The package of letters was a large one, of all sizes. From all quarters
they came--some from home; some from my brother officers of the Guards;
some from the Castle; and even one from O'Grady.
The first I opened was a short note from Horton, the private secretary
to the viceroy. This informed me that Major Mahon had written a
statement to the duke of all the circumstances attending my duel; and
that his grace had not only expressed himself highly satisfied with
my conduct, but had ordered a very polite reply to be addressed to
the Major, thanking him for his great kindness, and saying with what
pleasure he found that a member of his staff had fallen into such good
hands.
'His grace desires me to add,' continued the writer, 'that you need only
consult your own health and convenience with respect to your return to
duty; and, in fact, your leave of absence is perfectly discretionary.'
My mind relieved of a weighty load by the contents of this letter, I
recovered my strength already so far that I sat up in bed to peruse the
others. My next was from my father; it ran thus:--
'Dear Jack,--Your friend Major Mahon, to whom I write by this post,
will deliver this letter to you when he deems fit. He has been most
good-natured in conveying to me a narrative of your late doings; and
I cannot express how grateful we all are to him for the truly friendly
part he has taken towards you. After the strictest scrutiny, for
I confess to you I feared lest the Major's might be too partial an
account, I rejoice to say that your conduct meets with my entire
approbation. An older and a wiser head might, it is possible, have
avoided some of the difficulties you have met with; but this I will add,
that once in trouble, no one could have shown better temper or a
more befitting spirit than you did. While I say this, my dear Jack,
understand me clearly that I speak of you as a young, inexperienced man,
thrown, at his very outset of life, not only among strangers, but in a
country where, as I remarked to you at first, everything was different
from those in your own. You have now shown yourself equal to any
circumstances in which you may be placed. I therefore not only expect
that you will meet with fewer embarrassments in future, but that, should
they arise, I shall have the satisfaction of finding your character
and your habits will be as much your safeguard against insult as your
readiness to resent any will be sure and certain.
'I have seen the duke several times, and he expresses himself as much
pleased with you. From what he mentions, I can collect that you are well
satisfied with Ireland, and therefore I do not wish to remove you from
it. At the same time, bear in mind, that by active service alone can you
ever attain to, or merit, rank in the army; and that hitherto you have
only been a soldier by name.'
After some further words of advice respecting the future, and some few
details of family matters, he concluded by entrusting to my mother the
mention of what she herself professed to think lay more in her peculiar
province.
As usual, her letter opened with some meteorological observations upon
the climate of England for the preceding six weeks; then followed a
journal of her own health, whose increasing delicacy, and the imperative
necessity of being near Doctor Y------, rendered a journey to Ireland
too dangerous to think of.
'Yes, my dearest boy,' wrote she, 'nothing but this would keep me from
you a moment; however, I am much relieved at learning that you are now
rapidly recovering, and hope soon to hear of your return to Dublin. It
is a very dreadful thing to think of, but perhaps, upon the whole, it
is better that you did kill this Mr. Burke. De Grammont tells me that
a _mauvaise tête_ like that must be shot sooner or later. It makes
me nervous to dwell on this odious topic, so that I shall pass on to
something else.
'The horrid little man that brought your letters, and who calls himself
a servant of Captain O'Grady, insisted on seeing me yesterday. I never
was more shocked in my life. From what he says, I gather that he may
be looked on as rather a favourable specimen of the natives. They must
indeed be a very frightful people; and although he assured me he would
do me no injury, I made Thomas stay in the room the entire time, and
told Chubbs to give the alarm to the police if he heard the slightest
noise. The creature, however did nothing, and I have quite recovered
from my fear already.
'What a picture, my dear boy, did he present to me of your conduct and
habits! Your intimacy with that odious family I mentioned in my last
seems the root of all your misfortunes. Why will such people thrust
themselves forward? What do they mean by inviting you to their frightful
parties? Have they not their own peculiar horrors?--not but I must
confess that they are more excusable than you; and I cannot conceive
how you could so soon have forgotten the lessons instilled into you from
your earliest years. As your poor dear grandfather, the admiral, used to
say, a vulgar acquaintance is a shifting sand; you can never tell where
you won't meet it--always at the most inopportune moment; and then,
if you remark, your underbred people are never content with a quiet
recognition, but they must always indulge in a detestable cordiality
there is no escaping from. Oh, John, John! when at ten years of age you
made the banker's son at Northampton hold your stirrup as you mounted
your pony, I never thought I should have this reproach to make you.
'The little fiend who calls himself Corny something, also mentions your
continued familiarity with the young woman I spoke of before. What her
intentions are is perfectly clear; and should she accomplish her object
your position in society and future fortune might possibly procure her
large damages; but pause, my dear boy, before you go any further. I do
not speak of the moral features of the case, for you are of an age to
judge of them yourself; but think, I beseech you, of the difficulties it
will throw around your path in life, and the obstacles it will oppose to
your success. There is poor Lord Henry Effingham; and since that foolish
business with the clergyman's wife or daughter, where somebody went mad,
and some one else drowned or shot himself, they have never given him any
appointment whatever. The world is a frightful and unforgiving thing, as
poor Lord Henry knows; therefore beware!
'The more I think of it, the more strongly do I feel the force of
my first impressions respecting Ireland; and were it not that we so
constantly hear of battles and bloodshed in the Peninsula, I should even
prefer your being there. There would seem to be an unhappy destiny over
everything belonging to me. My poor dear father, the admiral, had a
life of hardship, almost unrewarded. For eleven years he commanded a
guardship in the Nore; many a night have I seen him, when I was a little
girl, come home dripping with wet, and perfectly insensible from the
stimulants he was obliged to resort to, and be carried in that state to
his bed; and after all this he didn't get his blue ribbon till he was
near sixty.
