Durrow.
Mr. Pryor had said he should not care for Durrow Park, but when he rode
over there, accompanied by Maxwell Drewitt, his nephew, and Mr. Waller,
he altered his opinion, and thought that, despite its drawbacks, Durrow
would be a very pleasant residence for a couple of months in the year.
“Non-resident again,” remarked Maxwell, laughing, while Mr. Gyton
inquired—
“How the deuce he could expect a man to stay away from London any
longer?
“More especially in such a hole as this, with only one post a day; with
no railway-station within fifty miles; with no telegram nearer than
fifty miles, also; with no books, no newspapers, no society. And a
bachelor, too,” finished Mr. Gyton.
“That is his own fault, I suppose,” remarked Maxwell Drewitt, “if it be
a fault; but I should rather call it a virtue.”
“Well said,” cried Mr. Waller, who was terribly under the influence of
petticoat government at home.
“For my part, I consider a bachelor one of the most enviable beings
under the sun,” went on Maxwell: “he can go as he likes, come as he
likes. He is free as air, and yet knows that he can settle down whenever
he pleases into husbandhood.”
“It is not so easy to settle down—at least, not to find any one to
settle down with at my age,” answered Mr. Pryor.
“Why, you cannot be more than a year or two my senior; and if I were
single to-morrow I could have my pick of a dozen—ay, and pretty girls,
too.”
“I wish you would introduce me to some of them,” remarked Mr. Pryor.
“I am too much your friend,” replied Maxwell; “far be it from me to lead
you up to the trap and help you to snap the spring on yourself. Wedlock
is a padlock,” added the owner of the Headlands. “Not that I ought to
speak against it, for my marriage made me; and my wife never had a will
of her own, so far as I heard of; but for an independent man to
marry—for a man like yourself, for instance—it is folly.”
“Drewitt is going to turn preacher, and expound the Gospel according to
St. Paul,” said Mr. Waller.
“I shall hold you up as an example of a sinner’s end then,” retorted
Maxwell.
“Hang it, man, you need not be so confoundedly personal!” observed Mr.
Waller, whose domestic discomforts were too well known for him to
attempt concealment. “It is not everybody knows how to marry so well, or
manage a wife so well when he is married, as yourself.”
Maxwell looked away from his companions over the ocean, and a thought
came across his mind that he had not married so very well after all.
He had given his youth—his liberty—all chances of happy love, for money;
and now he could not get rid of his wife—could not get rid of that old,
rouged, affected, ugly woman, who was jealous of every look he cast in
the direction of those who were younger and prettier than herself; who
had no homely graces, no fireside virtues; whom he could not even love
like a mother and value as a friend.
Forty-three and sixty—seventeen years on the wrong side. It was of this
Maxwell thought while he stood in front of Durrow House, and looked over
the Atlantic which lay like a lake below.
They were four fine-looking men. Maxwell was much the same in figure as
when we first saw him, but his face was more set and hardened; the lines
were deeper, the look in his eyes was darker. He was getting a little
bald, that is, the once-luxuriant hair was thinner, more especially
about his temples, and his whiskers were turning grey. He was the
oldest-looking man of the party, though Mr. Pryor was a year his senior;
but then Mr. Pryor’s life had not been so hard a one, and his heart was
younger too.
Mr. Pryor’s face was one that his sister said “it rested her to look
at,” so calm, so trustworthy, so good. Maxwell Drewitt had lived twice
as fast as this London barrister, and would be old twice as soon.
Some idea of this kind came into Mr. Waller’s mind, apparently, for he
said—
“I wish I looked as young as you do, Geoffry. I wish you could give me
the secret of wearing so well and keeping so handsome:” at which remark
Maxwell Drewitt turned round and laughed.
“I know what you are laughing at,” went on Mr. Waller; “you are thinking
that one must be handsome before one can keep handsome. That is the
worst of being clever, Drewitt; it makes a man so devilishly sharp and
disagreeable: but, now, do look at Pryor; there was not so much
difference between us twenty years ago, and yet——”
“There is all the difference now—is that what you would say?” asked
Maxwell. “If it be, perhaps there has been all the difference in the
twenty years too; in how the twenty years has been passed. You have
drunk hard, I have worked hard, while he has been addressing an
attentive court or lounging in an easy-chair. It is the pace that kills,
Waller, more than years.”
