“I will not promise,” said Cashel, as he drew Mary closer to him. “The memories I bear of the land are not all painless.”
“But you have seen nothing of Ireland that was Irish!” exclaimed Tiernay, boldly. “You saw a mongrel society made up of English adventurers, who, barren of hope at home, came to dazzle with their fashionable vices the cordial homeliness of our humbler land. You saw the poor pageantry of a mock court, and the frivolous pretension of a tinsel rank. You saw the emptiness of pretended statesmanship, and the assumed superiority of a class whose ignorance was only veiled by their insolence. But of hearty, generous, hospitable Ireland – of the land of warm impulses and kindly affections – you saw nothing. That is a country yet to be explored by you; nor are its mysteries the less likely to be unravelled that an Irish wife will be your guide to them. And now to breakfast, for I am famishing.”
Where the characters of a tale bear a share in influencing its catastrophe, the reader seems to have a prescriptive right to learn something of their ultimate destiny, even though the parts they played were merely subordinate. Many of ours here cannot lay claim to such an interest, and were seen but like the phantoms which a magic lantern throws upon the wall, – moving and grouping for a moment and then lost forever.
It is from no want of respect to our reader, if we trace not the current of such lives; it is simply from the fact that when they ceased to act, they ceased, as it were, to exist. Are we not, all of us in the world, acted upon and influenced by events and people, – purely passers-by, known to-day, seen perhaps for a week, or known for a month, and yet never after met with in all life’s journey? As on a voyage many a casual air of wind, many a wayward breeze helps us onward, and yet none inquire “whence it cometh or whither it goeth,” – so is it in the real world; and why not in the world of fiction, which ought to be its counterpart?
Of those in whom our interest centred, the reader knows all that we know ourselves. Would he, or rather she, care to learn that the elder Miss Kennyfeck never married, but became a companion to Lady Janet, who on the death of Sir Andrew, caused by his swallowing a liniment, and taking into his stomach what was meant for his skin, went abroad, and is still a well-known character in the watering-places of Germany, where she and her friend are the terror of all who tremble at evil-speaking and slandering?
Olivia married the Reverend Knox Softly, and seems as meek as a curate’s wife ought to be, nor bears a trace of those days when she smiled on cornets or mingled sighs with captains of hussars. If some of our characters have fared ill in this adventurous history, others have been more fortunate. The Dean is made a Colonial Bishop, and the distinguished Mr. Howie’s picture occupies a place in the last Exhibition!
Meek is still a placeman: bland, gentle, and conciliating as ever, he made at the close of the session a most affecting speech upon the sorrows of Ireland, and drew tears from the ventilator at his picture of her destitution!
Mrs. Kennyfeck and “Aunt Fanny” keep house together in the ancient city of Galway. Attracted to each other by a thousand antipathies, more cohesive than any friendship, they fight and quarrel unceasingly, and are never known to agree, save when the enthusiasm of their malevolence has discovered a common victim in the circle of their “friends.”
Here ends our history; nor need we linger longer with those whose happiness, so far as worldly prosperity can make it, is at last secured.
There is but one destiny of which we have to speak. Linton was never brought to trial; the day after his landing in England he was found dead in the cell of his prison, – no trace of violence, nor any evidence of poison to account for the circumstance; and whether through some agency of his own, or by the workings of a broken heart, the fact remains a mystery.
THE END.