The Master of Kincorth.
Archibald Drewitt, Esq., of Kincorth, was born a mistake. He said so
himself, and therefore there can be no discourtesy in my repeating the
observation. Whether different circumstances and a different training
might have rectified nature’s error, it is hard to say. Circumstances
and training did nothing for him, and accordingly a mistake he remained
to the end of the chapter.
“Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel;” that was the pleasant
programme sketched out for him. “Unstable as water, he did not excel,”
and he made everybody who had the misfortune to be connected with him,
miserable in consequence.
“Unstable as water!” Good heavens! how could a man, not, to be a bad
man, have more said in his dispraise!
Unstable as water, his purposes flowed backwards and forwards
perpetually. With youth, health, ample means, fair talents, he started
at six-and-twenty with as fair prospects of happiness as need to be
possessed by any man. Life was before him,—life with its objects, its
pleasures, its duties; but the duties he never fulfilled, the pleasures
he never tasted, the objects he never attained. At twenty-seven
existence seemed a vast conception; at forty-one it was an unfinished,
unsatisfactory, miserable failure.
God deliver us, friends, from such a result! God grant that, when the
noon of our life comes, it may find some work finished, some duty
discharged, so that as the sorrowful sunset draws near—as the darkening
twilight and the darker night approach, we may be able to look back on
the bright mid-day hours without tears of anguish, without the bitterest
thought humanity knows, of having lost time, which, even with all
eternity before us, we may never retrieve—never—for ever!
Unstable as water, the force with which the current of his feelings
hurried him along to an object one moment, was only equalled by the
violence of the flood by which he was distracted from it the next.
Over the sea of life he floated—a boat without a rudder, a mariner
without a star—tossed hither and thither by every wave of passion, by
every caprice and impulse. Almost continually he kept within sight of
the promised land of peace and comfort and content; but never once, ah!
never, did he manage to touch its shores.
Always planning, never executing. Always commencing, never completing.
Always borrowing, never repaying. Always thinking, never acting. Always
proposing, never performing, he spent the whole of his boyhood, manhood,
and age in sending down lost opportunities and good intentions to that
place which is paved with the one and roofed with the other.
It was not, I need scarcely add, that he meant to break his word or
intended to disappoint any living being; it was merely that his theory
proved better than his practice, that purposing and promising to do
everything he finished, like many another, by doing nothing.
Unstable as water, there was not a trait in his character but was
counteracted by some diametrically opposite peculiarity. He was not
religious, yet he was superstitious and bigoted. He hated the Roman
Catholics, yet he was always asking the priest to dinner; he was
prodigal, but still gave little away; he was impatient, yet bore
disappointment as calmly as a philosopher; he was popular, yet always at
feud with some one. He was by turns energetic and indolent, kind and
harsh, forbearing and provoking. His abstract ideas on the subject of
obedience were excellent, yet his servants and nieces ran counter to his
orders before his face. He was a stickler for birth and blood, yet he
supported with heart and soul Mr. Sache—a parvenu, and blackguard. He
was honourable, yet he could never pay a debt to the day; his bills had
always to be lifted by a friend, the interest on his mortgages was
always falling behind, somebody was for ever suffering through, or being
embarrassed by him. He loved punctuality, yet he could not keep an
appointment to the hour. He was never out of hot water, yet he looked as
well and happy as though care and duns and anxiety were meat and drink
to him. He never had a settled plan, yet he would not adopt any other
person’s scheme. He was for ever asking advice and never following it;
in brief, Maxwell Drewitt described his uncle to a nicety when he said
that he was “consistent in nothing except his inconsistency.”
But notwithstanding all his faults, Archibald Drewitt was better liked
than many a better man. He had such frank, gracious manners; he was such
a thorough gentleman in his ideas, his appearance, his bearing; he had
such a knack of turning a compliment, of saying pleasant things as if he
meant them, of implying that the man to whom he was talking at the
moment was his friend of friends—his friend beyond all other friends,
that it was impossible to resist him, as impossible to remain cold and
calculating in his presence, as it is for ice to keep from thawing in
the sun. Let a creditor be ever so angry, an interview with Mr. Drewitt
satisfied him. Those who had made vows concerning paper lent their name
to the owner of Kincorth; even Samuel Turner, an Englishman, a Quaker,
and a merchant, who, for his sins, had once enjoyed the hospitality of
the Irish gentleman, did bills for him, and was wont to lie awake whole
nights wondering how they were to be met, till Mr. Drewitt cut the knot
of his perplexity by a long and pathetic letter setting forth how that
he could not take up the bill, stating why he could not do so,
explaining when he should have money in abundance, and imploring Mr.
