Maxwell’s Improvements.
Three years passed away—slowly enough, for in a place like Duranmore
time’s flight is never very rapid; and during the course of those three
years the novelty of having a son had worn off, and Mr. Drewitt cut down
trees, and renewed leases, and took fines, and raised money without the
slightest reference to his heir’s interests. In the house matters were
better managed; out-of-doors, worse. Every day the property was going
more surely to the dogs; every day money seemed more difficult to be
had, more impossible to be kept.
When Brian lay in his cradle, Mr. Drewitt proposed building a house on
the farm he had settled on his wife before her marriage. “It will
increase the value of the place,” he said; “and if I live till Brian
grow up and marry, he can reside there and be independent of us
altogether; while, on the other hand, should you, dearest, ever have to
leave Kincorth, it would be a home for you.”
All in vain Mrs. Drewitt remonstrated. All in vain she entreated him to
wait, observing that it would surely be time enough to build a house for
Brian’s wife when Brian was put into jacket and trousers. She pointed
out that money was not very plentiful; that workmen would have to be
paid; that somebody must live in the house if it were finished; and that
it would be a continual expense and worry.
Mr. Drewitt overbore all her objections. He insisted that the thing,
being proper to be done, should be done at once; that a dower-house
ought immediately to be erected; that the expense would be nothing, the
advantages incalculable; and straightway he had granite quarried and
drawn to the farm, chose a site, set labourers to dig at the
foundations, and neglected every other concern of his life in order to
ride over each day and see how the work progressed.
“Where are you drawing those stones to?” Maxwell asked one of his
uncle’s men who was driving a cart and horse across the hills.
“To Analore, yer honour,” was the answer.
“What for?” pursued the young man.
“To build a house for Masther Brian. The masther is greatly taken on
with the notion entirely.”
“Fools build houses,” thought Maxwell, “and, my God, what a fool he is!”
Twelve months afterwards Maxwell rode over to Analore, and tying his
horse to a gate walked leisurely up the hill to see how Brian’s castle
was getting on. Analore lay inland; it was, as Lady Ebbutt had said, a
mountain: the farm was nothing more than a sheep-run. Nature had not
made it a garden, and Art had left Nature’s handiwork alone. Over the
short grass Maxwell picked his way: there were boulders, there were
brambles, there was bog, there was morass—Maxwell rounded them all,
still keeping up the hill to the site Mr. Drewitt had chosen.
It was a winter’s morning, bright, clear, and bracing; but there was
nothing of elasticity in Maxwell’s step—nothing youthful about his
movements.
Every now and then he stopped and looked about him; not that the place
was unfamiliar, for the young man knew every rood of his uncle’s
property much better than his uncle did himself. He was scrutinising the
land professionally; he surveyed it as a jockey might a horse. He was
contrasting it with Headlands, and thinking he had made a mistake in
choosing a farm by the sea. He dug up the turf with the heel of his
shoe, and taking a piece of the earth in his hand examined it minutely.
“Curse him!” said Mr. Maxwell Drewitt as he threw the mould away, “this
soil is better than mine,” and he pursued his walk up the hill, thinking
while he walked, till he reached the place where Mr. Drewitt had thought
to build his house.
It was a lovely site. “A property in such a situation, within twenty
miles of London, would be worth a king’s ransom; the view alone would be
a fortune,” thought Maxwell, while he looked over lake and valley, over
gorge and mountain, and then he laughed, to see nothing but the
foundations built up, no sign of bricklayer or labourer at hand. There
were cartloads of granite on the ground; there were heaps of sand and
marks of where mortar had been mixed; there was the earth that they dug
out of the foundations wheeled away on one side, and in this state the
edifice was left.
“If he had given this to me instead of settling it on her; if he had
said, ‘Maxwell, you have been hardly done by, and it is not much I can
give you, but there is Analore, take it, for you and your heirs for
ever;’ if he had made it over by any binding legal document and helped
me to raise a thousand pounds upon it, or lent me a thousand himself, as
he might readily have done, I should not have cared to call the king my
cousin,” were the thoughts that chased one another through Maxwell
Drewitt’s mind. “I could have built a house of those boulders; I could
have drained this land; I could have grown potatoes here till the ground
was fit for oats; I could have made a fortune out of the place, and so
might he, if he were not what he is—a purposeless idiot, a thickheaded
ass.”
