When Vyner went to sleep that night, it was to dream of all that the
last few days had presented before him. The wild and rocky Arran,
with its ruined Abbey and its lonely occupant; the bright-eyed but
over-thoughtful-looking boy, with all the freshness of childhood and all
the contemplative temperament of a man; then the iron-bound shore and
the semi-savage natives; and last of all the mountain region where he
then was, with that fairy figure more deeply impressed than he had drawn
her, and whom he now fancied to be tripping lightly before him up the
rocky sides of Strathmore.
As he opened his eyes, the view that met them startled him. It was one
of those vast stretches of landscape which painters cannot convey.
They are too wide, too boundless for picture. The plain which lay
outstretched before him, rising and falling like a vast prairie, was
unmarked by habitation--not a hovel, not a hut to be seen. Vast groups
of rocks stood out here and there abruptly, grotesque and strange in
outline, as though giants had been petrified in the act of some great
conflict, the stunted trees that crowned the summits serving as feathers
on the helmets. A great amphitheatre of mountain girded the plain, save
at one spot, the Gap of Glenvallah, through which, as his map told him,
his road on that morning lay.
His object was to see with his own eyes the so much vaunted scenery of
this region, to visit the lonely spot, and talk himself with its wild
natives; he doubted, indeed, if both the solemnity and the savagery had
not been exaggerated. To acquire the property was, after all, only one
of those caprices which rich men can afford themselves. They can buy
some rare and costly relic--some curious manuscript, some singular
specimen of a contested species, a shell, a stone, a fragment of
sculptured marble--to show which once or twice to some critical eye is
all its value; why not then possess in nature what, had it been reduced
to art, and signed Poussin or Salvator, would have been priceless? It
was thus he reasoned: “If this place be but what they have described it,
I shall own a landscape that all the galleries of Europe cannot rival. A
landscape, too, whose varying effects of sun and shadow, of daybreak and
twilight, shall be endless. The greatest of all painters, the sun, shall
throw over the scene his own lights, and the storm shall wash the canvas
and bring out afresh all the most lovely tints of colour.”
Grenfell had promised him overnight to be up and stirring by an early
hour, but when called he refused to rise; he had his lazy fit on him,
he said; he might have called it rather a malady than a paroxysm, for
it was chronic. He declared that the view from the rock before the door
fully satisfied him; he was no glutton about scenery; a little did for
him, and here was a feast. “Besides,” said he, “I have been reading
those atrocious magazines all night, and I mean to devote my day to some
rebel colloquies with my host.”
Perhaps, after all, Vyner was scarcely sorry to set out alone;
Gren-fell’s companionship was of so essentially worldly a character, his
qualities were best exercised when they discussed the men, the things,
and the topics of his day: such a man saw in the wild sublimity of a
mountain scene little else than its desolation, and Vyner bethought him
how often this town-bred gentleman had jarred upon him in moments of
peaceful reverie and errant fancy.
O’Rorke served his breakfast in silence; either he was not in
communicative mood, or he mistrusted his guest. He answered with brevity
the few questions about the road, only adding, “that it was a pity the
gentleman had not mentioned before where he was going, for there was an
old man and his granddaughter had just set out on that very road.”
“The child I saw here yesterday?”
“The same.”
“Have they been long gone? Could I overtake them, think you?”
“Easy enough; they’ve taken some bread and a bottle of milk for their
breakfast, and you’ll come up with them, if you walk briskly, before
they reach the Gap.”
He lost no further time, but strapping on a light knapsack, and armed
with a stout stick, set out at once.
“If it’s a gauger you are, you’d wish yourself back in the place you
came from before night,” said O’Rorke, as he looked after him. Vyner
was a good walker, and trained to the mountains, so that his eye quickly
detected any available short cut, and enabled him at a glance to choose
his path. If there was not actual peril in his position--thus alone and
companionless in a wild region, where any suspicion may attach to
the stranger--there was that amount of adventure that summons a man’s
courage to its post, and tells him that he must look to his own
safety; and who that has felt this sensation, this proud sense of
self-dependence, does not know its ecstasy! Who has not tasted the small
heroism of being alone on the mountain, on the wild heath at midnight,
on the rolling sea with a gathering storm in the distance, and who,
having felt, has not gloried in it?
But to the man who leaves behind a home of every comfort, where all
that can adorn and embellish existence are to be found, the contrast
of present privation with past indulgence has something wonderfully
exciting. He pictures the pleasant drawing-room with its cheerful fire,
and the happy faces round the hearth; he fancies he hears the merry
laugh, the melodious chords of the piano, the swell of some sweet voice,
and then he bends his ear to the rugged plash of the breaking sea, or
the whistling wind as it sweeps through some Alpine “crevasse.” If no
sense of such dangers arose to Vyner’s mind, yet there was enough to
make him feel how different was his present position from anything that
his daily life exacted. The chances that we voluntarily confront have a
wondrous fascination.
