EARLY WEST CARBERY
I have already commented on the social importance, and value, of the
feuds of a century ago. Fights were made, like the wall-papers, the
carpets, the furniture, to last. Friendships too, I daresay, but though
it was possible to dissolve a friendship, the full-fledged fight, beaked
and clawed, was incapable as an eagle of laying down its weapons.
Such a fight there was between two sisters, both long since dead. They
were said to have been among “The Beauties of the Court of the
Regent”--delightful phrase, bringing visions of ringlets and rouge, and
low necks and high play--and both were famed for their wit, their charm,
and their affection for each other. Still unmarried, their mother
brought them home to Castle Townshend (for reasons not unconnected with
the run of the cards), not quite so young as they had been--in those
days a young lady’s first youth seems to have been irrevocably lost at
about three and twenty--yet none the less dangerous on that account.
Most feuds originate in a difference of opinion, but this one, or so it
has always been said, was due to a disastrous similarity in taste.
Legends hint that a young cousin, my grandfather, then a personable
youth fresh from Oxford, was the difficulty. But whatever the cause (and
he married the elder sister) peace was not found in sixty years; the
combatants died, and the fight outlived the fighters.
In these feebler days the mental attitude of that time is hard to
realise. The stories that have come down to us only complicate the
effort to reconstitute the people and the period, but they may
help--some of them--to explain the French Revolution. A tale is told of
one of these ex-beauties, noted, be it remembered, for her charm of
manner, her culture, her sense of humour. Near the end of her long life
she went to the funeral of a relative, leaning decorously upon the arm
of a kinsman. At the churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her
and the coffin. She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her
squire, and struck the countryman in the face. It is no less
characteristic of the time that the countryman’s attitude does not come
into the story, but it seems to me probable that he went home and
boasted then, and for the rest of his life, that old Madam ---- had “bet
him a blow in the face.”
There is yet another story, written in a letter to a young cousin, by my
father’s cousin, the late Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, a very delightful
letter-writer and story-teller, who has taken with her to the next world
a collection of anecdotes that may possibly cause her relatives there to
share the regret of her friends here that she did not leave them behind
her.
“One more link in the chain of events,” she writes,
“Grandmamma’s sister-in-law married her brother, ‘Devil Dick,’ who was
violent to madness. His mother alone was not afraid of him. She had a
spirit of her own. On one occasion she went over a ship at Cork,
intending to make purchases from contraband goods. She set aside chosen
ones, but was stopped by the _Excisemen_. She looked at the basket
full, raised her tiny foot (which you and I, dearest A., inherit) and
kicked the whole collection overboard into the Sea!
“That same foot she released from her high-heeled shoe on arriving,
driven from Cork in a ‘Jarvey,’ and, when the _Cocher_ said ‘Stop Madam,
you haven’t paid!’ she threw the money on the ground, and with her shoe
she dealt him a smart box on the ear and said,
“‘Take _that_ before the Grand Jury!’ (meaning _she_ could do anything
and would not get fined.)
“_Une maïtresse femme!_”
Thus my cousin concludes her story, not without a certain approbation of
our ancestress.
Indisputably the coming of the Palefaces slackened the moral fibre of
Castle Townshend; the fire has gone out of the fights and the heat out
of the hatreds. I do not claim for the later generations a higher
standard; peace is mainly ensued by lack of concentration; it is not so
much that we forgive, as that we forget. I regret that these early
histories do not present my departed relatives in a more attractive
light, but personal experience has taught me how infinitely boring can
be the virtues of other people’s families.
A strange product of these high explosives was my father, who, as was
said of another like unto him, was “The gentlest crayture ever came into
a house.” He had no brothers and but one sister, a fact that did not, I
think, distress my grandparents, who were in advance of their period in
considering the prevalent immense families ill-bred; and even had the
matter been for them a subject of regret, they had at least one
consolation--a consolation offered in a similar case to a cousin of
Martin’s--“Afther all,” it was said, “if ye had a hundhred of them ye
couldn’t have a greater variety.”