All the world over, the man who has got hold of a new idea abuses the
man who sticks to the old: in Ireland, as in England, the man of
business hates the man of pleasure; the worker detests the idler.
Mr. Drewitt might be a fool, an ass, an idiot; in some things, indeed, I
am afraid he was all three; but had Maxwell been born to a great estate,
he would scarcely have seen his uncle’s shortcomings so clearly; he
would not have looked so closely after soils himself.
Give a property to a man whose eyes have once been opened and he can see
clearly enough how to improve it; but till necessity has sharpened their
inventions, I think few people notice everything which is lying within
their ken. It was his uncle’s marriage that sharpened Maxwell Drewitt,
that enabled him to see exactly to what extent the rent-roll of Kincorth
might be increased.
“If it were clear to-morrow it would be worth fifteen thousand a year;
increase those mortgages, and I could make it worth forty thousand a
year.” This was Maxwell’s calculation as he sat on a great stone,
looking over the lake, and the valley, and the distant mountains. “I
must try to get some land in this neighbourhood, and so make the most of
my rights of sea-weed,” was the practical conclusion he arrived at ere
he left Analore.
“A man like this deserved to succeed,” I hear some say at this juncture;
and my answer is, “He did succeed—he did lay house to house and acre to
acre.” He gained all that he set out determined to achieve, and if he
did not secure the great prize, towards which all human efforts
aim—happiness—it was only because, thinking he should find it in wealth
and position, in lands, in smiling fields, in verdant pastures, he
strove to become the owner of these good things, and of these only.
Knowing what need Ireland has of such men, fresh from the sight of her
wretched poverty, her miserable management, her forlorn condition, I
could almost wish I had chosen a different hero, and taken a better man
to show what energy and perseverance may do for an individual as well as
for a people.
There are such in Connemara; there are little oases, formed by their
industry and talent, in the wilderness; there are gardens in the desert;
there are resting-places where the tired mind and the weary heart may
sit down and take refreshment, seeing what even one man has been able to
effect. Kincorth is one of these; but the mind that saw what Kincorth
might be made has long ceased to fret itself with schemes, to vex itself
over disappointment; while the man who owns Kincorth now is grave beyond
all mortal comprehension.
Let me go on with my story, friends, for I must not write of the end
yet.
All the plans of Mr. Drewitt’s life came to nothing, like the
dower-house at Analore. All the good he purposed died in the birth, all
the reforms he intended were never carried out.
The road to ruin was the one he voluntarily chose in youth, and he
always lacked strength of mind enough to turn back at any stage of his
journey and try to make for fortune.
For a time Mrs. Drewitt endeavoured to mend matters, urging him to look
his affairs boldly in the face, and not to allow them to get more and
more involved; but before she had been married two years she, too,
learned that speaking was useless, and contented herself with entreating
that he would not mortgage the house and demesne of Kincorth; that he
would endure any inconvenience, practise any economy, rather than
jeopardize _the_ inheritance of their son.
Mr. Drewitt promised, and then broke his promise, comforting himself
exceedingly the while by thinking that his wife need never know he had
done so.
Mortgaging in one class is very like pawning in another. Money is
wanted, and a few thousands can easily enough be raised. Money is
needed, and it is only a step to the three balls.
But in either case it is the repayment that proves difficult, and with
Mr. Drewitt repayment was simply impossible. Still on—on—along the road
to ruin he pursued his way, riding his hacks, keeping his hunters,
making guests welcome, running into debt recklessly as he travelled.
There was plenty of good company taking the same journey with the owner
of Kincorth.
His was no isolated case—no exception to a general rule—only perhaps
there were few who, while beggaring themselves, made so little show of
wealth as he—few who seemed to do so small an amount of good, either to
their families or to their friends, as this weak, amiable, purposeless,
loveable Archibald Drewitt, who put down his misfortunes to every cause
save the real one, who shifted the blame to any man’s shoulders rather
than carry it himself.
Much as she loved her husband, Mrs. Drewitt could not be blind to his
shortcomings; she could not avoid seeing that different management might
have produced different results.