Turner meanwhile to do what was needful under the circumstances. “Please
renew,” was the burden of Mr. Drewitt’s everlasting song, a burden with
which many business men are conversant; but very few business men meet
with such correspondents as fell to the lot of the owner of Kincorth.
If was entirely his own fault getting into debt, but people forgot that
and pitied him for it.
There never was a man who drew so largely on the sympathies and purses
of his friends, and yet his cheques never came back dishonoured. Liking
was not the word to express the feeling Mr. Drewitt inspired in those
with whom he came in contact. He was loved, he was idolized, and yet he
left no track of good deeds behind him as he walked through life. Even
his charity, which consisted in letting every tramp who listed walk into
the kitchen at Kincorth, and drink a basin of milk, or toss off a glass
of poteen, before he trudged away with his wallet full of broken
victuals, was as purposeless and as useless as every other action of his
life. He helped no man who was helping himself; it was not the
struggling tradesman, the hard-working labourer who benefited by Mr.
Drewitt’s careless open-handedness; rather, it was the worthless
vagabond, the lazy idle beggar, who fattened on the waste and profusion
of Kincorth.
Open house to all comers: covers for a score if a score liked to drop
in; great sirloins of beef, fish as fine as ever swam in the sea, wine
of the best, whisky of the strongest, brandy that had never paid the
king a halfpenny, claret that was in the same predicament; “cead mille
failthe!” uttered in a rich soft Irish brogue—this was the order of
things in the parlour; whilst in the kitchen there was a bit and a sup
for all who chose to claim hospitality; for hungry dogs and for hungry
men and women. There was the heat of the piled-up turf fire for the lame
and halt who stood looking over the half door, muttering, “God save all
here!” There was the cup of tea for the deaf and dumb, who, by reason of
their misfortunes, were considered able to read the fortunes of others,
and who kept all the maids from their work by prophesying in signs and
gestures the advent of certain husbands, probable journeys, possible
misfortunes.
If the prayer of the poor avail, Archibald Drewitt should have been a
happy man; for never a day passed over without “God bless him” being
repeated thirty or forty times. To be sure, the lips that blessed would
have cursed even more volubly had help been refused; but the help never
was refused. It was _but_ a handful of meal, _but_ a plate of broken
meat, _but_ the bag of potatoes, _but_ the screw of tea, _but_ the
blessing lightly earned, the curse readily averted; and still Archibald
Drewitt did not prosper, still the property went like the house, like
the grounds, like the porter’s lodge, like the entrance—to rack and
ruin.
“Would you grudge the craturs a bite to keep life in them?” asked one of
the old servants one day when Maxwell Drewitt had made some remark
concerning the number of beggars he saw about the place.
“I’d make the rascals work and earn it,” he answered.
“Yer grandfather, God rest his sowl! would niver have made a spache like
that about poor done men,” she replied. “There was many a one thought he
had done wrong,—I thrust he is now in glory—in passing by his eldest son
to lave the place to the masther; but there is one thing sure and
certain, that it is a blessing for the poor you did not get it, Masther
Maxwell.”
“The poor had best make the most of their blessing then while it lasts,”
remarked the young man; “for a man cannot go on feeding a county for
ever, and my uncle is making ducks and drakes of Kincorth as fast as he
knows how.”
“Well, Masther Maxwell, it’s not for you to be saying anything about who
he feeds.”
“Because he has fed me, I suppose; because he has kept me like the
beggars in poverty and idleness,” remarked Maxwell. “I owe him no thanks
for that, Nannie, rather the reverse.”
“I always heard that Nicholas Drewitt was a terribly wise old gentleman,
but I am sure of it now,” answered Nannie.
“Well, do you be a wise old woman,” recommended Mr. Drewitt, junior,
“and make a purse for yourself and keep it; for I swear to you, Nannie,
that if ever I am owner of Kincorth I’ll clear it of all the vermin that
are eating the heart out of the corn now.”
And with this Maxwell Drewitt turned on his heel and walked away,
thinking, “If ever it do come to me it will be valueless, and I—I would
have kept it together; I would have made Kincorth something worth
talking about. Curse him,” said the young man stopping suddenly. “Curse
him for a fool!”
It was hard. His uncle ought either to have cast him off or provided for
him suitably. The very beggars had almost as much good of the estate as
he, and they had no claim on Kincorth as he had—a claim in equity though
not in law.