“As for pace,” muttered Mr. Waller, but a dangerous look in Maxwell’s
face stopped him.
“We can but live,” said the latter, hastily; “if we grow old soon, we
have lived much, that is all any one can make of the question; and yet,”
he went on, “I think it must be a fine thing for a man in middle age to
find himself free to begin the whole drama of existence over again. Free
to settle, free to choose, free to reside in a great town; and yet,
also, free to buy a place like this and keep it for a kind of dessert to
the dinner of the year. You will buy it?” he added, turning to Mr.
Pryor. “Can you resist?—can you look upon Durrow and yet flee from such
temptation?”
“I cannot,” answered Mr. Pryor: “spite of right of way, and private
stills and smugglers, and evicted tenants, and holy wells, I must have
Durrow.”
“And we will get a jolly lot of fellows together, and come over and have
such capital sport,” finished Mr. Gyton, who had kept silence for an
unusual time.
“Thank you, Frank, you are very kind,” replied his uncle.
“And you might get my mother to matronize halfa-dozen girls; it would be
such a lark,” went on Mr. Gyton; “dancing and boating, and riding and
driving.”
“No fear of the rents of Durrow being spent off the soil,” said Mr.
Pryor, “if Frank’s programme were carried out. I should spend as much in
a couple of months as Durrow would return in a year.”
“First-rate for Connemara,” answered Maxwell.
“I will write to my mother to-night,” persisted Mr. Gyton, “and give her
a description of Durrow. It is the very place she would delight in. Let
me see, how can I describe it? Help my imagination, Mr. Drewitt.”
“Your imagination!” repeated Maxwell; “gracious heaven! there is no
imagination about the matter; it is all fact, from beginning to end.
There are the rocks, and the Atlantic, and the islands; and Durrow
stands, say a hundred feet above the sea, and the ground is level from
the house to the very edge of the cliff, which goes sheer down to the
shore. There are no trees to speak of, no shrubs, no fields; it is all
rock and mountain, and bog and morass. It is a place to make your teeth
chatter in the winter-time; but in the summer—you see for yourself,
young gentleman, what it is like now.”
“Cannot you buy the place at once, and let us all spend August here?”
asked Mr. Gyton, with enthusiasm.
“I am afraid not,” said Mr. Pryor, with a smile; “but I dare say I can
have it all ready for your mother by the spring.”
“And if you want a good fellow to manage your property and to reside in
the house while you are away, let me recommend you a deserving man. His
name is Connor; and he has been overseer at the marble quarries for
sixteen or seventeen years past.”
“What—Ryan’s brother-in-law!” exclaimed Mr. Waller, with some surprise.
“Even so; do you know anything against Connor?” demanded Maxwell, facing
sharp round on the last speaker.
“No; only you remember that you thought—that is—that Ryan himself—”
“Ryan himself is not Connor,” interrupted Maxwell; “and Mrs. Connor is a
very worthy person.”
“And pretty too,” added Mr. Waller “though she is not so young as she
used to be. By Gad! Geoffry, that was a girl! If she had been more
thoroughbred she might have married a duke. Faith, I thought she stayed
single so long waiting for some travelling prince to pick her up and
carry her off with him. She must have been thirty before she took on
with Connor; eh Drewitt?”
“I am not the parish clerk, sir,” answered Maxwell, hotly. “I do not
keep a register of births in my head;” and with this civil speech the
owner of the Headlands marched off to the edge of the cliff, where he
flung himself down on the grass, and with one hand supporting his head,
looked away and away over the sea across which white sails were glancing
in the sunshine.
“What a damnable temper Drewitt has!” remarked Mr. Waller. “I am sure it
is just wearing his body out,” and the trio turned into the house and
walked through the empty rooms, and looked at all possible views, from
all possible windows, discussing furniture and papers, and carpets and
window-curtains the while.
