The Hour of Success.
Near the gates of Kincorth Brian separated himself from his mother, and
promising to meet her at Durrow, walked back up the avenue towards the
house. He had many things to put together—some few presents to make,
some last words to speak, ere he went out into the world to push his
fortune; and accordingly he retraced his steps slowly up the drive,
thinking of the change that twenty-four hours had wrought in his
prospects, and considering what it would be best for him to do now.
Half-way, Maxwell overtook him, and dismounting, walked with Brian to
the house, leading the chesnut, who looked distressed, as though she had
been ridden fast and far.
“I am glad to have an opportunity of talking with you alone, Brian,”
said Mr. Maxwell Drewitt. “Is there any earthly reason why we should not
be friends? why you should leave Kincorth at all?”
“I think there is,” Brian answered.
“Will you explain what you mean? Will you explain to me why there should
be ill-will between you and me any more than there was between your
father and my father?”
“Your father and my father were probably different men to what you and I
are,” was the reply. “Your father was wilfully disinherited, and he knew
why; I am disinherited by an accident, or by a fraud; you can best tell
which,” and Brian’s lip curled.
“You cannot think it other than accidental, surely,” said Maxwell.
“What I think cannot signify to you so long as you have got Kincorth,”
was the reply.
“Well now, Brian, that I have got Kincorth, will you tell me what I am
ever likely to make out of it? The mortgages, as you know, are almost
equal to its value. It is not a cheap house to keep up. More will be
expected from the owner of Kincorth than was ever looked for from the
owner of the Headlands. The place will be an expense to me, not a gain;
you must have sense enough to see that yourself.”
“Give it to me,” said Brian, grimly, “and see if I will complain.”
“Why, boy, you could never have made money out of it.”
“I should have tried,” was the reply. And there ensued a long silence,
which Maxwell broke, by saying as they approached the house—
“Shall we be friends?”
“No,” Brian answered; “for I mean to put you out of Kincorth, if I can.
If I cannot, then I mean to bide my time, and take my revenge. You need
not look so black, Mr. Maxwell Drewitt. I shall not shoot you; I shall
not come behind you in the dark and smite you under the fifth rib; but I
shall find out your weak point and hurt you there. A year or two is
nothing; I can wait: when you least look for me I shall be at your
side.”
“You are mad, Brian,” said his cousin.
“Then it is you who have made me so,” was the reply.
“Let us be friends.”
“I told you no, once; I tell you no, twice. There are places where even
you, Maxwell Drewitt, will be unable to injure me, to hinder my
succeeding; and I shall succeed yet; and I shall come back to Kincorth
yet. Let me pass, I am not going to steal anything out of the house. It
is yours now, I know, but it has not been so for long. Let me pass.”
“Can he have found another will?”—that was the thought which crossed
Maxwell’s mind, and for a moment he stood irresolute. Then he made way,
and Brian entered the house.
Before many minutes had elapsed he came down the staircase, with a bunch
of keys in his hand.
“Harold’s luggage and mine is together, and I will send over for both
to-morrow morning. Meantime, if you would like to see that we have taken
nothing belonging to you, there are the keys. Take them,” he insisted,
as Maxwell drew back, and he flung them at his cousin’s feet.
“I am going now,” the youth said, looking round him with a terrible
despair. “I am going now. Have you anything to say to me before I go?”
“Let us be friends.”
“You struck me to-day, Maxwell.”
“I am sorry for it.”
“You pushed me aside at my father’s funeral.”
“Inadvertently.”
“You have got Kincorth.”
“Accidentally.”
“For years you have been trying to put my father against me; you made
him misjudge me towards the last; you tried to frustrate all my efforts
for freeing Kincorth.”
“I thought I was acting for the best.”
“Then,” answered Brian Drewitt, “I think I am acting for the best now,
when I refuse your friendship; when I say you are a coward and a
hypocrite; when I cross this threshold, saying that at peace with you I
will never re-enter it.”
“Brian, you will repent.”
“And so will you.”
With which mutual assurances the cousins separated, and while Maxwell
took possession of his new home, Brian strode out of the house and took
the hill-path leading to Durrow.
He had to pass by the stables on his way through the plantations, and he
turned aside to speak to Flynn, who was the last man to leave the yard.
“Mr. Maxwell wants you, I think, Flynn,” he said; “and I wish to say
good-bye to the horses; so you can come back here after you have seen
him;” and with that Mr. Brian Drewitt thrust a crumpled note into the
man’s hand, remarking—
“That will pay you for your overtime.”
“I don’t need it, Masther Brian,” said Flynn. “I’d work night and day
for you, I would, if working could give you back your own.”
