Charles James Lever

“ It was with passionate eagerness Nina set off in search of Kate. Why she should have felt herself wronged, outraged, insulted even, is not so easy to say, nor shall I attempt any analysis of the complex web of sentiments which, so to say, spread itself over her faculties. The man who had so wounded her self-love had been at her feet, he had followed her in her walks, hung over the piano as she sang—shown by a thousand signs that sort of devotion by which men intimate that their lives have but one solace, one ecstasy, one joy. ”

“ I wonder, am I what is called falling in love with the Greek—that is, I wonder, have the charms of her astonishing beauty and the grace of her manner, and the thousand seductions of her voice, her gestures, and her walk, above all, so captivated me that I do not want to go back on the past, and may hope soon to repay Miss Kate Kearney by an indifference the equal of her own? I don’t think so. Indeed, I feel that even when Nina was interesting me most, I was stealing secret glances towards Kate, and cursing that fellow Walpole for the way he was engaging her attention. ”

“ My dear Dick, you have some lessons to learn in life, and one of them is that, just as it is bad heraldry to put colour on colour, it is an egregious blunder to follow flattery by flattery. The woman who has been spoiled by over-admiration must be approached with something else as unlike it as may be—pique—annoy—irritate—outrage, but take care that you interest her Let her only come to feel what a very tiresome thing mere adulation is, and she will one day value your two or three civil speeches as gems of priceless worth. ”

“ As Walpole drew nigh, he heard her saying: ‘Marry one of your own race, and you will jog on well enough. Marry a Frenchwoman or a Spaniard, and she’ll lead her own life, and be very well satisfied; but a poor Irish girl, with a fresh heart and a joyous temper—what is to become of her, with your dull habits and your dreary intercourse, your county society and your Chinese manners!’
‘Miss O’Shea is telling me that I must not look for a wife among her countrywomen,’ said Lockwood, with a touching attempt to smile. ”

“ O’Shea will not call it amongst his unlucky days,’ said Kate laughingly.
‘I almost think I like your Austrian,’ said the other.
‘Only don’t call him my Austrian.’
‘Well, he was yours till you threw him off. No, don’t be angry: I am only talking in that careless slang we all use when we mean nothing, just as people employ counters instead of money at cards; but I like him: he has that easy flippancy in talk that asks for no effort to follow, and he says his little nothings nicely, and he is not too eager as to great ones, or too energetic, which you all are here. ”

“ Two sorrows never made a joy, Kitty.’
‘There! they are lighting the lamps,’ cried she suddenly. ‘I don’t think they can be more than three miles away.’
‘Have you rooms ready, if there be two coming?’
‘Yes, papa, Mr. Walpole will have his old quarters; and the stag-room is in readiness if there be another guest.’
‘I’d like to have a house as big as the royal barracks, and every room of it occupied!’ cried Kearney, with a mellow ring in his voice. ‘They talk of society and pleasant company; but for real enjoyment there’s nothing to compare with what a man has under his own roof! ”

“ Tell me, Nina,’ said he suddenly, lowering his voice to a tone of exquisite tenderness, ‘have you never, as a little child, played at that game of what is called seeking your fortune, wandered out into some thick wood or along a winding rivulet, to meet whatever little incident imagination might dignify into adventure; and in the chance heroism of your situation have you not found an intense delight? And if so in childhood, why not see if adult years cannot renew the experience? Why not see if the great world be not as dramatic as the small one? ”

“ A goodish old house, and a small estate, underlet as it is, bringing me about two thousand a year, and some expectations, as they call them, from an old grand-aunt.’
‘You have enough, if you marry a prudent girl,’ muttered Kearney, who was never happier than when advocating moderation and discretion.
‘Enough, at least, not to look for money with a wife.’
‘I’m with you there, heart and soul,’ cried Kearney. ‘Of all the shabby inventions of our civilisation, I don’t know one as mean as that custom of giving a marriage-portion with a girl. Is it to induce a man to take her? ”

“ I have a charming collaborateur, my lord’s niece, who was acting as his private secretary up to the time of my arrival, and whose explanation of a variety of things I found to be so essential that, from being at first in the continual necessity of seeking her out, I have now arrived at a point at which we write in the same room, and pass our mornings in the library till luncheon. She is stunningly handsome, as tall as the Greek cousin, and with a stately grace of manner and a cold dignity of demeanour I’d give my heart’s blood to subdue to a mood of womanly tenderness and dependence. ”