After a time Mr. Pryor made his escape, and rejoined his host, and the
two lay on the grass, near the edge of the cliff, talking about
Duranmore, and Kincorth and Durrow, and Ireland and England, for nearly
an hour.
“There is another thing,” said Maxwell, at last; “the last proprietor,
Mr. Carford, was a Roman Catholic, and almost supported the priest of
Durrow, besides paying tithes. Will you follow suit? I know that to
English ears such advice must sound absurd; but, after all, the few
things I have mentioned will not amount to a hundred a-year, and you
will have five hundred a-year back in comfort. You cannot civilize a
country in a day. You must give savages beads, and rum, and
looking-glasses, if you take their land from them. They cannot
understand the substance, so you must let them have the sham. I should
like to come back to life in a hundred years’ time, say about 1950, and
see Ireland then. Will there be butchers’ shops in a place like
Duranmore, where the poor people will buy scraps for their Sunday’s
dinner, as the Londoners do on Saturday night? Will yellow meal be a
tradition, and the cup of tea an institution? Will the people wash
themselves, and the women wear their flannel petticoats under their
dresses instead of round their necks? Will the bare feet be covered?
Will the children drop off their rags some night, and put on clean
cotton frocks, like English children, when they get up in the morning?
Will they comb their hair, and scrub their faces, and eat with a knife
and fork? Will the men who drive the sheep into Ballinasloe fair ever
know by experience what number of joints there are in one? Will they
ever have wooden floors? and if they have, will they keep them clean? I
wonder, Mr. Pryor, I wonder! And yet,” added Maxwell, “if that day ever
do come, Ireland will he Ireland no longer, but only a more picturesque
England—a Cumberland, in fact, across the channel.”
“On the whole, perhaps, you would not care to come back after the
hundred years,” suggested Mr. Pryor.
“Yes, I should. I should like to have my land then, and to be able to
sell it at the 1950 market price. A hundred years!—where shall we be
then? where shall we be?”
“Certainly not on the top of Durrow Cliff, talking about Ireland,”
answered Mr. Pryor, gravely. There was something about the fierce tone
of Maxwell’s question which quivered through every nerve in his body.
“Is he afraid of death?” marvelled the barrister, and even while he was
marvelling, Maxwell spoke again.
“I can remember,” he said, “when I was a boy coming across here with my
father, and walking over the very spot where we are now talking, hand in
hand with him. It was just such another day as this, warm and bright and
clear; there were vessels coming and going; the sea was blue and calm;
the fishermen were drying their nets in the sun. Well, the years have
passed since then—passed like days. I have been lying here thinking how
short a day life is after all, and wishing that we could endure through
the centuries like the mountains, or the ocean yonder.”
“It would be very sad if we could, I think,” answered Mr. Pryor.
“Do you really mean what you say? But we are so differently constituted
that one man’s meat is literally another man’s poison. To me it has
always seemed that life is so short, while there is so much to be done
in the world.”
“Ay! but by successive gangs of labourers,” replied Mr. Pryor.
“Shall we go?” asked Mr. Maxwell Drewitt, hastily springing to his feet.
“Have you seen enough of Burrow? Shall we call at Kincorth as we return,
and ask how my uncle is to-day?”
“I should like to call on Mr. Drewitt,” said the other. “The last time I
saw him he was lying on Doctor Sheen’s bed, with his pretty young wife
nursing him. I suppose twenty years has changed them both.”
“It has changed everybody excepting you, Geoffry,” exclaimed Mr. Waller,
who heard the last words. “I think you must be one of the immortals.”
“It has changed me, Harry,” was the reply, spoken sadly, though with a
smile. “Twenty years lie behind instead of before me; that is all the
difference; but, after all, that difference is considerable.”
It was a long way from Durrow to Kincorth—ten Irish miles to ride,
though probably not more than four, had the road followed the flight of
the crow.
“But what road in Connemara ever did follow the flight of the crow?”
demanded Mr. Waller; whereupon Maxwell asked what engineer could bridge
the bays, and make a way through the rocks and precipices.
