Lewis Wingfield

“ Strogue Abbey from within, was no more pleasant to its owner than from without. Doreen's serenity, which for years had made Shane uncomfortable, assumed now a preternatural repulsion. Odours as of gravecloths seemed to emanate from her garments. The phosphorescence of the charnel-house was a nimbus to her head. Her brow was circled by the calm that appertains not to mundane matters; which chills the creeping souls of those who cling to earth. Instead of being shocked that Theobald should have evaded the offices of the scrag-boy, she was content. ”

“ Lord Clare was charmed, and hurried to Strogue with the good news. My lady was a riddle, whose behaviour was always different from what might be expected. He knew that Terence's danger had placed her on a gridiron where she was consuming slowly, and naturally concluded that her joy at his reprieve would culminate when she was told that she might keep him near her for a while. This extraordinary young man, for whom a servant would sacrifice his life, must needs be tenderly beloved by the mother to whom he owed his birth. If she was in raptures she had a queer method of displaying her feelings. ”

“ Terence was speaking. My lady held her breath to listen.
'I speak to you as from the grave,' he said. 'My life is done. A week or two at most, and my place will be vacant--my shadow will darken the threshold of my ancestors no more. Take care, my brother! When you look on my empty seat let the sad memory of me be precious on your hearth, untarnished by regret. You are the head of the house. Do not forget the responsibilities to which you are born. Look at the tapestry in the drawing-room, and follow the example of your fathers. Do your duty by them; be without fear and without reproach. ”

“ After all, a woman's judgment may never be relied on. It must be his office, then, to rebuke her folly, and show where his true duty lay.
A great love, indeed--a sublime love! A love which is a crown of glory, but which was in this instance a wreath doomed to be wasted on the sterile rock. Shane cared for no one but himself. Was inclined even to spurn this love--nay, had dared brutally to repulse it, because it could not accomplish impossibilities. Not a drop from the precious phial had ever leaked out for Terence--not a single drop. ”

“ Get ye gone by the postern in the rosary. The peasantry are staunch. You might lie in a cabin under the bed-furniture till night, and then steal out to sea under cover of the darkness.'
'If I fall into their hands I will speak my own defence, sir,' murmured Emmett, without moving.
'And much good may it do you--fool!' shouted the enraged councillor. 'Don't stand shilly-shallying here like a great goose. Sara, order him to go. If he's hanged you'll have yourself to thank for it.'
Sara took no heed, but lay back, watching the dear youth--as white as wax, like one in a trance. ”

“ Had he no mercy--this villain who had wriggled himself by specious arts into the confidence of honest men--this snake in the grass--this bravo who, smilingly looking in your face, could coldly choose the most fitting moment for stabbing you? It was Cassidy--actually Cassidy, who before her, before Lord Kilwarden, before Curran, could get upon the table to swear away the life of him whom he had called friend.
Even the little advocate, whose faith in the innate goodness of human nature was not strong, was staggered. ”

“ She was dressed like a lady, in a costly beaver with ostrich plume, and a laced riding-dress--the same as she was wont to wear when galloping at the head of a troop of dragoons in search of food for Moiley. No longer a slattern serving-wench in a low shebeen, but a paid and honoured favourite of Government; a lying, drunken, brazen hyæna. This was an admirable joke of Major Sirr's. What a pity it was that it should miscarry! What humour could be more sly and delicate than to clinch a man's fate by the false witness of her whom he had elected to love? ”

“ On the contrary, once the union carried, it was essential that Ireland should be at peace. Lord Clare knew perfectly well, while he prated about peace, that he had wilfully hailed the silence of a cowed nation as a restoration of contented tranquillity. He knew very well that if the English army and the soldier Viceroy were removed, and the leaders permitted to scheme on, the country would be in as much danger as ever; that, union or no union, millennium could not supervene until time should blot away the nefarious means employed. ”

