Warned.
In the days of which I am writing there were two kinds of lawyer extant
in Ireland—the wholly disreputable and the eminently respectable.
Among the disreputable every kind and description of man might be found,
providing he was decidedly clever and not over-scrupulous; the
respectable, on the contrary, were mostly of one pattern, men of
standing, having characters to lose, who were socially quite on an
equality with their clients, and who were as far above the stock
attorney of Irish novelists as an honest merchant is above a swindling
adventurer.
The worst of the respectable lawyers was that they were a little slow;
the best of the disreputable lot was that they were decidedly sharp and
shrewd.
Drawn as a rule from the lower middle class, the latter had all the
quickness of the lower orders of Irish society, all their acuteness of
perception, all their rapidity of jumping to conclusions. In guerilla
warfare the regular army had no chance with them; they were down on a
point of law like a terrier on a rat; they had every Act of Parliament
at their fingers’ ends; they were perfect scourges in court; they were
the terror of witnesses, the detestation of magistrates. If there were a
flaw in your title, woe betide you if one of them got scent of it. They
were clever, well up in law, impertinent, impudent, vulgar; they were
always talking about the people’s rights; always for the man who had
shot his landlord or his landlord’s bailiff from behind a hedge; always
against the Crown; always in favour of the Roman Catholics and against
the Protestants.
Unless a landlord had very dirty work indeed on hand he seldom left his
family solicitor to seek advice from one of these gentlemen; and it was
rarely indeed that any of them so far deserted his original flag as to
serve under the enemy. In politics they were Liberals; in religion much
the same. As a rule, they had been articled without the regular fee, and
came into the profession by the back stairs. They were the hope of the
vagabond population; they were the deliverers of many a man from the
grievous terrors of the law; they fought so long as there was a rag of a
chance left to them. If ever they got very rich they settled into men
who upheld the constitution and the government; but so long as they
remained poor—and that was generally for ever, because they spent as
recklessly as they earned easily—they were for the people: for the women
who went about barefooted; for the men who lounged through life with
their coat-tails trailing the ground, with their battered hats worn on
one side, with their hands in their pockets, and short pipes in their
mouths.
Of this class Timothy Ryan was a favourable specimen. He might not have
much principle, but he had a heart. He was known to forgive men their
costs, though he was also known to have done many a thing which his best
friends could scarcely consider honest. He was not a hard agent, though
he was certainly not an honest man. His conscience had never stood in
his way, but his feelings had. He was immensely popular with the lower
orders, but he had not the entrée into any of the gentlemen’s houses in
the neighbourhood, except into that of Waller of Eversbeg, whose agent
he was, and to whose table he was often invited.
For the rest, he had little society save Mr. Murphy, Dr. Sheen’s
assistant; the parish priest, and a retired sea captain who lived on the
Duranmore side of Eversbeg Head. With Maxwell Drewitt, whom he had known
for years, his intimacy was entirely of a business character, and yet
Ryan was proud of the acquaintanceship, such as it was. He felt it gave
him a certain standing knowing a Drewitt of Kincorth, even although that
Drewitt had not the remotest chance of ever owning Kincorth. He knew he
owed Waller’s agency—a tremendous lift for him—to Maxwell having brought
the owner of Eversbeg into Inchnagawn Cottage to shelter during a storm;
he was well aware young Drewitt could benefit him still more if he
chose; for all of which reasons, Ryan cultivated Maxwell; whilst, for
various sufficient reasons of his own, Maxwell cultivated Ryan.
Jenny Bourke was Ryan’s half-sister. They were children of the same
mother; Mrs. Ryan having changed her name for that of Bourke within two
years of her first husband’s death.
Of the Ryans’ union there had been many sons: one, Timothy, the eldest,
settled at Duranmore as a lawyer; another ran away to sea; a third
enlisted; a fourth emigrated; and so at last poor Mrs. Bourke departed
this life in despair of ever seeing them reunited, and left her only
daughter to the care of her sister and to the guardianship of Timothy.
As for Mr. Bourke, he had long before deserted his wife and married a
younger and more attractive-looking woman in England; indeed, rumour
said that Mrs. Ryan was by no means his first essay in matrimony. He had
a way of winning widows and securing their little fortunes, and then
disappearing like a flash of lightning.
Some people declared Bourke was not his name at all; but be this as it
may, Jenny had never been called by any other, and she never hoped to be
called by any other, unless indeed it might some day happen that Maxwell
were able to make her his wife.