From his map he learned that the estate which he wished to purchase
began at the Gap of Inchegora, a solemn gorge visible for many a mile
off! It was indeed a grand portal that same Gap, not fully fifty feet in
width, and more than nine hundred in height--a mere fissure, in fact, as
complete as though made by the stroke of a giant’s scimitar. With
his eyes directed constantly to this spot, he went onward, and came at
length to a little stream, at the margin of which, and under the shelter
of a solitary ash, sat the old peasant and his granddaughter at their
breakfast.
[Illustration: 120]
“I have walked hard to come up with you,” said Vyner. “I wanted to have
your company to the Gap.” The old man touched his hat in acknowledgment
of this speech, and then bent down his head, while the child spoke to
him in Irish.
“‘Tis deaf my grandfather is, Sir, and he didn’t hear you,” said the
girl.
“Tell him I would be glad he’d be my guide as far as Mort-na------”
She laughed merrily at his poor attempt at the name, and said, with a
racy intonation, “Mortnagheela. ‘Tis there we live ourselves.”
The old peasant munched his bread and lifted the bottle twice to his
lips before he answered the girl’s question, and then said, “Ask him is
he a gauger.”
“No,” said Vyner, laughing; “I have not come here to molest any one.
I want nothing more than to look at your big mountains and grand old
cliffs.”
“You’re a surveyor,” said the old man, whose hearing seemed to have not
lost one word Vyner uttered.
“Not even that, my good friend--a mere idler, no more.”
The peasant said something in Irish to the child, and she laughed
heartily at it, looking up the while in Vyner’s face, as though it made
the jest more poignant.
“Well, will you let me bear you company, Katherine?” asked he. As the
girl repeated the question, the old fellow gave a half impatient shrug
of the shoulders, and uttered a few sentences in Irish with a voluble
energy that savoured of passion.
“‘Tis what he says, Sir,” said the child; “that he was in trouble once
before, and found it hard enough to get out of it, and if misfortune was
to come to you, that he’d be blamed for it.”
“So, then, he’d rather have nothing to do with me,” said Vyner, smiling.
“What does he mean by trouble?”
The old man looked up full in his face, and his eyes took an almost
defiant expression as he said, “Isn’t the assizes trouble?--isn’t it
trouble to be four months in gaol waiting for them?--isn’t it trouble to
stand up in the dock, with two sons of your own, and be tried for your
life?”
“Yes, that indeed may be called trouble,” said Vyner, compassionately,
as he sat down on the bank and took out a cigar. “Do you smoke? Will you
have one of these?”
The old man looked at the cigar and shook his head; either he did not
value, or did not understand it.
“That’s the reason I come up here,” resumed the peasant. “I’m a Mayo
man, and so is all belongin’ to me, but after that”--he laid an emphasis
on the last word--“the landlord, ould Tom Luttrell, wouldn’t renew my
lease, and so I come up to this wild place, where, praise be to the
Virgin, there’s no leases nor landlords either.” “How does that happen?
The land surely has an owner?” “If it has, I never saw him, nor _you_
neither. And whoever he is, he knows better than to come here and ax
for his rents.” The bitter laugh with which the old fellow finished his
speech was scarcely short of an insult--indeed, Vyner half winced as
he felt that it might have been meant as a menace to himself. “No,”
continued he, as though following out the flow of his own thoughts;
“there’s the Gap of Inchegora before us, and through that Gap
tithe-proctor, agent, or bailiff, never passed, and if they did, they’d
never pass back again!”
“And who is supposed to own these lands?” asked Vyner, mildly. “The
College of Dublin has some of them; Lord Landsborough has more; John
Luttrell of Arran says that there’s part of them his; and, for the
matter of that, I might say that the mountain there was mine--and who’s
to contradict me?--or what better am I after saying it?”
Pouring out a cupful of brandy from his flask, Vyner offered it to him,
and this he took with gratitude, his eyes devouring with admiration the
little silver goblet that held it.
“Drink Mr. Luttrell’s health,” said Vyner, pouring out the last of the
liquor into the cup; “he was an old friend of mine long ago.”
“Here’s health to him, and long life, too, if it was any use to him,”
said the man, doggedly.
“There is truth in what you mean; a life such as he leads now can be of
little pleasure, or profit either.”
“And who brought him to it?” burst in the old man, fiercely, for the
spirit had mounted to his brain, maddening and exciting him. “What was
it but the ould Luttrell pride that ruined every one of them, and
will ruin them yet? He married a decent girl, well brought up, and
good-looking; she wasn’t a lady, but not a lady in the land had a better
heart or a finer temper, but he wouldn’t own her for all that. No, not
a bit of it; there she lived, now with one brother, now with another,
nobody darin’ to call her Mrs. Luttrell, nor even as much as hint she
was married. How we stood it--we never were very patient--I don’t know,
but we did, and more ill luck to us for doing so!” There was a long
pause before he continued: “At last there came that trouble I was
telling you of. When Mr. Crowe was shot, and I was tuk with my two
sons--as innocent every one of us as that little girl there, but what
did that signify?--the Attorney-General said, ‘It’s eight-and-twenty
years I’m coming this circuit, and I never knew a capital felony to be
tried without a Malone in it! I wonder,’ says he, ‘will the time ever
come when this will cease?’ There was eight of us then banished, some in
Botany Bay, and some in America, and, by coorse, it was hard for us
to make up money for the ‘defence’--the more because we spent so much
already on lawyers. Howsomever, we did do it. We got a pound here, and
ten shillings there, and at last gathered twenty-two fourteen-six.