“Keep it,” returned Brian. “I am not poor—keep it, I can make more; only
go—go away,” and he crossed the yard and pushed open the stable-door,
and went in, closing, but not latching it after him.
“Gently, my lady,” said the youth: he had walked up the stable and
entered Madcap’s loose box. At sound of his voice, the chesnut turned
round and whinnied.
Then Brian drew a pistol out of his pocket, looked to the priming,
cocked it, and took aim.
At the moment, Madcap put her head against his breast, asking in her
mute fashion for the caress to which she was accustomed: finding no
caress given, she lifted her head and looked at him with soft and
inquiring eyes.
“I cannot do it, Chessy,” he said. “I meant to shoot you, but I must
leave you for others to ride; for others to maltreat if they will—my
beauty—my pet! It would be greater kindness for me to put it out of
anybody’s power to do this; but I cannot—I cannot;” and he put his arms
round her slender neck, and leaned his head against her shoulder, the
chesnut standing still and quiet all the time, as though she had some
human comprehension of what was the matter with him.
At last she turned her head, and began rubbing it against his breast as
usual. Brian had always petted her more than anybody else, and she in
return, though he was not her master, had been wont to follow him about
the yard and round the meadows like a dog.
“I must go now, beauty,” Brian said, and he stroked her silky coat
slowly—slowly. “Good-bye,” and thinking there was no one near to see
him, he kissed the white star on her forehead, and then stepped back and
looked at her soft wondering eyes again.
“Good-bye, Chessy—good-bye,” and he walked out of the stall, not knowing
that Flynn and his cousin were standing in the next box, which chanced
to be vacant, looking on at his leave-taking.
As he went the chesnut turned round in her stall, and followed him to
the door. She put her head over the top of it, and watched him, with her
great brown sorrowful eyes, out of the stable.
“Hasn’t she a face just like a Christian, sir?” asked Flynn, but Maxwell
never answered him.
He had come to the yard suspecting his cousin’s design the moment Flynn
said Mister Brian had told him to go to the house. He had thought to
catch the boy doing mischief, and behold! he only saw that leave-taking,
which is always so pathetic, between a man and a favourite animal.
Something about the manner of that leave-taking caused Maxwell to walk
back to the house slowly and thoughtfully. He had got Kincorth, a
valueless property, for which he had paid a tremendous price. The man
who once stood between it and him was dead, the man’s widow was gone,
the man’s children were departed likewise, and now as he passed from
room to room, he found each in succession desolate and deserted.
He ascended the staircase and entered the chamber he had occupied in the
days which were now gone and passed away for ever. He crossed the bare
floor—he threw open the window and looked out.
In the gathering twilight, the mountains seemed frowning upon him, the
trees to be sunk in gloom; and that feeling of desperate depression he
had felt for the first time as he rode home one night, years and years
before, under the moonlight, came upon him once more.
Life was then before him: where was his life now? Half gone—more than
half gone—even if he survived to that threescore years and ten beyond
which man’s strength is but labour and sorrow. The twenty-one years had
passed like a watch in the night, like a tale that was told! Twenty more
years, and he should be as old as the man whom he had seen laid that day
in Eversbeg Abbey.
For twenty-one years he had been scheming, and planning, and plotting,
and his schemes had been in the main successful—he had gained wealth,
position, houses, and lands.
Suppose he lived for twenty years more, and for twenty to the back of
that, and through the whole of the time went on adding house to house,
and acre to acre—still the twenty, and the twenty, must come to an end
at last, and where would he be then?
That was Maxwell Drewitt’s dark hour: many such had come to him lately;
for it does not require a man to have either a very sensitive
conscience, or to think much on holy things, to make such considerations
strike home to him at times.
On the contrary, as sickness seems most terrible to the strong; as pain
seems most dreadful to those who have been exempt from it; as age seems
most wretched to the young; as poverty seems most frightful to the
affluent—so the very fact of a man rarely taking courage to face this
bugbear of our common mortality is sure to make its aspect more
unendurable when it forces itself upon him.
Maxwell had heard read that morning, beside his uncle’s grave, the words
which he knew must one day be read over his own:—
“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full
of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it
were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.” And now, without in
the least knowing that thousands and thousands of years before the same
ideas had passed through the soul of one in great distress and
tribulation, the owner of Kincorth, leaning out into the night, and
looking away to the lonely hills, was thinking precisely the same
thoughts as those to which Job in his anguish gave utterance.
“There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,
and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root
thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground;
yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like
a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost,
and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth
and dryeth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no
more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.”