Why did the man want to marry now? Had he not been in love fourteen
years before? and was not one love enough for such a temperament for
life? Had he not been jilted? Had he not stood with the muzzle of a
pistol touching his forehead, when his brother found him? and did not
the pistol miss fire? and had not the pair a fight for the weapon, which
ended in George Drewitt knocking the owner of Kincorth down and sending
for a doctor to bleed him till he fainted?
“I wish he would take the same notion again,” thought Maxwell, “and that
I had the loading. He would not fall in love a third time;” and the
young man sneered bitterly as he remembered his father’s weakness in
interfering to save the life that stood between him and Kincorth, as he
thought of all the oaths Archibald Drewitt had sworn when the fever
passed away about dividing the estate, about giving his brother a share,
about all he would do for the children, about how he would never marry,
never look with love on the face of any woman again, but live single,
and bring up Maxwell and his sisters as though they were his own son and
daughters.
If an amiable man does us a wrong we hate him fifty times more than if
he were as black as Erebus—hate him because the world joins issue with
us on the question. Had Archibald Drewitt been like Maxwell Drewitt,
nephew and uncle could have fought the matter out on equal social
grounds; but as it was society could never be made to believe that
Archibald Drewitt could be wrong, for which reason Maxwell Drewitt hated
him.
It was hard. I can imagine no cross harder to bear than that of a man
like Maxwell Drewitt placed in Maxwell Drewitt’s position.
In England such a position would have been bad enough; in England, where
any one with courage, and industry, and cleverness, may eventually make
his way; but in Ireland, in Connemara, in a country where trade is
looked down upon, where work is ignominy, where there are but two
classes—the very rich who do nothing, and the very poor who do as little
as they can help, my reader, think of it!—think of a gentleman beggar—of
a man who had all the instincts of his class—who looked upon a merchant
as an inferior being—who had been brought up to no profession—whose
proud stomach could never have brooked the idea of business—who laughed
scornfully at Samuel Turner’s well-meant postscript—who would have tried
to keep up the name and the property and the family dignity,—and who was
still a pauper.
Think of it. He was hardly done by, and all the more hardly, perhaps,
because Kincorth belonged to an interloper—to one of those younger sons
who, since the time of the patriarchs, have been continually putting the
noses of elder sons out of joint.
Never a Drewitt before had thought of making money; but Maxwell was
determined to make it now. He was born in advance of his age; the men of
thirty years ago did not think much of draining, of subsoils, of
top-dressing, of the rotation of crops, and for that matter indeed to
look at Connemara now, one would think that the men of the present day
thought as little of these matters as their predecessors.
Once Maxwell had visited England—once he had seen corn growing, where
for centuries previously nothing had thriven save rushes and reeds and
wild fowl. He had asked how the change was effected, how the morass was
turned into a garden, the wilderness into a fruitful plain; and while
his host told him he thought of Galway—thought of the rushes and the
bogs there—thought as only an Irishman can think of his native country,
and of the best way of bettering his condition.
In England, too, he saw smiling cottages, well-fed men and women,
children with clothes on their back and shoes to their feet. Again he
asked for information, and again he was told that these men, who were
better clad than the best tenants who reluctantly came to Kincorth in
May and November, were not landholders, only labourers.
“That is it,” thought Maxwell Drewitt, then only a lad; “the small farms
are the curse of Ireland. Our tenants ought to be our labourers—that is
it.”
And he went back, Irish like, making fun of the English for having a
good dinner, and yet scorning his countrymen for being contented with
potatoes and salt. It is the Irishman of thirty years ago and more I am
talking about, remember. It is not to be supposed the Irishman of 1865
bears more than the faintest family resemblance to him.
At any rate, the individual whose story I am telling detested the
English as English, and yet was willing to learn a lesson out of their
book of prosperity. He liked the flesh-pots, but he hated the country.
He loved the wealth, but he could not stand the accent. He could have
horsewhipped the first Irish peasant he saw shrinking out of the way of
his galloping horse, and yet he thought the English too independent.
“Look at England,” he would say in Ireland, and yet in his heart, while
he was in England, he loved Irish ways and Irish manners best.
He thought of those great English farmers riding their thoroughbreds,
sending their daughters to boarding-schools, walking to church beside
their wives, who were dressed in silks and merinos, and then he looked
into Irish hovels, where the owner of the soil—owner so far as paying
his rent can make a man so—never knew what it was to eat an egg laid by
his own hens, to taste butter made from his own cows’ milk, year after
year.
“It is all wrong,” concluded Maxwell Drewitt; “these men ought to be
labourers: they ought to be eating fat bacon and drinking strong ale
like the English. How _do_ the English make money as if it was to be
picked up by the road side? Give Galway to them and in twenty years they
would be advertising villa sites—villa sites”—and the young man looked
away towards the mountains and smiled to think how soon the Cockneys
could spoil Connemara.
