Charles James Lever

“ For a time she abstained altogether from even a chance reference to Linton; but at length, as their intimacy ripened, she avowed her fear of him in all its fulness. When men will build up the edifice of distrust, it is wonderful with what ingenuity they will gather all the scattered materials of doubt, with what skill arrange and combine them! A hundred little circumstances of a suspicious nature now rushed to Roland's memory, and his own conscience corroborated the history she drew of the possible mode by which Linton acquired an influence over him. ”

“ On a sofa in one corner of the room sat Olivia Kennyfeck, pale and trembling, her eyes tearful, and her whole air bespeaking grief and agitation. At the window close by stood Miss Kennyfeck, the calm composure of her face, the ease of her attitude, the very types of internal quiet. She looked out, up the square, and playing on the woodwork of the window an imaginary pianoforte air, while in the back drawing-room sat Mrs. Kennyfeck and Miss O'Hara, side by side on a sofa, their excited looks and heightened complexions attesting the animation of the controversy, for such in reality it was. ”

“ What greater punishment did any one ever incur than to live in the daily sight and contemplation of a bliss that his own folly or madness have forever denied him; and yet, to that same suffering do I cling, as the last tie that binds me to existence. To see you in the world, to watch you, to mark the effect your grace and beauty are making on all around you—how every fascination calls up its tribute of admiration—how with each day some new excellence develops itself, till you seem inexhaustible in all the traits of graceful womanhood, this has been the cherished happiness of my life! ”

“ Still here, my dear Cashel, still in this Tipperary Siberia, where our devotion to your service has called and still retains us,—and what difficulties and dangers have been ours! What a land!—and what a people! Of a truth, I no longer envy the rich, landed proprietor, as, in my ignorance, I used to do some weeks back. To begin: Your Château de Tubbermore, which seems a cross between a jail and a county hospital without, and is a downright ruin within, stands in a park of thistles and docks whose luxuriant growth are a contemptuous reflection upon your trees, which positively don't grow at all. ”

“ But there was an innate dread of notoriety, a sensitive shrinking from remark, that made him actually timid about transgressing whatever he was told to be an ordinance of fashion. To dress in a particular way; to frequent certain places; to be known to certain people; to go out at certain hours; and so on,—were become to his mind as the actual requirements of his station, and often did he regret the hour when he had parted with his untrammelled freedom to live a life of routine and monotony.
Shrinking, then, from any confidence in Linton, he next thought of Kennyfeck ”

“ Linton well knew that if “Necessity” be the mother of invention, “Propinquity” is the father of love; that there is nothing so suggestive of the tender passion as that lackadaisical state to which lounging at home contributes, and the chance meetings with a pretty girl. The little intercourse on the stairs going down to breakfast, the dalliance in the conservatory, the chit-chat before dinner, are far more formidable than all the formal meetings under the blaze of wax-lights, and amid the crush of white satin. ”

“ To most persons the yacht voyage would have seemed, too, a chance occurrence, where an accidental intimacy was formed, to wane and die out with the circumstance that created it. Not so did he regard it. He read a prearranged plan in every step she had taken—he saw in her game the woman's vanity to wield an influence over one for whom so many contended—he knew, too, how in the great world an “éclat” can always cover an “indiscretion”—and that, in the society of that metropolis to which she aspired, the reputation of chaperoning the rich Roland Cashel would be of incalculable service. ”

“ Is not some poor Indian girl who follows her wild ranchero husband through the dark valleys of Guiana, not only a happier, but a better wife than your proud peeress?”
Linton shook his head and smiled, but did not reply.
“I see how my old prejudices shock you,” said Cashel. “I only grieve to think how many of them have left me; for I am sick—sick at heart—of your gay and polished world. I am weary of its double-dealing, and tired of its gilded falsehood. Since I have been a rich man, I have seen nothing but the servile flattery of sycophancy, or the insidious snares of deeper iniquity. ”

“ Worse still, Roland,—and faith I don't think I could make the confession, if a few hours, or a few days more, were not to hide my shame in a felon's grave,—I played the jewels you sent here for Maritaña. She refused them with words of bitterness and anger. Partly from the irritated feeling of the moment, partly from the curse of a gambler's spirit,—the hope to weary out the malice of fortune,—I threw them on the monte-table. Of course I lost. It was soon after this Barcelonetta was laid in ruin by a shock of earthquake, the greatest ever experienced here. ”