“ There is something peculiarly galling to the man who is wincing under the pang of poverty to find that the world regards him as rich and well off, and totally beyond the accidents of fortune. It is not simply that he feels how his every action will be misinterpreted and mistaken, and a spirit of thrift, if not actual shabbiness, ascribed to all that he does, but he also regards himself as a sort of imposition or sham, who has gained access to a place he has no right to occupy, and to associate on terms of equality with men of tastes and habits and ambitions totally above his own. ”

“ I will not even say that when I have sat beside her, heard her low soft voice, and watched the tremor of that lovely mouth vibrating with wit, or tremulous with feeling, I have been all indifference; but this I will say, she shall not number me amongst the victims of her fascinations; and when she counts the trinkets on her wrist that record the hearts she has broken—a pastime I once witnessed—not one of them shall record the initial of Dick Kearney.’
With these brave words he mounted the narrow stair and knocked at his sister’s door. ”

“ I am treated in his family with a more than ordinary deference and respect—his very daughter would cede the place of honour to me, and my will is never questioned. It is time to teach this pretentious fine gentleman that our positions are not what they once were. If I were a man, I should never cease till I had fastened a quarrel on him; and being a woman, I could give my love to the man who would avenge me. Avenge me of what? a mere slight, a mood of impertinent forgetfulness—nothing more—as if anything could be more to a woman’s heart! ”

“ You have your way to work in life as well as Mr. Atlee. From all I can judge, you’re scarcely as well calculated to do it as he is. You have not his smartness, you have not his brains, and you have not his impudence—and, ‘faith, I’m much mistaken but it’s the best of the three!’
‘I don’t perceive, sir, that we are necessarily pitted against each other at all.’
‘Don’t you? Well, so much the worse for you if you don’t see that every fellow that has nothing in the world is the rival of every other fellow that’s in the same plight. ”

“ I had at one time a good deal of Walpole’s intimacy—I’ll not call it friendship, for somehow there were certain differences of temperament that separated us continually. We could commonly agree upon the same things; we could never be one-minded about the same people. In my experiences, the world is by no means the cold-hearted and selfish thing he deems it; and yet I suppose, Lady Maude, if there were to be a verdict given upon us both, nine out of ten would have fixed on me as the scoffer. ”

“ These are the idiots who get us into foreign wars, or those apologetic movements in diplomacy, which are as bad as lost battles. What a contrast to Atlee—a rare clever dog, Atlee—and so awake, not only to one, but to every contingency of a case. I like that fellow—I like a fellow that stops all the earths! Your half-clever ones never do that; they only do enough to prolong the race; they don’t win it. That bright relative of ours—Cecil—is one of those. Give Atlee Walpole’s chances, and where would he be?’
A very faint colour tinged her cheek as she listened, but did not speak. ”

“ Is not the world full of these places? is not the puzzle of this query of all lands and of all peoples? That ever-present delusion of what we should do—what be if we were aught other than ourselves: how happy, how contented, how unrepining, and how good—ay, even our moral nature comes into the compact—this delusion, I say, besets most of us through life, and we never weary of believing how cruelly fate has treated us, and how unjust destiny has been to a variety of good gifts and graces which are doomed to die unrecognised and unrequited. ”

“ Throw your eyes over that great expanse of dark bog, vast as one of the great campagnas you have often described to us, and bethink you how mere loneliness—desolation—needs a stout heart to bear it; how the simple fact that for the long hours of a summer’s day, or the longer hours of a winter’s night, a lone woman has to watch and think of all the possible casualties lives of hardship and misery may impel men to. Do you imagine that she does not mark the growing discontent of the people? ”

“ First of all, you and your brother magistrates had no right to accept bail. The injury was too grave: Gill’s life, as the doctor’s certificate will prove, was in danger. It was for a judge in Chambers to decide whether bail could be taken. They will move, therefore, in the Queen’s Bench, for a mandamus—’
‘May I never, if you won’t drive me mad!’ cried Kearney passionately; ‘and I’d rather be picking oakum this minute than listening to all the possible misfortunes briefs and lawyers could bring on me.’
‘Just listen to Holmes, father,’ whispered Dick. ”

“ Look here, Mr. Kearney: if a man in a battle was to say to himself, I’ll never give any but a fair blow, he’d make a mighty bad soldier. Now, public life is a battle, and worse than a battle in all that touches treachery and falsehood. If you mean to do any good in the world, to yourself and your country, take my word for it, you’ll have to do plenty of things that you don’t like, and, what’s worse, can’t defend.’
‘The soup is getting cold all this time. Shall we sit down?’
‘No, not till we answer the telegram. Sit down and say what I told you.’
‘Atlee will say I’m mad. ”