Mr. Murphy had something more than a liking for the girl, but Jenny
turned her coldest shoulder on the assistant when he called.
“It’s that blackguard Maxwell at his tricks again,” thought Mr. Murphy;
“I am sure he sees her somehow:” but Mr. Murphy was a wise man and kept
his own counsel. He did not frighten Jenny by spreading a net in her
sight, but he drew back and watched who threw the crumbs, he felt
confident, the girl came down to pick up.
“I’ve my eye on you, my boy,” he would remark to himself when he met
young Mr. Drewitt and exchanged bows with him; “I have my eye on you.
Give you rope enough and you will run it into a noose for yourself, or I
am greatly mistaken. Good-morning, sir; fine weather this for the
country.” And he would ride off on his rough pony, while Maxwell trudged
over the Connemara roads on foot.
His uncle had offered him leave to take a couple of horses out of the
stable at Kincorth, but Maxwell declined the gift.
“Not one of them shall give me a lift up,” he said to Ryan, and Ryan
applauded his spirit even while he wondered at it.
“Where the deuce does he get the money from?” considered the lawyer:
“where can he get it? for a man is not able to live for nothing, even in
a cabin; and he pays wages, and buys implements, and hires horses, and
draws sea-weed. I should like to know who is backing him. Can it be
Turner? It is not impossible.”
And Maxwell took every pains to foster this idea, and to make Mr. Ryan
think not only that Turner was backing him, but also that Mr. Waller and
Mr. Pryor were willing to help him in his endeavours.
In reality, however, he did not for many a long day receive the
slightest assistance from any of his male acquaintances, whether Irish
or English.
It was Lady Emmeline Vervensoe who helped him into the saddle; it was
Lady Emmeline who, when she heard he had left Kincorth with the
intention of trying to push his way on in the world, gave him a
considerable sum of money, saying significantly as she pressed it into
his hand: “Secret service money for the election; you need not give me
any account of it, Mr. Drewitt.” And Mr. Drewitt did not give her any
account, and when he found that his farming operations required more
capital he asked her ladyship to make him a further advance.
He and Colonel Vervensoe had never healed up their old wound. So they
passed each other when they met without speaking, and Maxwell was never
by any chance now asked up to Cragantlet, even in the hunting season.
But yet the servants at Cragantlet knew that Mr. Drewitt of “The
Headlands,” as he was beginning to call his new property, occasionally
rode up to the house when Colonel Vervensoe was from home; and a man who
was in the habit of attending Lady Emmeline when she drove in her
phaeton, or rode out on horse-back, could have told tales of many a
meeting, not accidental, between the pair.
There was nothing wrong in the affair; there was no breaking of the
seventh commandment, nor idea of breaking it; but still Lady Emmeline
liked Maxwell so much, and Maxwell found her ladyship so extremely
useful, that neither thought of discontinuing the acquaintance
altogether.
To be strictly truthful, however, the young man had thought at one time
of persuading her ladyship to go off with him—not because being his
neighbour’s wife made her seem any nicer in his eyes, but simply because
her husband had insulted him, and she had a large fortune.
I am afraid, seeing Lady Emmeline was not over-prudent, had Maxwell been
sure the game was worth the candle, that he would not have proved
over-scrupulous in the matter; but as it was, Maxwell had a long head,
and a clear head, and he reflected that, if he ran away with Colonel
Vervensoe’s wife, that gallant officer would either shoot him or ruin
him.
Her ladyship, at a certain price, might not be dear; but her ladyship,
with a bullet in some part of his body, or with heavy damages from the
Ecclesiastical Courts, was quite another matter.
Mr. Maxwell Drewitt thought that game not worth the candle, and so
abandoned it, and accordingly Lady Emmeline Vervensoe’s character was as
safe in his keeping as though she had been as ugly as one of the witches
in Macbeth or as repulsive as Sycorax.
Nevertheless, it was her money that ploughed his fields, paid his
labourers, bought his seed; and, to do Maxwell Drewitt justice, no money
was ever more judiciously laid out.
He was prudent, he was economical, he did not encroach on her kindness;
he knew when to hold back his hand and say “enough.”
He required money and she lent it to him—gave it to him, she said but
Maxwell preferred the other way of putting it. Once he had got the
start, however, he worked manfully to keep it: he wanted to show Lady
Emmeline, and to convince himself, out of what small beginnings even an
Irishman may make a fortune; and so he laboured on, bringing first one
piece of land and then another under cultivation, till people finally
began to talk of Maxwell Drewitt as a wonder, and to marvel how he did
it; while pretty Jenny Bourke thought within herself, “He will soon be
rich enough to ask Timothy for me now;” but she never ventured to say
this to him again, although she still stole out to meet him, either by
the stream, or on the shore, or up in the mountain gorge that lay at the
back of Inchnagawn Cottage.