Friends, oh! friends, is there not something unutterably mournful in the
figure of that man standing lonely, lonely as ever, in the room he had
left when a young man, so many years before? He had been solitary then,
he was solitary now; when he was lying in his grave he could not be more
alone than he felt standing there, looking out into the night.
Beyond all that he could have expected the wild dreams of his youth had
met with fulfilment. From the position of a dependent he had raised
himself to that of the first landed proprietor in the neighbourhood;
from beggary he had risen to wealth; from indigence, to prosperity and
consideration. If all Galway were not his, he owned quite enough of the
county to make the name of Drewitt a wonder to tourists—a memory in
Connemara.
There was not a house whose doors did not fly open at his approach. If
he had not effected all he had intended for the people’s good—for the
people’s advancement—that certainly was more their fault than his. He
had learned, as he assured Mr. Pryor, that a nation cannot be civilized
in a day; that a love of tidiness and of cleanliness, a desire for
luxuries, cannot be implanted in one generation, nor yet in two. He had
long comprehended that there was the same distinction between the upper
and lower classes in Ireland in the nineteenth century as existed
between lord and serf in the earlier portions of English history; not to
the extent of a power of life and death—not to the extent of a power of
oppression, or imprisonment, or disposal of the bodies of the poor; but
the same social difference. The lords lived in profusion, with a certain
wasteful magnificence, while their hinds were contented with the
coarsest fare. The lords went about in grand attire, while the serfs
were clothed meanly. Between the two classes in those days there could
have been no more distinction than there is between the rich and the
poor to the present day in Connemara; and it was this state of things
which Maxwell Drewitt at last declared to himself he was not sent into
the world to alter.
“The rice pot to the Hindoo,” he was wont to say, “the potato kish to
the Irish;” but the meal barrel and the potato kish were both better
supplied on the estates belonging to Maxwell Drewitt than on the estates
of any other man in West Connemara.
He had no cause to be greatly disappointed on that score; he had done
something for his countrymen and countrywomen, and having done as much
as he thought possible without their own co-operation, Maxwell rested
content. He loved Ireland better than he loved her sons and daughters;
but he loved himself better than Ireland.
And now having gained the summit of the hill of success, he stood on the
top looking out into the night a lonely man. Most lonely! Was this what
he had bargained for in those days of poverty and struggle? Was this the
end he had striven to reach? Was it thus he had expected to feel when
that end was compassed? Money—station—health—position: he possessed all
these, and yet the man whom he had followed to his grave that morning
was not so lonely as he.
There is a story current in Ireland about a traitor, by name Parese, who
undertook to give the Castle of Maynooth into the hands of an enemy of
the Fitzgeralds. He stipulated for a certain sum of money, but forgot to
stipulate also for his life; the consequence of which oversight resulted
in the “devil betraying the betrayer,” whose head was cut off as soon as
the reward was counted out.
Whether this tale be true or false, we need not stop to inquire, seeing
how often analogous cases must have come under the observation of all of
us; but I think that what happened to Parese happened also in a great
measure to Maxwell Drewitt. He had bargained for money and power, and
money and power he had, but nothing more.
When the bells that now hang in the tower of the church of St. Nicholas,
in Galway, were being cast, it is related that from far and from near,
men and women brought their golden brooches and rings, their precious
ornaments and their stores of silver and gold, and threw them in with
the iron, to the end that all might he fused together. And it is further
stated that the precious metals may be seen shining to this day in the
bells, and that those offerings of the faithful have caused their tones
to be peculiarly sweet and beautiful.
It is a lovely legend, and all the more lovely because it is so tenderly
suggestive, so touchingly pathetic. The men and the women who flocked to
the place where the casting went on have passed away, and their names
are forgotten on earth; but still the bells peal out the sweet music,
still their silver and their gold make the tone fuller, the notes more
exquisite.
I cannot help recalling these two stories while I think of Maxwell
standing there in the darkness, spite of all his wealth, alone—alone! He
had not bargained for happiness, thinking success would insure
happiness.
He cast no stores of love into time’s furnace on faith that he would
receive back, in some shape, principal and interest, and lo! the dark
days were advancing towards him, and there was never a one to take him
by the hand and bid him be of good cheer.
For money, he had, like Parese, sold his best friends, deserted the
woman who had trusted him, married a wife for whom he did not care; for
money he had schemed to ruin his uncle, and when his schemes failed, he
had accomplished his purpose by more dishonest means still. Money he had
elected to serve—Mammon had been his god, and, as has been cleverly
said, cent. per cent. his prophet; but a man cannot serve two masters—a
man cannot hoard all his wealth, or else spend it entirely on himself,
and still hear God’s bells making sweet music in his ears—music that
never sounds so sweet as to the sick and weary.