“But they would live like fighting cocks out of it—they would,” finished
Maxwell Drewitt; “and it is a burning shame and a crying disgrace that
the Irish cannot do the same.”
“We do very well as we are, Max,” said his uncle, when he propounded
these heretical doctrines to him. “Let well alone. The Almighty never
intended us to be like England or he would not have given us such an
iron-bound coast. The country is different and the people are different
and our ways are different. If you put shoes and stockings on the
children they would limp along the roads. If you washed their faces and
sent them to school they would cry their eyes out. If you put Davy Blake
into an English farmhouse and told his wife she must keep it clean, they
would be wretched. Each nation goes through the centuries its own way,
as each man travels to heaven by a different road. Many a person has
tried to mend us, and many a person has come to grief. Stick to your
horse across country, Maxwell, and leave the rights and wrongs of
Ireland to those whose business it is to study them.”
Admirable advice doubtless, and kindly meant; but then the giver was a
man whose way had been made for him, and the receiver had to try and
make his own way as best he could. And gold mines were not common in
that part of the country. Money was not lying under foot as it was
reported to be in London; where, however, Colonel Dyak had not improved
his opportunities any more than Mr. Archibald Drewitt had improved his,
in Connemara.
No two men ever travelled to the dogs at so equal a pace as the
Englishman about town and the Irish country gentleman. They went by
different roads, but their destination was the same: and yet each looked
up to the other, and while Dyak thought Drewitt was rolling in wealth,
Drewitt considered Dyak an individual without a care.
They had met after a fashion common enough in Galway. Colonel Dyak went
there to fish, and Mr. Drewitt coming across him one day, on the shores
of one of the innumerable lakes, asked him to dinner.
And Colonel Dyak accepted the invitation, and ate Mr. Drewitt’s mutton
and drank his claret, and rode his horses every day for six weeks; at
the end of which time he insisted on carrying his host back to London
with him.
Nothing loth, Mr. Drewitt went over twice, and the second time he
returned to Kincorth it was as an engaged man; who by way of bettering
his prospects had asked a young and portionless woman to cast in her lot
with his.
There was one kind of wife who might have saved both him and Kincorth. A
wife with a clear head and a strong will, able to carry things with a
high hand—clever and active and determined and economical withal, would
have queened it at the old place and kept the mortgaged acres together;
but, as a matter of course, Miss Dyak was gentle and loving and
trusting—a woman perfectly incompetent to fight out any battle—a woman
with a sweet placid face—with calm, thoughtful eyes—with smooth, glossy
hair—with a soft, white, satiny skin—with a low voice—with timid,
caressing manners—with no head to plan; but with a heart to be broken.
It is hard for me to write about her—hard for me to go on from this
point and tell of the storms and rain that fell upon that drooping
head—of the trials and crosses that bowed that poor heart before she lay
down to sleep the only really peaceful slumber our poor humanity knows.
She was not the wife for Mr. Drewitt, and Mr. Drewitt was not the
husband for her; but notwithstanding that, they chose to take one
another for better or for worse.
There was no better to the matter, however—it was all worse; it was like
everything Archibald Drewitt did or proposed to do—a mistake.
Colonel Dyak was charmed with the match, and delighted with his
son-in-law elect. He had enjoyed himself greatly at Kincorth. He knew
Mr. Drewitt’s horses were capital. He had landed salmon twelve pounds
weight. The lakes in Galway were alive with fish: the mountains were
covered with game.
“A fine country, I believe,” remarked one of his club acquaintance to
him. “Magnificent scenery, they tell me—monstrous properties—capable of
being improved to any extent.”
Whereupon Colonel Dyak broke ground.
“A fine country! Why, sir, there is not an Englishman breathing knows
what a country it is; there is not a Londoner would believe in such
scenery being within five hundred miles of him unless he saw it.
Mountains! I couldn’t tell you how high they are. Lakes! God only knows
how many hundred lakes I saw in one day. Harbours! why the coast is a
succession of front doors facing America. Rivers! if you turned the
Thames the other way, and made it run from Yorkshire south, it would not
be half so fine as the Shannon. Fuel! you can’t imagine what a
magnificent fire turf makes. Land! there are thousands upon thousands of
acres that have never been turned up by a plough. Labour! eightpence to
tenpence a day in the summer, sixpence to eightpence in the winter.