“ If Cashel had not laughed heartily at the lisping imitation, it is possible Mrs. Kennyfeck might have been displeased; but as the quiz “took,” she showed no umbrage whatever.
“The Honorable Downie Meek, Under Secretary of State,” read Olivia, with a little more of emphasis than on the last-mentioned names.
“A person you'll be charmed with, Mr. Cashel,—so highly informed, so well bred, so perfectly habituated to move in the very highest circles,” said Mrs. Kennyfeck, giving herself, as she spoke, certain graces of gesture which she deemed illustrative of distinguished fashion. ”

“ If the cottage be an almost ideal representation of rustic elegance and simplicity, its situation is still more remarkable for beauty; for while Art has developed all the resources of the ground, Nature, in her own boundless profusion, has assembled here almost every ingredient of the picturesque, and as if to impart a sense of life and motion to the stilly calm, a tumbling sheet of water gushes down between the rocks, and in bounding leaps descends towards the Shannon, of which it is a tributary. ”

“ To Roland, the rattle of the gale, the hissing sea, the strained and creaking cordage, all, not only brought back old memories of his once life, but effectually seemed to dispel the colder mood of mind which admixture with the world of fashion had impressed upon him. He was again, if not in reality, in heart and spirit, the bold buccaneer that walked the Western seas, bursting with life, and eager for adventure. ”

“ Now it seems to me that nothing could better suit the careless, open-handed freedom of your habits than the vacillations of high play. It's the only way that even for a moment you can taste the sensation of being hard pressed, while in the high flood of luck you can feel that gushing sense of power that somehow seems to be the secret soul of gold!”
“Men must lose with a very different look upon their features before I can win with the ecstasy you speak of,” cried Cashel. ”

“ Cashel passed a night of feverish anxiety. Enrique's uncertain fate was never out of his thoughts; and if for a moment he dropped off to sleep, he immediately awoke with a sudden start,—some fancied cry for help, some heart-uttered appeal to him for assistance breaking in upon his weary slumber.
How ardently did he wish for some one friend to whom he might confide his difficulty, and from whom receive advice and counsel. Linton's shrewdness and knowledge of life pointed him out as the fittest ”

“ As for myself, whenever I read in the papers of meetings to petition Parliament to repeal this or redress that, in the name of 'Justice to Ireland,' I ask, why does nobody pray for the recall of the Dean of Drumcondera?”
“Here's mamma,” whispered Olivia, as the drawing-room door opened.
“We've done the Dean, mamma,” said Miss Kennyfeck, with calm composure.
“Well, don't you feel that you love him already? Mr. Cashel, confess that you participate in all my raptures. Oh dear! I do so admire talent and genius,” exclaimed Mrs. Kennyfeck, theatrically. ”

“ Cashel?” said Miss Kennyfeck, as they emerged from a grove of beech-trees, and came upon the wide and stretching plain, so well known to Dubliners as the Fifteen Acres, but which is, in reality, much greater in extent. “I have always fancied this great grassy expanse must be like a prairie.”
“About as like as yonder cattle to a herd of wild buffaloes,” replied Roland, smiling.
“Then what is a prairie like? Do tell us,” said Olivia, eagerly. ”

“ Pepystell, the fashionable architect, had that day sent for Roland's inspection; houses, villas, castles, cottages, abbeys, shooting-boxes, gate-lodges, Tudor and Saxon, Norman and Saracenic,—everything that the morbid imagination of architecture run mad could devise and amalgamate between the chaste elegance of the Greek and the tinkling absurdity of the Chinese.
“I do so love a cottage ornée,” said Mrs. White, taking up a very beautiful representation of one, where rose-colored curtains, and a group on a grass-plot, with gay dresses and parasols, entered into the composite architecture. ”

“ We could not, if we would, follow the complex tissue of day-dreams that wandered over every clime, and in the luxuriant rapture of power created scenes of pleasure, of ingredients the most far-fetched and remote. The “actual” demands our attention more urgently than the “ideal,” so that we are constrained to follow the unpoetical steps of so ignoble a personage as Mr. Phillis,—Cashel's new valet,—who now broke in upon his master's reveries as he entered with hot water and the morning papers. ”

“ There is something of conscious power in the quiet garb, a sense of trustfulness; it is like the warrior advancing without his weapons to a conference that is exceedingly pleasing, seeming to say, You see that I am not a being of tulle, and gauze, and point de Bruxelles, of white satin, and turquoise, and pink camellias, but a creature whose duties may be in the daily round of life, meant to sit beside on a grassy slope as much as on a velvet ottoman, to talk with as well as flirt with. ”

“ As if wealth, in forestalling the necessity for labor, did not, at the same time, deprive life of all the zeal of enterprise. When I have stepped into my boat to board a Chilian frigate, I have had a prouder throbbing at my heart than ever the sight of that banker's check-book has given me. There's many a Gambusino in the Rocky Mountains a happier—ay, and a finer fellow, too, than the gayest of those gallants that ever squandered the gold he quarried! ”