“ After all, Joe Atlee was a nobody; flattery might call him an adventurer, but he was not even so much. Amongst the men of the dangerous party he mixed with he was careful never to compromise himself. He might write the songs of rebellion, but he was little likely to tamper with treason itself. So much he would tell her when he got back. Not angrily, nor passionately, for that would betray him and disclose his jealousy, but in the tone of a man revealing something he regretted—confessing to the blemish of one he would have liked better to speak well of. ”

“ She knew Walpole thoroughly—she understood the working of such a nature to perfection, and she could calculate to a nicety the mortification, and even anger, such a man would experience at being thus slighted. ‘These men,’ thought she, ‘only feel for what is done to them before the world: it is the insult that is passed upon them in public, the soufflet that is given in the street, that alone can wound them to the quick.’ A woman may grow tired of their attentions, become capricious and change, she may be piqued by jealousy, or, what is worse, by indifference ”

“ It is as though the atmosphere is too weighty for fancy to mount in it. You, my dearest Kate,’ said she, drawing her arm round her, and pressing her towards her, ‘do not know these things, nor need ever know them. Your life is assured and safe. You cannot, indeed, be secure from the passing accidents of life, but they will meet you in a spirit able to confront them. As for me, I was always gambling for existence, and gambling without means to pay my losses if Fortune should turn against me. ”

“ Our press will denounce the infamous arts by which these witnesses have been tampered with, and justice has been defeated. The insults they may hurl at our oppressors—for once unjustly—will furnish matter for the Opposition journals to inveigh against our present Government, and some good may come even of this. At all events, I shall have accomplished what I sought. I shall have saved from a prison the man I hate most on earth, the man who, robbing me of what never could be mine, robs me of every hope, of every ambition, making my love as worthless as my life! ”

“ The all-powerful sense of living for another begets indifference to the little straits and trials of narrow fortune, till the mind at last comes to feel how much there is to live for beyond the indulgence of vulgar enjoyments; and if, to crown all, a high ambition be present, there will be an ecstasy of bliss no words can measure.’
‘Have you failed in Ireland?’ asked she suddenly. ”

“ Kearney, that what with the fantastic effects of the morning mists, as they lift themselves over these vast wastes—the glorious patches of blue heather and purple anemone that the sun displays through the fog—and, better than all, the springiness of a soil that sends a thrill to the heart, like a throb of youth itself, there is no walking in the world can compare with a bog at sunrise! ”

“ That one disparagement, perhaps, worst of all,’ cried he aloud: ‘how is a man to enjoy his estate if he is “put upon his title” every day of the week? One might as well be a French Emperor, and go every spring to the country for a character.’
‘What shocking indignity is this you are dreaming of?’ said a very soft voice near him, and turning he saw Nina, who was moving across the grass, with her dress so draped as to show the most perfect instep and ankle with a very unguarded indifference. ”

“ Lord Danesbury had never been a fluent speaker in public, while in private life a natural indolence of disposition, improved, so to say, by an Eastern life, had made him so sparing of his words, that at times when he was ill or indisposed he could never be said to converse at all, and his talk consisted of very short sentences strung loosely together, and not unfrequently so ill-connected as to show that an unexpressed thought very often intervened between the uttered fragments. Except to men who, like Walpole, knew him intimately, he was all but unintelligible. ”

“ Walpole had adopted Atlee because he found him useful in a variety of ways. He was adroit, ready-witted, and intelligent; a half-explanation sufficed with him on anything—a mere hint was enough to give him for an interview or a reply. He read people readily, and rarely failed to profit by the knowledge. Strange as it may seem, the great blemish of his manner—his snobbery—Walpole rather liked than disliked it. I was a sort of qualifying element that satisfied him, as though it said, ‘With all that fellow’s cleverness, he is not “one of us.” ”

“ We’ve plenty of old tunes, Mr. Walpole,’ said Kearney, turning to that gentleman, ‘that rebellion, as you call it, has never got hold of. There’s “Cushla Macree” and the “Cailan deas cruidhte na Mbo.”’
‘Very like hard swearing that,’ said Walpole to Nina; but his simper and his soft accent were only met by a cold blank look, as though she had not understood his liberty in addressing her. Indeed, in her distant manner, and even repelling coldness, there was what might have disconcerted any composure less consummate than his own. ”

“ Confound it!’ he would say to himself. ‘Aunt Betty loves me, and money has no share in the affection I bear her. If she knew I must be her heir, she’d say so frankly and freely. She’d scorn the notion of doling out to me as benevolence what one day would be my own by right. She is proud and intolerant enough, but she is seldom unjust—never so willingly and consciously. If, then, she has not said O’Shea’s Barn must be mine some time, it is because she knows well it cannot be true. ”