She heard how well Maxwell was doing, and asked his uncle whether he
could not reclaim some portion of his own land likewise.
“If I had started unencumbered as he has done,” replied Mr. Drewitt,
with a sigh, “things might have been very different; but I have been in
debt from the first. I had a heavy establishment to keep up. I had those
children to maintain.”
And the owner of Kincorth spoke in a tone of such sincere self-pity that
Mrs. Drewitt had no courage left to remind him of the fact of his having
started with eight thousand a-year clear, spite of the mortgages. She
held her peace, and Mr. Drewitt still continued traversing the road that
for him could have but one end.
Three years passed away. Kathie was dead, Susan had eloped, Wilhelmina
rode as fast, as far, and as fearlessly as ever. There was another child
at Kincorth—a daughter named after its paternal grandmother, Geraldine.
There was a third infant coming, and Mrs. Drewitt’s face was beginning
already to tell tales of sorrow and anxiety. Poor lady! four years of
married life, of an irregular household, of a dissatisfied family, of
regret, of sickness, of struggle, had rubbed some of the beauty of youth
off her countenance, had altered and saddened her expression.
She had mourned for Kathleen, she had wept over the girl in the watches
of the night; she had kept her with her so long as human love and human
care could avail; and when at length Kathleen floated out from the river
to the sea, Mrs. Drewitt watched her as she drifted towards the great
ocean with eyes dimmed by crying, with a heart bowed down by grief.
Though she had her baby, though she did now own that great and powerful
king, still she missed the friendship and the companionship of the girl
who had taken to her so kindly.
She had never feared to talk to Kathie about her perplexities, her
difficulties, and now she knew that through the years to come she must
live entirely without sympathy, and without assistance.
If anything had been wanting to fill her cup of sorrow at that time, a
remark of Maxwell’s, which through the officiousness of an acquaintance
came to her ears, would have caused it to overflow.
He said what he knew to be false, that if Kathie had been properly
attended to when she first returned from school, she need not then be
lying in Eversbeg Abbey.
It was not true; and Mrs. Drewitt herself chanced to be aware that no
care or attention could have saved Kathie at any stage of her disease;
but the blow went home for all that.
She reproached herself; she thought she had not noticed Kathie’s malady
so soon as she might; she remembered that she had mistaken the flush on
her cheeks for strength—the brightness of her eyes for health.
She knew she had been taken up with herself and the baby; for a time she
remembered she felt so ill that exertion of any kind was a trouble; and
then she was so happy about the birth of her son, that she did not pay
much attention to any one save the young autocrat.
She had put the boy first (this was what she thought), and, being her
own, she ought to have seen to poor motherless Kathie, even before
thinking of her child. Heaven help her!—many a time that winter the baby
went a little to the wall, while the sick girl was nursed and tended.
If Maxwell had exhausted all his ingenuity in trying to make her
wretched, he could not have succeeded better.
She had been selfish, she had been absorbed, and it was wrong for her to
be either, though nothing could have saved Kathie, though no help of man
could have averted the decree of death.
She and Mr. Drewitt had both been foolish. She, gentle soul, could see
it all clearly enough when the idol had been taken down from its
pedestal, when its father ceased to consider its future prospects every
moment in the day, when she found life had its duties, though she was a
mother—when she discovered that even a baby may usurp too much
attention, and lead with its fat toes, with its plump legs, with its
soft, yielding body, with its clenched fists, with its meaningless face,
its unseasonable grief, and its maniacal merriment, the wisest parent
into temptation every day.
Poor Kathie! Mrs. Drewitt mourned for her as no one of her own flesh and
blood sorrowed.
Maxwell was busy with his schemes; Susan was full of her lover; Willy
thought the house dull, and lived as much out of it as possible; Mr.
Drewitt had his own anxieties and troubles, and besides, he said “he
always expected Kathie to follow her mother.”
Mrs. Drewitt alone, did not forget the girl, but thought of her when the
winter snows were on the ground, when the February rains deluged the
earth, when the spring flowers were blooming and the summer splendour
glorifying the hills. Nothing could be quieter than Eversbeg Abbey,
nothing more beautiful, more peaceful, and Kathie always longed for
peace and quietness.
