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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.

Amongst the strange situations in life, there are few stranger, or, in certain respects, more painful, than the meeting after long absence of those who, when they had parted years before, were on terms of closest intimacy, and who now see each other changed by time, with altered habits and manners, and impressed in a variety of ways with influences and associations which impart their own stamp on character.

It is very difficult at such moments to remember how far we ourselves have changed in the interval, and how much of what we regard as altered in another may not simply be the new standpoint from which we are looking, and thus our friend may be graver, or sadder, or more thoughtful, or, as it may happen, seem less reflective and less considerative than we have thought him, all because the world has been meantime dealing with ourselves in such wise that qualities we once cared for have lost much of their value, and others that we had deemed of slight account have grown into importance with us.

Most of us know the painful disappointment of revisiting scenes which had impressed us strongly in early life: how the mountain we regarded with a wondering admiration had become a mere hill, and the romantic tarn a pool of sluggish water; and some of this same awakening pursues us in our renewal of old intimacies, and we find ourselves continually warring with our recollections.

Besides this, there is another source of uneasiness that presses unceasingly. It is in imputing every change we discover, or think we discover in our friend, to some unknown influences that have asserted their power over him in our absence, and thus when we find that our arguments have lost their old force, and our persuasions can be stoutly resisted, we begin to think that some other must have usurped our place, and that there is treason in the heart we had deemed to be loyally our own.

How far Kate and Gorman suffered under these irritations, I do not stop to inquire, but certain it is, that all their renewed intercourse was little other than snappish reminders of unfavourable change in each, and assurances more frank than flattering that they had not improved in the interval.

‘How well I know every tree and alley of this old garden!’ said he, as they strolled along one of the walks in advance of the others. ‘Nothing is changed here but the people.’

‘And do you think we are?’ asked she quietly.

‘I should think I do! Not so much for your father, perhaps. I suppose men of his time of life change little, if at all; but you are as ceremonious as if I had been introduced to you this morning.’

‘You addressed me so deferentially as Miss Kearney, and with such an assuring little intimation that you were not either very certain of that, that I should have been very courageous indeed to remind you that I once was Kate.’

‘No, not Kate – Kitty,’ rejoined he quickly.

‘Oh yes, perhaps, when you were young, but we grew out of that.’

‘Did we? And when?’

‘When we gave up climbing cherry-trees, and ceased to pull each other’s hair when we were angry.’

‘Oh dear!’ said he drearily, as his head sank heavily.

‘You seem to sigh over those blissful times, Mr. O’Shea,’ said she, ‘as if they were terribly to be regretted.’

‘So they are. So I feel them.’

‘I never knew before that quarrelling left such pleasant associations.’

‘My memory is good enough to remember times when we were not quarrelling – when I used to think you were nearer an angel than a human creature – ay, when I have had the boldness to tell you so.’

‘You don’t mean that?’

‘I do mean it, and I should like to know why I should not mean it?’

‘For a great many reasons – one amongst the number, that it would have been highly indiscreet to turn a poor child’s head with a stupid flattery.’

‘But were you a child? If I’m right, you were not very far from fifteen at the time I speak of.’

‘How shocking that you should remember a young lady’s age!’

‘That is not the point at all,’ said he, as though she had been endeavouring to introduce another issue.

‘And what is the point, pray?’ asked she haughtily.

‘Well, it is this – how many have uttered what you call stupid flatteries since that time, and how have they been taken.’

‘Is this a question?’ asked she. ‘I mean a question seeking to be answered?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Assuredly, then, Mr. O’Shea, however time has been dealing with me, it has contrived to take marvellous liberties with you since we met. Do you know, sir, that this is a speech you would not have uttered long ago for worlds?’

‘If I have forgotten myself as well as you,’ said he, with deep humility, ‘I very humbly crave pardon. Not but there were days, ‘added he, ‘when my mistake, if I made one, would have been forgiven without my asking.’

‘There’s a slight touch of presumption, sir, in telling me what a wonderful person I used to think you long ago.’

‘So you did,’ cried he eagerly. ‘In return for the homage I laid at your feet – as honest an adoration as ever a heart beat with – you condescended to let me build my ambitions before you, and I must own you made the edifice very dear to me.’

‘To be sure, I do remember it all, and I used to play or sing, “Mein Schatz ist ein Reiter,” and take your word that you were going to be a Lancer —

 
“In file arrayed,
With helm and blade,
And plume in the gay wind dancing.”
 

I’m certain my cousin would be charmed to see you in all your bravery.’

‘Your cousin will not speak to me for being an Austrian.’

‘Has she told you so?’

‘Yes, she said it at breakfast.’

‘That denunciation does not sound very dangerously; is it not worth your while to struggle against a misconception?’

‘I have had such luck in my present attempt as should scarcely raise my courage.’

‘You are too ingenious by far for me, Mr. O’Shea,’ said she carelessly. ‘I neither remember so well as you, nor have I that nice subtlety in detecting all the lapses each of us has made since long ago. Try, however, if you cannot get on better with Mademoiselle Kostalergi, where there are no antecedents to disturb you.’

‘I will; that is if she let me.’

‘I trust she may, and not the less willingly, perhaps, as she evidently will not speak to Mr. Walpole.’

‘Ah, indeed, and is he here?’ he stopped and hesitated; and the full bold look she gave him did not lessen his embarrassment.

‘Well, sir,’ asked she, ‘go on: is this another reminiscence?’

‘No, Miss Kearney; I was only thinking of asking you who this Mr. Walpole was.’

‘Mr. Cecil Walpole is a nephew or a something to the Lord-Lieutenant, whose private secretary he is. He is very clever, very amusing – sings, draws, rides, and laughs at the Irish to perfection. I hope you mean to like him.’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course, or I should not have bespoken your sympathy. My cousin used to like him, but somehow he has fallen out of favour with her.’

‘Was he absent some time?’ asked he, with a half-cunning manner.

‘Yes, I believe there was something of that in it. He was not here for a considerable time, and when we saw him again, we almost owned we were disappointed. Papa is calling me from the window, pray excuse me for a moment.’ She left him as she spoke, and ran rapidly back to the house, whence she returned almost immediately. ‘It was to ask you to stop and dine here, Mr. O’Shea,’ said she. ‘There will be ample time to send back to Miss O’Shea, and if you care to have your dinner-dress, they can send it.’

‘This is Mr. Kearney’s invitation?’ asked he.

‘Of course; papa is the master at Kilgobbin.’

‘But will Miss Kearney condescend to say that it is hers also.’

‘Certainly, though I’m not aware what solemnity the engagement gains by my co-operation.’

‘I accept at once, and if you allow me, I’ll go back and send a line to my aunt to say so.’

‘Don’t you remember Mr. O’Shea, Dick?’ asked she, as her brother lounged up, making his first appearance that day.

‘I’d never have known you,’ said he, surveying him from head to foot, without, however, any mark of cordiality in the recognition.

‘All find me a good deal changed!’ said the young fellow, drawing himself to his full height, and with an air that seemed to say – ‘and none the worse for it.’

‘I used to fancy I was more than your match,’ rejoined Dick, smiling; ‘I suspect it’s a mistake I am little likely to incur again.’

‘Don’t, Dick, for he has got a very ugly way of ridding people of their illusions,’ said Kate, as she turned once more and walked rapidly towards the house.