There was a preacher who once undertook to prove that life’s voyage
would be a pleasant one, even were there no hope of land on the other
side, nothing but the long sleep and the cold grave as a finish to each
man’s story. His theory seemed to be, that there is so much enjoyment in
the goodly company, in the lively conversation, in the health-giving
breeze, in the witty anecdote, in the daily work, as to make the journey
a desirable one in itself, without any reference to an expected haven;
and while the goodly company is around us, while the conversation never
flags, while the sky is clear and the body strong, perhaps he may be
right. I have known many who seemed to think so. Only, reader, how is it
when man has to go below; when he is lying in his narrow berth; when the
guests have dropped off one by one; when the voices of the singers are
hushed; when the evil days are come and the years draw nigh when he
shall say, “I have no pleasure in them;” when the sun and the light, and
the stars and the moon be darkened, and the clouds return after the
rain—how is it then?
Standing in the gathering night—type of that still deeper night which he
would one day have to pass through, Maxwell Drewitt was seized in the
hour of his success, in the hour of his victory, with a strange
horror—with a frightful dread. It seemed but a day to him since he was
young; it would be but a day till he was old, and then—
Maxwell closed the window, and groped his way out of the room. All in
darkness, he descended the staircase, and when he reached the hall, he
took his hat, and saying to one of the servants, “You need not wait up
for me. I shall not sleep here just at present,” walked out of the
house, and down the avenue, under the trees, past the porter’s
lodge—home.
“I do not think I shall go up to Kincorth till you can go with me,” he
said to his wife, and Lady Emmeline looked at him in amazement.
It was the first time during sixteen years she had heard him express a
wish for her companionship, and so much affection astonished her.
Further, instead of kicking her poodle out of his way with a curse,
Maxwell, thinking of that scene in the stable of which he could not get
rid, stretched his hand towards the creature, and called it by
name—“Prince—Prince!” But Prince, unused, like its mistress, to such
attentions, only crouched behind Lady Emmeline, who, pushing the dog off
the sofa, said—
“Go, Prince, there.”
“Come here, Prince,” added Maxwell, and he made a movement to stroke
him; but Prince backed from the proffered caress, and, barking and
growling, retreated under the sofa.
“Prince is not accustomed to your noticing him,” said Lady Emmeline,
apologetically, but Maxwell did not seem to hear her words. He was
walking up and down the room with his hands buried in his pockets, his
head bent down, his face looking stern and thoughtful.
“Has Mrs. Drewitt really left Kincorth?” asked Lady Emmeline after a
long pause.
“Yes, they are all gone,” he answered.
“Dear, dear; I am very sorry; poor things!”
“I do not see why the devil you should be sorry for them,” he said,
stopping in his walk; “nor why you should call them poor things. I did
not want them to go. Heaven knows, I would much rather they had stayed.
And as for their being ‘poor things,’ they cannot be a great deal poorer
than they were; and I suspect Mrs. Drewitt knew pretty well what she was
about when she went to Durrow. Pryor is sure to marry Geraldine, and
that, you may say, will be a provision for the family.”
“How very clever you are, Maxwell,” remarked Lady Emmeline, her old face
lighted up with admiration. “Who could ever have pieced that all
together as you have done? I never should; but now it is as clear as
possible. It is not exactly nice; but still one can scarcely blame
her—can one?”
“Blame her! though she has placed me in a most awkward position, I
commend her prudence. Candidly, I did not think Mrs. Drewitt had so much
sense,” and Maxwell looked as he spoke at his wife’s face, and wondered
with an unutterable astonishment how he ever came to marry such a fright
of a woman.
“And Mr. Pryor is so nice, and Geraldine so pretty,” said Lady Emmeline.
“The only drawback—” Maxwell began, but he stopped in his speech
suddenly and resumed his walk.
“Is what?” inquired his wife.
“I was wrong—there is no drawback,” said Maxwell, who did not intend to
make any remarks for the future about disparity of age, if he could
avoid doing so. He had been thinking of something he meant to ask his
wife to do for him, and to compass that object he intended to be civil
to her; civil so far as it was in his nature to be towards any one with
whom he was thrown in daily communication.
Many a taunt he had flung at her, but he would try to taunt no more. If
she fell into his plan and helped him to carry it out, he would bear
with her silliness; he would say nothing to her about their childless
hearth—about her rouge—her age—her affectation. He would command his
temper and his tongue, and do his best for her, if she would do her best
for him.