“That is a mighty nice walk on a summer’s evening,” remarked Mr. Murphy,
pointing up this gorge, as he and Mr. Ryan stood looking inland one fine
morning in June.
“Is it?” said the attorney, carelessly.
“I like to listen to your innocent talk,” replied Mr. Murphy. “‘Is it?’
he says, just as simple as a lamb.”
“Well, is it?” repeated Mr. Ryan. “How should I know anything about the
place; I never was up the stream in my life!”
“Never were out with any young woman either, I suppose?”
“I have not been this many a year, at any rate,” returned the other.
“The only girl I ever was to say sweet on was not sweet on me; and
somehow I never fancied another since.”
“Well, it is mighty queer,” remarked Mr. Murphy.
“What is queer?” asked his friend.
“Why, the lies men will tell when women and money are concerned. It was
no later ago than last night that I followed a pair of lovers from the
top of the gorge down to that big rock; you see it there, don’t you?”
“Yes. You followed them; what then?”
“Why then, Mr. Timothy Ryan, as I did not want to be seen, I stopped
behind that lump of granite and watched; and I saw them in the darkness
come down, down, down. The young woman wore a light dress; and I am
positive that dress, at any rate, went round your haystacks and in by
the back gate.”
“You did not think it was me, Murphy?” said Ryan; but his voice sounded
hoarse as he asked the question.
“You in the light dress? in course not; but if the man wasn’t you, who
was he?”
“You are sure you had not been drinking?”
“I’ll swear it for you, if you like.”
“And you are certain you were not mistaken?”
“Sure and certain.”
“The man was not as tall as I am?”
“He might not have been.”
“Was he anything like Maxwell Drewitt?” inquired Ryan.
“They could have passed for twins,” replied Mr. Murphy.
“That’s enough, Murphy, thank you,” said Ryan, and he drew a long, deep
breath. “It’s warm to-day,” he observed, lifting his hat off his head,
and letting the light wind fan his temples. “I must be getting towards
Duranmore now,” he added abruptly; “are you going to walk that way?”
“I can walk any way,” was the reply. “Trade is mighty dull just now.
There has not been a child born this week, I think; and only one
accident, and he was carried home dead as a doornail. It’s a cursed
place at the best of times,” proceeded Mr. Murphy; “but the like of it
this June nobody would credit. I have made up all our calomel into pills
and powders, just for want of something to do; and I have been trying
how much nux vomica I could take without bringing on tetanus, for the
sake of whiling away the time. I don’t think there is another such hole
in the entire of Great Britain or Ireland. Whenever my mother dies, and
she can’t last long, poor old girl, I shall cut Ireland altogether, and
make for London. That’s the place, my boy—that’s the chance for men like
me.”
And Mr. Murphy rattled on after this fashion all the way to Duranmore,
leaving it quite optional with his companion whether he answered him or
not.
Ryan elected not to answer him, and not to speak till they were shaking
hands at the door of his office in the High Street; then he said—
“They did not see you, did they?”
“Does a corpse see the sexton when he is shovelling the mould in on the
top of him, do you think?” asked Mr. Murphy.
And with that they parted.
For many a night afterwards Mr. Ryan kept watch; many a time he
pretended to go away from home, and kept guard in the gorge, in the
twilight, in the starlight, in the moonlight—all in vain.
He would not speak to his sister nor to Maxwell. He bided his time, and
he waited without result until one evening when he was returning, a day
sooner than he had expected to be back, from an outlying portion of Mr.
Waller’s property, among the wildest part of the Joyce country.
There he had bought a new horse, a young, handsome creature, bay with
black legs, leaving in exchange his old white mare and a not
unreasonable number of pound-notes.
He was proud of his new purchase: it had a long easy trot, and had
brought him by bridlepaths up hilly roads, through lonely valleys,
thirty Irish miles without turning a hair; and he was so careful of this
good steed that he stopped at the top of the hill above Eversbeg in
order to lead him down the steep descent.
With his arm passed through the bridle and his hand on the horse’s
glossy neck, Mr. Ryan paused at a turn of the road, and looked at the
view spread out before him.