It was best so—it was best.
The birds built their nests in the ivy that grew over the window beneath
which the vault of the Drewitts lay. They went twittering in and out,
chirping and singing all the day, from early morning till late at night.
The sheep came in over the broken wall, and browsed at will among the
graves, undisturbed by resident or stranger. The ferns grew among the
old walls, and the grass was long and rank in the hollows between the
tombs. Nettles tall and luxuriant flourished where the priest had once
performed mass, where the worshippers had once knelt before the altar.
There was no roof to the Abbey, save the sky. The once perfect arches of
doors and windows were falling to decay. The evening wind lightly
stirred the leaves of the ivy. In the stillness the ripple of the waves
upon the shore could be distinctly heard, and it was in this quiet
nook—quiet and neglected, desolate and beautiful—that Kathie, with her
hands folded on her breast, slept among her kindred, far beyond the
reach of sorrow or regret.
One trouble drives away the memory of another, and Susan’s elopement
proved even a greater trial to Mrs. Drewitt then Kathie’s death. She
knew where the one was, but did not know what had become of the other.
She only felt that the evil she was unable to avert had come at last.
She had spoken to Susan, to Maxwell, to Mr. Drewitt, and behold the end
was an empty room one morning, and a note from Miss Drewitt, stating
that as anything seemed preferable to remaining at Kincorth, she had
determined to cast her lot with the only man who loved her.
“What lot has she chosen, Maxwell, what lot?” asked poor Mrs. Drewitt,
as with blanched face she showed this note to her nephew, and entreated
him to trace his sister and bring her back.
“Would she stay, do you think?” asked Maxwell. “Could you or I, or
anybody living, keep Susan here if she made up her mind to go away? But
I will follow them to Dublin. I will see whether they are married, and
if not, he shall marry her.”
But the fugitives were gone to England, and at Liverpool Maxwell lost
all traces of them. He could not devote his life to running after his
sister. He had not the time, he had not the money, he had not the
inclination.
“As Susan had sown she must reap,” he remarked to Mrs. Drewitt, and he
went back to his farm by the shore.
What more could be done for Susan was done by Mrs. Drewitt, who wrote to
her brother-in-law, Sir Everard Ebbutt, begging him to ascertain Captain
Ellenham’s antecedents, and to give her tidings of her niece, if
possible. Further, she asked him not to mention the matter to his wife.
Sir Everard lost no time in replying to this letter. To begin with, he
stated that Captain Ellenham could not have married Miss Drewitt,
because he had at that moment a wife and three children living in
London. Further, Captain Ellenham’s regiment having been ordered abroad,
it was more than probable Susan had gone abroad with him. Should he
obtain any further information he would let her know.
“It is a blessing she has gone abroad. I hope she will die there!” was
Maxwell’s only remark when Mrs. Drewitt communicated these particulars
to him. “And if ever I come across that fellow, I will shoot him.
Meantime it will be as well to say to every one that they are married.”
Having summed up the duty of the family in which explicit sentence,
Maxwell dropped the subject, and never, of his own free will, mentioned
his sister afterwards.
He was building a house at the time on the piece of barren land that had
come to him from his grandfather, and he paid particular attention to
the masons during the whole of the summer following Kathie’s death.
“A bare staring place,” Mr. Drewitt told his wife, “that it made him
feel cold even to look at. What a pity for him not to have chosen a
better site! It is a good house too;” and then he asked Maxwell why he
had not selected some finer position, somewhere on the side of a hill,
and where there was more of a view.
“Beggars cannot afford to be choosers,” answered the younger man;
“besides, wait a while, sir, and you will not call my choice so bad a
one. Further, remember the land I am laying money out on now is _my
own_, and that I am not in a position to both build and buy.”
“But money can always be raised, you know,” suggested Mr. Drewitt.
“Can it?” was the reply. “That is not my opinion, and I hope you will
never find reason to alter yours.”
This little rap ended the conversation. It is not easy to talk with a
man who has always the last word and the best word; and besides, it
suddenly occurred to Mr. Drewitt that the house at Analore was not two
feet above the ground, and that perhaps Maxwell might inquire why he did
not raise money to finish it.