“ He shrank from the occasional visits of Lord Clare, who had brought his country to this pass--even deprecated those of his friend Curran with a new-born peevishness; for in the face of his old ally he could trace tell-tale lines of weary watching and despondency, which spoke with eloquent meaning of the darkness outside the prison walls; whispering of the universal sorrow he would so gladly have forgotten. Curran became nervous about him, fearing lest his mind should give way. Solitude, and such thoughts to brood over as his were, are good for no man. ”

“ Doreen gently cut the longest tress from Sara's golden head and pressed it into Robert's palm.
'Thanks,' he said, with a quiver of the lip. 'I will wear this in my bosom when I mount the scaffold. I am ready, gentlemen, and will not detain you. Before I leave the world--and I leave it now when I leave my friends--I have one request to make. May the charity of oblivion be accorded to my memory! Let no one write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dares now to vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. ”

“ The fairy islet of Glas-aitch-é seemed defended from outer evil by a spell, which gave the sleeping knights in the sea-caves no cause for waking. The seals rolled over on the blue-green waves as though the world were not full of sorrow; the eagles soared high up in ether, dazzled by the glory of the sun. As month followed month my lady saw that her pet project was brought no nearer to realisation than in the old days of Strogue; that it was further off, indeed; for Shane had grown as coldly indifferent to his cousin as she was to him. ”

“ Her sufferings must indeed be terrible, Miss Wolfe thought, if that marble pride was powerless to conceal them. No human frame may bear for long such wrenching. Either the stern countess must go raving mad, or else she would certainly soon die.
One night when (sleepless herself) Doreen rose to listen at her aunt's door, she caught, amid inarticulate babble, the oft-repeated words, 'Terence--Shane!' muttered in such tones of anguish, that, shivering, she crept back to bed, warned as by chilling vapour from the threshold of a secret which 'twere better not to know. Terence--Shane! ”

“ It was the old, sad story over again of Wexford, without Father Roche or the priest of Boulavogue. The insurrection was evanescent; accompanied by much intermittent bravery on the part of the peasants, much imbecility on the part of the leaders, awful retribution on the part of the Hessians and squireens. Cassidy found everywhere the feeling which Lord Clare had worked for, and was overwhelmed with admiration at the cleverness of the chancellor. Every one was mourning for a brother or a son. A gloom of failure hung like a pall over the peasantry. ”

“ Lord Cornwallis had done his best. In the course of the year which elapsed between the two attempts to carry the union he made two state progresses--one in the southern counties and the other in the north, and preached the millennium according to St. Pitt. Clare and Castlereagh both laboured on in town as sure no negro slaves ever laboured; and yet when the time came all was still provokingly uncertain. This Irish senate was unutterably vile. Having surrendered its scrap of virtue, it repudiated, like an irreclaimable strumpet, even the maxim of honour amongst thieves. ”

“ The case of Terence she shrank from considering at all. But this young man whose existence was no reproach: she might feel pity for him without stabbing her own soul with red-hot daggers by the impulse.
Things were going as smoothly as could be expected. Shane's little party had developed into a banquet which would become historical. Her firstborn would receive honours from the King which should counterbalance the disgrace wherewith the second seemed destined to endow his family. The French prisoners of war would be exchanged in time, returning to the bosoms of their distracted loves unhurt. ”

“ She knew, indistinctly, that the scrag-boy had become to her warped soul a harbinger of peace; and afraid of seeing too much on the glass which conscience held, had shut her eyes and breathed on it till the Present should become Past, and thereby irretrievable. But Gillin's words could not be shut out after so simple a fashion. She had hinted a few moments since, with scathing irony, that even if she sacrificed her own child in cold blood on the altar of Nemesis, her conduct would be no worse than my lady's had been to her second son. ”

“ It is not crying, "Lord! Lord!" but doing "the will of my Father who is in heaven!" If my clients had been arraigned before a jury of Cornhill shopkeepers, they would ere now be in their lodgings. The law of England suffers no man to be openly butchered in a court of justice. The law of England recognises the innate blackness of the human heart--the possibility of villains thirsting for the blood of their fellow-creatures; and the people of Ireland have but too good cause to be acquainted with that thirst. At the awful foot of Eternal Justice I call on you to acquit these men. ”