I’ll never forget it, twenty-two fourteen-six--in fact, I used to go
on saying it over to myself, as I sat in my cell, just as if saying it
would make it grow. The attorney, Mr. Roach, who was a good friend of
ours, towld me in secret that there was two or three ugly things in
the case, and that short of ould Mr. Clancy, the King’s counsel, there
warn’t a man could get us off; ‘and less than thirty guineas,’ says
he, ‘won’t bring him down.’ All this time, none of us would ask Sally
Luttrell for a farthin’. We all knew she had nothing of her own, and
we wouldn’t be beholdin’ to Mr. Luttrell. At last, my youngest daughter
couldn’t bear it any longer; she sets off for the house where Sally was
stoppin’, and what she said, or how she did it, we never knew, but the
next morning there came to Mr. Roach’s office a note with the money. It
was an order on French’s Bank, signed with a letter L. When the trial
was come on--it was the third day--the Crown lawyers was pushing hard to
make out a charge of conspiracy, and show that half the country was in
it, and at last declared that they were ready to prove that an immense
sum of money lay in the Bank just to defend all the people that ever
broke the law, or did anything wrong, and that in this case they would
produce a list of subscribers, each of them down for some trifle, every
one of whom had been once at least in that dock with an indictment
against him. Sure enough, however he come by it, he had the list.
And such a set of witnesses as he brought up never was seen afore.
‘Gentlemen of the jury, I only ask you to look at them,’ says he; ‘just
look at them, and you’ll know what sort of a tie binds these people to
the prisoners in the dock.’ Clancy said nothing till it was all over--he
wouldn’t cross-question one--but he holds a bit of paper in his hand,
and says, ‘My Lord,’ says he, ‘it appears to me, that to be poor and
wear ragged clothes in this country is to be outlawed, and that any man
whose condition is not as comfortable as my learned friend’s, must be
declared a rebel to his King and a liar to his Maker. It’s very
hard,’ says he, ‘but as it comes from so high an authority as the
Attorney-General, it must be good law, and I’ll not dispute it.
Fortunately, however, for my unhappy client, his character has not only
made friends for him amongst good men and kind men--it is not only by
his equals in life that his honest nature is known--poor labourers,
humble peasants testify by their hard-earned pittance, freely given, to
their love for an old neighbour and friend. But what good is it? They
are poor, and must be perjured; they are half-famished, and of course
they are infamous. But here, my Lord, is a witness well enough to do to
be respected; he eats, drinks, and dresses in the way the law requires;
he has an estate, and of course a conscience; he keeps an agent, and
therefore he has a sowl to be saved; his sympathies are written down
here at the cost of eleven pounds eight shillings, and--though his
modesty is satisfied with a mere letter L--his name is John Hamilton
Luttrell.’”
As if the strain on his memory to recal the precise words employed, and
to bring back the whole scene, had been too much for him, or as though
the emotions of the past had surged back to overwhelm him, the old
peasant held his hand over his eyes, and sat several minutes without
speaking.
“Did Luttrell come on the table, then?” asked Vyner.
“No, Sir; he was seen in court a short time before, but when he was
called he couldn’t be found; nor from that day out was he ever seen in
the streets of Castlebar. It was that sent him away to the island. His
pride and his shame together.”
“You are less than just to my old friend,” said Vyner, warmly. “To know
what he felt, to understand all the difficulties that he saw before him.
you should be in _his_ place as he was.”
“That’s as much as to say that I ought to be a gentleman before I
condemned him,” said the old fellow, with a look of intense craftiness.
“But the lawyer that defended _me_ didn’t want to be a labourin’ man to
explain what _I_ felt, or what was passin’ in my heart. No, Sir, there’s
things in the world that are just the same to the rich man as to the
poor one, just as sickness and sorrow is. Get up, Kitty, we’re stayin’
too long here; it will be black night before we get home.”
“How many miles do you count it?”
“Twenty-one--long miles, too--the last four of them over shingle, and
steep besides.”
“Shall I find an inn--well, shall I find shelter for the night?” said
he, correcting himself.
“Shelter I could give you myself, but I’d rather you’d look for it
anywhere else. I told you already why.”
“Well, I’m not afraid of your company, and, if you don’t dislike mine,
we’ll travel together.”
The little girl said something with eagerness in Irish, and then turning
to Vyner she took his hand, and said, “Yes, come with us.” And they set
out.