“ Suddenly the bull stopped, and retiring till his haunches-touched the paling, he seemed surveying the field, and contemplating another and more successful mode of attack. The concentrated passion of the creature's attitude at this moment was very fine, as with red eyeballs and frothed lips he stood, slowly and in heavy strokes lashing his flanks with his long tail.
“Is he tired?” said Miss Kennyfeck, as Cashel stood close to the paling, and breathed his horse, for what he foresaw might be a sharp encounter. ”

“ This exclamation was caused by a loud smash, like the report of a cannon-shot, and at the same moment the taper topmast fell crashing down, with all its cordage clattering round it. The confusion of the accident, the shouting of voices, the thundering splash of the sea, as, the peak having fallen, the craft had lost the steadying influence of the mainsail, all seemed to threaten immediate danger. Cashel was about to spring forward and assist in cutting away the entangled rigging, when he felt his hand firmly grasped by another, whose taper fingers left no doubt to whom it belonged. ”

“ There was a certain suave gentleness in his bland look, an air of easy courtesy in his every motion, a kind of well-bred mannerism in the very carriage of his gold-headed cane, that told of a time when the graces of deportment were a study, and when our modern careless freedom had been deemed the very acme of rudeness. He was dictating, as was his wont each morning, some reminiscence of his early life, when he had served in the Body-Guard of Louis XVI., and where he had borne his part in the stormy scenes of that eventful era. ”

“ At length, perceiving that he did not speak, he himself turned towards the stranger, and said,—
“You are, doubtless, a man of the world, sir, and need no apologies for my remarking that good news demands a scrutiny not less searching than its opposite. As the friend of Senhor Cashel,”—here he turned a glance beneath his heavy brows at the youth, who, however, seemed not to notice the word,—“as his friend, I repeat, deeply interested in whatever affects him, I may, perhaps, be permitted to ask the details of this very remarkable event.” ”

“ In a deep, old-fashioned straw chair, reclined, rather than sat, Lady Kilgoff; a slightly feverish flush lent a brilliancy to her otherwise pale features, deepening the expression of her full soft eyes, and giving a more animated character to the placid beauty of her face. Her hair, in all the loose freedom of its uncared for state, fell in great voluptuous masses along her neck and shoulders, while part of a finely-turned arm peeped out beneath the folds of the wide scarlet cloak which the fisherman's wife had lent her in lieu of her own costly “Cashmere.”
Next to her sat Roland ”

“ This made him silent and reserved as he walked along, and so palpably inattentive to all his companion's efforts at agreeability that Linton at last said, “Well, Cashel, if you can dispense with sleep, you certainly seem to take the compensation in dreaming. Here have I been retailing for you the choicest bits of gossip and small-talk, not only without the slightest gratitude, but even without common attention on your part!”
“Very true,” said Cashel; “the reproach is quite just, and no man can be more agreeable at the expense of his friends than yourself.” ”

“ Phillis, superintend the very color of your cravat and the shape of your hat?”
“Oh, believe me,” replied Mr. Kennyfeck with a bland persuasiveness, “fashion is only exigeant in small matters; the really momentous affairs of life are always at a man's own disposal. Whoever is fortunate enough to be Mr. Cashel's choice, becomes, by the fact, as elevated above envious criticisms as she will be above the sphere where they alone prevail.” ”

“ This Roland Cashel is an underbred boy.”
“There is a great deal in what you say, Linton. But as jealousy is a feeling of which I have never had any experience, I was only anxious on Lady Kilgoff's account, that the thoughtless gayety of a very young and handsome woman should not expose her to the sarcastic insinuations of an impertinent world. She is gay in manner; there is an air of lively imagination—”
“No more than what the French call 'amabilité,' my Lord, which, like the famed armor of Milan is not the less defensive that it is so beautiful in all its details.” ”

“ To make a house pleasant, to bring agreeable people together,—to assemble those particles whose aggregate solidifies into that compact mass called society,—is far harder than is generally believed; vulgar folk attempt it by getting some celebrity to visit them. But what a failure that is! One lion will no more make a party than one swallow a summer. New people, like our friend Cashel, try it by asking everybody. ”

“ From the great hall to the uppermost chamber the aspect of all bespoke comfort. The elegances of life, Linton well knew, are like all other refinements,—not capable of being “improvised,” but the daily comforts are. The meaner objects which make up the sum of hourly want,—the lazy ottoman, the downy-pillowed fauteuils, the little squabs that sit in windows to provoke flirtations and inspire confidences ”