“He must be excessively clever, I think,” sighed Mrs. Drewitt, when she
heard in the following spring how Maxwell was buying young trees from
Waller of Eversbeg, and planting them round his new abode.
“They won’t live—they can’t live; it is impossible,” said Mr. Drewitt,
who, although he did not exactly grudge Maxwell his success, still
thought that such innovations ought not to be encouraged by Providence.
“They cannot live; consider the sea-breeze—the exposed situation.”
And Mrs. Drewitt, of course, was of her husband’s opinion. Maxwell had
made a mistake at last; the trees could do no good. But the trees throve
for all that. Maxwell had considered the matter before ever Mr. Drewitt
thought of it. He had a south aspect; he was well sheltered from the
north and east; he knew that the woods surrounding Eversbeg must have
been planted by some one, and he thought he would risk something at any
rate, and make the experiment.
There is many a lovely place across the water, many a sweet nook in the
Green Isle, but I doubt whether in its way—which, of course, is not a
grand way, but only very quiet and enchanting—the tourist could chance
to see a prettier spot than “Headlands” at this day.
If you row across the bay from the little fishing village of Eversbeg,
you see the house built of granite lying among the trees. The lawn
slopes quite down to the edge of the shore, while the woods, spreading
out like a semicircle, enclose this piece of green, which is soft as
velvet. Down almost to high-water mark the plantations extend, and when
the tide is in the willow, and the birch, and the spruce-fir droop their
branches over the tide. See it on a fine day, when the bay resembles an
opal; when the new-mown grass appears in the distance to be an emerald
set in a darker band of green; when the rugged headland shows dark and
steep against the calm unruffled ocean; when there is hardly a ripple on
the sea, when there is scarcely the lightest breeze stirring among the
treetops; when the little fishing village nestling on the side of
Eversbeg Point looks white and picturesque in the bright sunlight; when
the mountains look higher and nearer than usual, and rear their great
heads towards the sky; when the ruins of Eversbeg Abbey appear close at
hand; when the fresh-shorn sheep are climbing the hill-sides; when no
sound breaks the stillness save the plash of the oars as the rowers pull
across the bay, and the drip drip of the water from the blades, as they
hold them above the sea and float gently towards the shore;—see it thus,
I say, and you can well fancy you have beheld fairyland. It is a place
you cannot bear to leave—that you turn back and look at with an
indescribable emotion—that you wave your adieu to with the tears filling
your eyes, though you could not give a reason why or wherefore.
Maxwell Drewitt found it a wilderness—this is the paradise he left it.
Think of that as you lean over the stern, and the rowers bear you away
from the garden of Eden, and think, also, if you had such a nest on
earth you might find it hard to leave the world, and that, perhaps, it
is best for you to own nothing so perfect, so exquisite of its kind.
Headlands is too beautiful—that is all any person can say. It seems too
charming to be real; and when you have left Eversbeg behind you, and are
travelling away towards Oughterard through the valley of desolation,
through the land of a thousand Dead Sea lakes, you come gradually to
believe that “Headlands” was a dream—that such a place never
existed—that the lawn does not slope down to the glassy sea—that the
trees do not overhang the water—that Maxwell Drewitt never planted the
ground at all, but that it remains barren and sterile to this very day.
Nevertheless that modern garden of Eden lies in Connemara, on the shores
of the wide Atlantic; within sight of its tremendous billows, of its
restless waves. Eversbeg Bay is much more open than Duranmore, which
almost resembles a lake. On the north side of Duranmore stands Kincorth,
well sheltered from all breezes save the south, high up on the hill, the
house conspicuous for miles; on the north side of Eversbeg, lying low by
the shore, is the modest mansion Maxwell reared for himself in the days
when he was a poor and a struggling man.
The trees grew and spread out their branches, the land improved and
began to pay him well.
While difficulties increased at Kincorth, everything grew smoother and
easier at Headlands; and yet one difficulty had arisen in Maxwell
Drewitt’s path.
Colonel Vervensoe was dead; and Lady Emmeline, by consequence, was left
a widow.
It took Maxwell a few days to realize the difference that this fact
might make in his position; and then he drew back his breath and paused,
asking himself, “What next?”