“ If you are sorely troubled, and in your anxiety to conceal that you are losing your nerve, force yourself on to preposterous deeds of prowess, there is much comfort to be obtained from the sympathetic ring of a jolly voice, the warm clasp of a shoulder-of-mutton hand. Cassidy, too, was so open and so innocent--so easily seen through. Lord Glandore felt a sort of disdain for him, dubbing him, with patrician condescension, a big grown-up baby, and so forth--even whilst he clutched for support the giant's burly arm. ”

“ Dublin sank into stupor when the news leaked out, for all classes respected the single-minded young martyr of Irish liberty. Curran was the first to arrive at Strogue with the sad intelligence--his eyes red, his face worn. Doreen turned her head away, too sorrowful for tears. My lady sat in a trance as though she heard nothing, for the temporary energy which had brought her to town had waned; the ghost at her elbow fanned her with his pinions, mesmerised her free-will. As for Sara, she gave way to hysterical weeping. Sara was domesticated now at Strogue. ”

“ With grief she listened to the weary tale of treachery, marvelling with Cassidy as to who the traitor was. She burned with indignation at the conduct of the executive, observing that there is an unwritten law in accordance with which the ignorant are to be protected from themselves; not coaxed to crime and then murdered for it. For some reason of his own, the giant avoided the mention of Terence; and Doreen respected his delicacy, for she thought that perchance he had ill things to tell of him, and she shrank from hearing them; clinging rather to her present state of doubt. ”

“ If only Shane was safely married to his cousin! Was it too late to make another effort? My lady perceived dimly that Shane was repelled by the damsel--and no wonder. The passions of this earth seemed gone, burnt away, consumed, by the action on her mind of past events. Doreen sat on a heap of ashes, enclosed in a rarified atmosphere of her own. But, for all that, another trial must be made; matters were becoming desperate; my lady began to fear that she was not strong enough to fight against Heaven. She would see Shane, and speak very seriously to him forthwith. ”

“ As they were not in the habit of looking through keyholes, they knew not that he was working in earnest; that he had determined in his own mind, should the union pass, to make the first shaking out of the united flag upon the Castle his signal for attack; when a handful of scatter-brains, as unpractical as himself, should storm the Castle, kill the Viceroy, proclaim Ireland free, and the Act of Union a valueless piece of dirty parchment. Jack Cade's rabblement was no whit more laughable an assemblage than the army which Robert proposed to lead to victory. ”

“ Whichever way he chose to act, no dishonour could accrue to the younger from his decision, so long as he, Terence, had first registered his private protest. Shane had been most insulting--had stooped even to mock at his brother's deplorable condition. But that was of no moment. When we stand upon life's brink we can afford to contemn the foolish lapping of the waves. It mattered not a rush what Shane might say or think. Yet that scene in the rosary was not one of the rainbow-hued visions which were to fresco into warmth the cold walls of his prison-cell at Fort George. ”

“ My lady sped rapidly away. The ordeal--short and sharp--more bitter even than she dreamed--was over; the draught was swallowed--in vain. Gillin's taunts had shrivelled her soul like branding-irons. It behoved her to arrange her features before returning to the Abbey, lest some one should detect the troubled aspect of the chatelaine and make guesses at its cause, which might possibly come near the truth. As courage failed and resolution waned, her secret struggled the harder to come forth. ”

“ Her nurse, old Jug, witnessed the scourging, and scurried home all of a tremble at the horrid spectacle. In her presence he had writhed and shrieked for mercy--had gnawed his tongue lest it should escape control--had swooned--and was then tossed upon some straw--half dead, but faithful so far.
Sara clung to her saddle-pommel as she listened, lest she too should swoon; and it dawned upon Doreen that they were out on a fool's errand. Life is a bitter gift to many; yet, charged as we are with illusory hopes, what suffering must be ours ere we master its full bitterness! ”