Nestling at the foot of the hill, huddled up among its woods, stood
Eversbeg, and nearer to him still were the ruins of Eversbeg Abbey. He
could see the pointed windows half concealed by ivy; he could see the
grave-stones and the crosses and the monuments; he could see away over
Eversbeg Bay, out to the great Atlantic; and he could discern, like a
speck in the distance, Maxwell Drewitt’s cottage lying away near
Eversbeg Head.
There was a great hush and calm over everything—over the sea and the
land, the mountains and the valleys—and Ryan could not help feeling
subdued by that virtue of stillness, by that calm which seems oftentimes
to follow the sun’s setting, as though nature were lying quiet ere
falling to sleep for the night.
After this pause he went on, descending the hill by a winding road,
which soon shut out from his view Eversbeg and the Abbey and the
Atlantic, but brought him at a sharp turn within sight of Kincorth and
Duranmore and Duranmore Bay, which was more like a lake than like an arm
of the sea, and his own white cottage close to the shore, where Jenny
would not be expecting his return.
As he thought of this, Ryan pulled up short. He had twisted his hand in
his horse’s mane, he had lifted his left foot half way up to the
stirrup, but on the instant he unwound his fingers from among the coarse
black hair, and stood beside his steed, while the animal lifted up its
head and looked out over the bay, too, as though he had been a
Christian.
While he stood irresolute, Ryan saw a man leave the shore road, and,
after looking round, follow the course of the stream I have spoken of as
flowing at the back of Inchnagawn Cottage.
It was Maxwell Drewitt. Though it was getting dusk, though there was a
considerable distance between them, still Mr. Ryan recognized the man he
had been waiting for.
When there are not a dozen gentlemen within a circuit of twenty miles it
is not easy to mistake the identity of any of them, and Ryan felt that
he was not deceived—Maxwell Drewitt was going up the stream to meet
Jenny, and he might catch them yet; and he would catch them, “he would,
by——.”
He flung the reins to a lad who stood at a cabin-door by the wayside,
and bidding him take care of the horse, Ryan left the main road and
dashed down what remained of the hill, across bog and river, among
brambles and heather, home. He had his riding-whip in his hand, and
involuntarily he shortened his hold of it as he drew nearer—nearer
still.
Every now and then he stopped, for there was a noise in his ears like
the raging of distant waters. It was his passion—it was the tumult in
his breast which sounded to him as the roar of the sea.
He came on—on; he gained the high road; he stole round by the back of
his own house; and there, by the stream, were the pair still talking.
“Timothy!” shrieked Jenny—and she had reason: in a moment he held
Maxwell by the collar, and showered down blows upon him.
“Villain! scoundrel! coward!” he said, and he literally ground his teeth
with rage.
“Hands off, fool!” shouted Maxwell, and he clasped his own round Ryan’s
throat.
There was an awful struggle for a moment, but then Maxwell tripped his
opponent up, and putting his knee on his chest, tore the whip out of his
grasp, and sent it flying among the weeds and rashes that grew on the
other side the stream.
“Who is villain, scoundrel, coward now?” he asked, with a sneer; with
his face black with rage, with the veins in his forehead swelled, with
the devil that was in him looking out of his eyes. “Who is a spy and a
listener? I won’t thrash you, because you are her brother; I won’t shoot
you, because you are not worth the trouble; but I’ll leave you to think
what you have made by this move;” and Maxwell released his adversary,
picked up his hat, which had fallen to the ground, and saying to Miss
Bourke, “I will see you another time, Jenny,” was about to walk off,
when Ryan called out, “Stop!”
“You shall never see her to speak to again. Only let me catch you near
the house—only let me hear of Jenny ever looking to the side of the
street where you walk, and I will shoot you like a dog.”
“Have you finished?” asked Maxwell; “because in that case I may wish you
good-morning.” And he lifted his hat to Jenny, whose face was as white
as the cottage walls, and was gone.
Within a week Ryan took a house in Duranmore next door to his office,
and moved his furniture and himself and his sister away from the pretty
cottage by the shore.
But the waves came rolling up the bay for all that: though there was no
human ear to listen to their music, they still rippled over the stones
and sand—the shutters of the cottage-windows were closed and fastened,
but the fuchsias bloomed the same as ever—no Jenny now stood by the
stream, singing her love songs, dreaming her love fantasies, but the
stream went dancing over the stones to the sea none the less
joyously—there were none to look up at the everlasting hills, but the
summer’s sun shone on them, and the winter’s snows lay on them, as the
sun had shone and the snow had lain since the beginning of time.