Society! I never was among a more jovial set of people in my life. Ay,
that is a country! with building materials lying by the wayside, with
granite roads, with marble quarries, silver mines, rock and mountain and
lake and sea. You must come to Galway with me sometime and judge for
yourself.”
“I should like to go greatly,” was the reply. “I am curious to know why
such a country should not prosper.” And the little Londoner took snuff,
and then adjusted his double eye-glasses, thinking doubtless that he
could solve the problem, which is about as dark as the Sphinx, in a
scamper through Ireland.
That is one of the beauties of Ireland, I may here remark. Everybody
imagines, when he begins the pleasing study of her manifold sorrows, of
her excessive poverty, that he has got hold of the right end of the
stick at last; that he has hit on the word with which in some remote age
the puzzle was locked so carefully that no one has ever been able to
open it since; and led on by this delusion, he proceeds triumphantly
only to discover that the riddle seems to have no solution, that all
arguments about the sister island work in a circle, and return to the
same point in the end.
Colonel Dyak, however, was a man who did not trouble himself with
questions of this kind. He took things as he found them: if they were
well, he was pleased; if they were ill, he trusted they would right
themselves in time; and if they did not right themselves, it still was
no business of his; and he felt something more than satisfied with the
match his daughter proposed to herself, although her intended husband’s
property was situated in Ireland; in a country the nonprosperity whereof
puzzled the wise head of his club acquaintance.
Good fishing, good shooting, good hunting could not, however, quite
reconcile Mrs. Dyak to the idea of Agnes throwing herself away upon a
commoner, and that commoner a man unable to make satisfactory marriage
settlements upon her.
“If she _must_ marry,” remarked the eldest daughter, who, on the
strength of having secured a baronet, took upon herself airs in the
family cabinet—“if she _must_ marry a baronet, why did she not make sure
that he was a rich one?”
“But your papa says, my love,” put in Mrs. Dyak, mildly, “that Mr.
Drewitt’s income is fifteen thousand a year.”
“More likely fifteen hundred,” answered Lady Ebbutt.
“And he settles an estate of I think it is two thousand acres on Agnes,”
went on Mrs. Dyak, not heeding her daughter’s remark.
“Depend upon it the estate is a mountain, mamma,” said the baronet’s
wife.
“Well, Bertha, whether it is a mountain or not we cannot help ourselves
in the matter now. Agnes and her papa have set their minds on the match;
and indeed, my dear, I may tell you in confidence, that as we could not
have afforded another season in town, it is a great blessing Aggy has
made a choice. For we must go abroad, and what chance would there be of
her marrying abroad, tell me that?”
But Lady Ebbutt declined to gratify her mother’s desire: she only
observed that she thought it would be better for her parents to reside
in Ireland rather than on the Continent.
“Papa would like it of all things,” she finished.
“I should not,” answered Mrs. Dyak, and the conversation dropped.
Thus the marriage was finally agreed to by all the parties interested.
As a matter of course Mrs. Dyak protested against it, and maintained for
some time sufficient coolness of demeanour to impress Mr. Drewitt with a
due sense of the honour Miss Dyak had conferred upon him by accepting
his hand, and the very moderate settlement that accompanied it; but in
the end Mrs. Dyak gracefully gave way; and in a very fashionable church,
and attended by a little crowd of bridesmaids, Archibald Drewitt and
Agnes Dyak were made man and wife.
It was a very gay wedding. There were plenty of grand people in the
church: there was no lack of fashionable guests at the breakfast.
Everything was in the best style. It was Colonel Dyak’s last shot, and
he did not spare the powder. Any one might have thought his yearly
income something enormous. Even Mr. Drewitt wondered how it happened
that behind such a marriage feast there should be no marriage
settlement, little dreaming that if there had been, Miss Dyak would
never have been permitted to marry a man who lived in Ireland, who had
no house in London, or even in Dublin, who never resided abroad for any
part of the year, and whose estates were embarrassed to such an extent
that only two or three people had other than the faintest idea which
part of his property belonged to him and which to his mortgagees.
It was a nice fate, truly, that Agnes Dyak was robed that morning, all
in pure white, to go out to meet.
“Who shall say that human sacrifices have ceased to be offered in
Britain?” whispered one cynical bachelor to his neighbour, when the pair
joined hands and took one another till death should part them. “Who
shall say there are no victims slain on the horns of the altar now?” And
the speaker laughed, and his friend laughed, and the friend said the
idea was “devilish good,” and the speaker thought in his heart that he
had put it rather neatly, while both forgot how true many words spoken
in jest may be; and neither imagined that when Agnes Drewitt walked down
the long aisle a wife, she was walking on, at the same time, to endure
her martyrdom.