An only son, with a solitary sister, brought up in the days when the
difference between the sexes was clearly defined by the position of the
definite article, “an only son” being by no means in the same case,
grammatical or otherwise, with “only a daughter,” it would not have been
surprising had he developed into such a flower of culture as had
blossomed in “Johnny Wild.” I expect that the rare and passionate
devotion of his father to his mother taught him a lesson not generally
inculcated in his time. In truth, his love and consideration for his
mother and sister amounted to anachronism in those days, when chivalry
was mostly relegated to the Eglinton Tournament, and unselfishness was
bracketed with needlework as a graceful and exclusive attribute of the
Ministering Angel.
Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, once defined the two men of her acquaintance whom
most she delighted to honour as
“_Preux Chevaliers!_ Christian gentlemen, who feed their dogs from the
dinner-table!”
I find it impossible to better this as a description of my father. I
recognise the profound conventionality of saying that dogs and children
adored him, yet, conventional though the statement may be, it is
inflicted upon me by the facts of the case. In him children knew,
intuitively, the kindred soul, dogs recognised, not by mere intuition,
but by force of intellect, their slave. I can see him surreptitiously
passing forbidden delicacies from his plate to the silent watchers
beneath the surface, his eyes disingenuously fixed upon the window to
divert my mother’s suspicions, and I can still hear his leisurely
histories of two imaginary South African Lion-slayers, named, with a
massive simplicity, Smith and Brown, whose achievements were for us, as
children, the last possibility of romance.
Children alone could extract from him the tales of various feats of his
youth, feats in which, one supposes, the wild blood that was in him
found its outlet and satisfaction; of the savage bull on to whose back
he had dropped from the branch of a tree, and whom he had then ridden in
glory round and round the field; of the bulldog who jumped at the nose
of a young half-trained Arab mare when my father was riding her, and
caught it, and held on. And so did my father, while the mare flung
herself into knots (and how either dog or man “held their howlt” it is
hard to imagine). The bulldog was finally detached with a pitchfork by
one Jerry Hegarty, who must himself have shown no mean skill and courage
in adventuring into the whirl of that nightmare conflict, but my father
sat it out. It was a daughter of that mare, named Lalla Rukh, a lovely
grey (whom I can remember as a creature by me revered and adored, above,
perhaps, any earthly thing), who was being ridden by my father through a
town when they met a brass band. Lalla Rukh first attempted flight, but
such was her confidence in her rider that, in the end, she let him ride
her up to the big drum, and, in further token of devotion, she then,
heroically, put her nose on it. One imagines that the big drummer was
enough of a gentleman to refrain from his duties during those tense
moments, but the rest of the band blazed on. My father was a boy of
seventeen when he got his commission and was presently quartered at
Birr, where he acted as Whip to the regimental pack of hounds. There is
an authentic story of a hound, that my grandfather sent to Birr, by
rail and coach, escaping from the barracks, and making his way back to
the kennels at Drishane. Birr is in King’s County, and the journey, even
across country, must be over a hundred miles. (These things being thus,
it is hard to understand why any dog is ever lost.)
My father was in the Kaffir wars of 1843 and 1849, and fought right
through the Crimean campaign, being one of the very few infantry
officers who won all the clasps with the Crimean medal. One of his
brother officers in the 68th Durham Light Infantry has told (I quote
from an account published by the officer in question) “of an incident
that shows the coolness and ready daring that characterised him. On the
morning of the battle of Inkermann, 5th Nov., 1854, the 68th saw a body
of troops moving close by. Owing to the fog it was impossible to
distinguish if these were Russian or English. It was of the utmost
importance, and the Colonel of the 68th exclaimed, ‘What would I give to
be able to decide!’
“Without a pause Henry Somerville said, ‘I’ll soon let you know!’ And,
throwing open his grey military great-coat, he showed the scarlet
uniform underneath.
“In a second a storm of rifle bullets answered the momentous question,
thus speedily proving that enemies, and not friends, formed the
advancing troops.”
There is another story of my father’s turning back, during a retirement
up hill under heavy fire, at the battle of the Alma, to save a wounded
private, whom he carried on his back out of danger. But not from him did
we hear of these things. One of the few soldiering stories that I can
recollect hearing from him was in connection with the fighting
proclivities of his servant, Con Driscoll, a son of a tenant who had
followed him into the regiment. Con had been in a row of no small
severity; his defence, as is not unusual, took the form of reflections
upon the character of his adversary, and an exposition of his own
self-restraint.
“If it wasn’t that I knew me ordhers,” he said, “and the di-_ship_lin’
of the Sarvice, I wouldn’t lave him till I danced on his shesht!”