here with the search-warrant. You’ll not give them even the passing triumph of seeing that you are annoyed or offended?’

‘That I will, my lad. I’m prepared now, and I’ll take them as easy as if it was a morning call. Come in and have your breakfast with us, and say nothing about what we’ve been talking over.’

‘Many thanks, sir, but I think – indeed I feel sure – I ought to go back at once. I have come here without my aunt’s knowledge, and now that I have seen you and put you on your guard, I ought to go back as fast as I can.’

‘So you shall, when you feed your beast and take something yourself. Poor old Kattoo isn’t used to this sort of cross-country work, and she’s panting there badly enough. That mare is twenty-one years of age.’

‘She’s fresh on her legs – not a curb nor a spavin, nor even a wind-gall about her,’ said the young man.

‘And the reward for it all is to be ridden like a steeplechaser!’ sighed old Kearney. ‘Isn’t that the world over? Break down early, and you are a good-for-nothing. Carry on your spirit, and your pluck, and your endurance to a green old age, and maybe they won’t take it out of you! – always contrasting you, however, with yourself long ago, and telling the bystanders what a rare beast you were in your good days. Do you think they had dared to pass this insult upon me when I was five-and-twenty or thirty? Do you think there’s a man in the county would have come on this errand to search Kilgobbin when I was a young man, Mr. O’Shea?’

‘I think you can afford to treat it with the contempt you have determined to show it.’

‘That’s all very fine now,’ said Kearney; ‘but there was a time I’d rather have chucked the chief constable out of the window and sent the sergeant after him.’

‘I don’t know whether that would have been better,’ said Gorman, with a faint smile.

‘Neither do I; but I know that I myself would have felt better and easier in my mind after it. I’d have eaten my breakfast with a good appetite, and gone about my day’s work, whatever it was, with a free heart and fearless in my conscience! Ay, ay,’ muttered he to himself, ‘poor old Ireland isn’t what it used to be!’

‘I’m very sorry, sir, but though I’d like immensely to go back with you, don’t you think I ought to return home?’

‘I don’t think anything of the sort. Your aunt and I had a tiff the last time we met, and that was some months ago. We’re both of us old and cross-grained enough to keep up the grudge for the rest of our lives. Let us, then, make the most of the accident that has led you here, and when you go home, you shall be the bearer of the most submissive message I can invent to my old friend, and there shall be no terms too humble for me to ask her pardon.’

‘That’s enough, sir. I’ll breakfast here.’

‘Of course you’ll say nothing of what brought you over here. But I ought to warn you not to drop anything carelessly about politics in the county generally, for we have a young relative and a private secretary of the Lord-Lieutenant’s visiting us, and it’s as well to be cautious before him.’

The old man mentioned this circumstance in the cursory tone of an ordinary remark, but he could not conceal the pride he felt in the rank and condition of his guest. As for Gorman, perhaps it was his foreign breeding, perhaps his ignorance of all home matters generally, but he simply assented to the force of the caution, and paid no other attention to the incident.

‘His name is Walpole, and he is related to half the peerage,’ said the old man, with some irritation of manner.

A mere nod acknowledged the information, and he went on —

‘This was the young fellow who was with Kitty on the night they attacked the castle, and he got both bones of his forearm smashed with a shot.’

‘An ugly wound,’ was the only rejoinder.

‘So it was, and for a while they thought he’d lose the arm. Kitty says he behaved beautifully, cool and steady all through.’

Another nod, but this time Gorman’s lips were firmly compressed.

‘There’s no denying it,’ said the old man, with a touch of sadness in his voice – ‘there’s no denying it, the English have courage; though,’ added he afterwards, ‘it’s in a cold, sluggish way of their own, which we don’t like here. There he is, now, that young fellow that has just parted from the two girls. The tall one is my niece – I must present you to her.’

CHAPTER XL

OLD MEMORIES

Though both Kate Kearney and young O’Shea had greatly outgrown each other’s recollection, there were still traits of feature remaining, and certain tones of voice, by which they were carried back to old times and old associations.