'De Vere is constantly with us, and is, I remark, attentive to your
cousin Julia. This is not of so much consequence, as I hear that her
Chancery suit is taking an unhappy turn; should it be otherwise, your
interests will, of course, be looked to. De Vere is most amusing, and
has a great deal of wit; but for him and the Count we should be quite
dreary, as the season is over, and we can't leave town for at least
three weeks. [The epistle concluded with a general summing up of its
contents, and an affectionate entreaty to bear in mind her caution
regarding the Rooneys.] Once more, my dear boy, remember that vulgar
people are a part of our trials in this life. As that delightful man,
the Dean of St. George's, says, they are snares for our feet; and their
subservient admiration of us is a dangerous and a subtle temptation.
Read this letter again, and believe me, my dearest John, your
affectionate and unhappy mother,
'Charlotte Hinton.'
I shall not perform so undutiful a task as to play the critic on my
excellent mother's letter. There were, it is true, many new views of
life presented to me by its perusal, and I should feel sadly puzzled
were I to say at which I was more amused or shocked--at the strictness
of her manners, or the laxity of her morals; but I confess that the part
which most outraged me of all was the eulogy on Lord Dudley de Vere's
conversational gifts. But a few short months before, and it is possible
I should not only have credited but concurred in the opinion; brief,
however, as had been the interval, it had shown me much of life; it
had brought me into acquaintance, and even intimacy, with some of the
brightest spirits of the day; it had taught me to discriminate between
the unmeaning jargon of conventional gossip and the charm of a society
where force of reasoning, warmth of eloquence, and brilliancy of wit
contested for the palm; it had made me feel that the intellectual gifts
reserved in other countries for the personal advancement of their owner
by their public and ostentatious display, can be made the ornament and
the delight of the convivial board, the elegant accompaniment to the
hours of happy intercourse, and the strongest bond of social union.
So gradually had this change of opinion crept over me that I did not
recognise in myself the conversion; and indeed had it not been for my
mother's observations on Lord Dudley, I could not have credited how far
my convictions had gone round. I could now understand the measurement by
which Irishmen were estimated in the London world. I could see that if
such a character as De Vere had a reputation for ability, how totally
impossible it was for those who appreciated him to prize the great and
varied gifts of such men as Grattan and Curran, and many more.
Lost in such thoughts, I forgot for some moments that O'Grady's letter
lay open before me. It was dated Chatham, and written the night before
he sailed. The first few lines showed me that he knew nothing of
my duel, having only received my own letter with an account of the
steeplechase. He wrote in high spirits. The Commander-in-chief had
been most kind to him, appointing him to a vacant Majority--not, as he
anticipated, in the Forty-first, but in the Ninth light Dragoons.
'I am anxiously looking out for Corny,' said he, 'and a great letter-bag
from Ireland--the only bit of news from which, except your own, is that
the Rooneys have gone into deep mourning, themselves and their whole
house. Various rumours are afloat as to whether any money speculations
of Paul's may have suggested the propriety of retrenchment, or whether
there may not have been a death in the royal family of OToole. Look to
this for me, Hinton; for even in Canada I shall preserve the memory
of that capital house, its excellent _cuisine_, its charming hostess.
Cultivate them, my dear Jack, for your sake and for mine. One Rembrandt
is as good as a gallery; so sit down before them, and make a study of
the family.'
The letter concluded as it began, by hearty thanks for the service I had
rendered him, begging me to accept of Moddiridderoo as a souvenir of his
friendship. And in a postscript, to write which the letter had evidently
been reopened, was a warning to me against any chance collision with
Ulick Burke.
'Not, my dear boy, because he is a dead shot--although that same is
something--but that a quarrel with him could scarcely be reputable in
its commencement, and must be bad whatever the result.'
After some further cautioning on this matter, the justice of which
was tolerably evident from my own experience, O'Grady concluded with a
hurried postscript:--
'Corny has not yet arrived, and we have received our orders for
embarkation within twenty-four hours. I begin half to despair of his
being here in time. Should this be the case, will you, my dear Hinton,
look after the old villain for me, at least until I write to you again
on the subject?'
While I was yet pondering on these last few lines, I perceived that a
card had fallen from my father's letter. I took it up, and what was
my astonishment to find that it contained a correct likeness of Corny
Delany, drawn with a pen, underneath which was written, in my cousin
Julia's hand, the following few lines:--
'The dear old thing has waited three days, and I think I have at length
caught something like him. Dear Jack, if the master be only equal to
the man, we shall never forgive you for not letting us see him.--Yours,
Julia.'
[Illustration: 367]
This, of course, explained the secret of Corny's delay--my cousin,
with her habitual wilfulness, preferring the indulgence of a caprice to
anything resembling a duty; and I now had little doubt upon my mind that
O'Grady's fears were well founded, and that he had been obliged to sail
without his follower.
The exertion it cost me to read my letters, and the excitement produced
by their perusal, fatigued and exhausted me, and as I sank back upon my
pillow I closed my eyes and fell sound asleep, not to wake until late on
the following day. But strange enough, when I did so, it was with a head
clear and faculties collected, my mind refreshed by rest unbroken by
a single dream; and so restored did I feel, that, save in the debility
from long confinement to bed, I was unconscious of any sense of malady.
From this hour my recovery dated. Advancing every day with rapid steps,
my strength increased; and before a week elapsed, I so far regained my
lost health that I could move about my chamber, and even lay plans for
my departure.