“Besides,” added Mr. Gyton, “to a man not pressed for time, the windings
in and out are pretty and picturesque: but only fancy, uncle,” he said,
turning to Mr. Pryor, “how one would curse these curves and turnings if
one were riding for one’s life, or for a doctor.”
Maxwell Drewitt seemed impressed with this idea. “I never thought of
that before,” he observed; “but then, I suppose, no man ever did ride
for his life through Connemara. It would be all foot-work over the
hills.”
And yet when they rounded the base of another mountain, as they turned
another corner sharply, Maxwell pulled up.
“I cannot get that notion of yours out of my head,” he said, noticing
that the others pulled up also. “Riding for one’s life—what a strange
fancy!”
“I tell you what is a strange fancy to my mind, Drewitt—going to a sick
man’s house with six horses and two servants, like a troop of dragoons,”
exclaimed Mr. Waller.
“We need not ride up to the hall-door,” answered Maxwell; while Mr.
Pryor said—
“Well thought of, Waller; we might have had enough sense for that
ourselves.”
“But we had not, you see,” summed up Mr. Gyton, and the four rode on
abreast.
“I never pass that old ruin,” said Mr. Waller, pointing to a tower and
some walls belonging to an ancient castle lying back among the hills,
“but I think of Murphy. You remember Murphy, don’t you, Drewitt, that
used to be with Sheen?”
“I remember some fellow of that name, but what the devil had he to do
with Castle Cronach?”
“Why, there was a squireen lived at that house in the hollow, where the
honeysuckles are growing, and he had a wife who used to drink
tremendously—spent every farthing on whiskey, and sold everything she
could lay her hands on to get more. The poor fellow was almost at his
wits’ end what to do about it (she did drive him to America in the long
run), and so he went to Murphy for advice in the matter.
“‘Could the doctor give him nothing?’
“‘Is it poison you need?’ said Murphy; ‘because if it is, say so like a
man.’
“‘Of course it was not poison he wanted, but only some trifle to cure
her of drinking. Could Mr. Murphy not mix her up something?’
“‘If we could mix up anything to cure that disorder,’ says Murphy, ‘we
should be made men: but I tell you what, take home a gallon of whiskey,
and let her drink as much as she likes, and I will be round with you
before night.’
“It was in the summer-time, but not moonlight, and when the woman was
thoroughly drunk, Murphy and the husband carried her down into the
vaults of that old castle and laid her down on some boards till she
should come to.”
“I suppose she never ‘came to?’” suggested Mr. Gyton.
“Didn’t she, though? but she had a good sleep first, and when she woke
about twelve o’clock she began calling out and asking where she was.
“‘Well, you are in the vaults underneath Eversbeg Abbey, ma’am,’ Murphy
says.
“‘And how long have I been here?’ she inquired.
“‘A matter of ten or twelve months,’ he answered.
“‘Then I’m dead, in course?’ she says.
“‘As a doornail,’ wound up Murphy.
“‘And are you dead too?’
“‘Yes, ma’am.’
“‘And how long have you been here?’
“‘Somewhere about five years,’ he said.
“‘Then we are all dead?’
“‘Yes.’
“She sat down on the floor and thought the matter out a bit. Murphy said
he could not imagine what she would say next, and was just trying to
fancy, when she began—
“‘You must know the ways of his country a good deal better than me.
Where can you get a drop of good whiskey now, reasonable?’
“‘That floored me,’ Murphy finished. ‘Squire,’ said he, ‘you’d better
take your wife home; if she thinks there are whiskey-shops in Hades, it
is of no use trying to frighten her with death. Take her home and let
her live.’
“And he let her live; but she ruined him and died a beggar in Spanish
Place, in Galway.”
“I wonder what has become of Murphy?” said Maxwell, while they rode,
with loose bridles, at a slinging trot over the hard Connemara roads,
neck and neck together, hoofs keeping time, all four abreast; the
Irishmen with their feet well in their stirrups, riding only on the
snaffle, bending a little over their horses’ manes; the Englishmen
sitting more stiffly and more erect in their saddles, with only their
toes in the irons, holding both bridles equally in their hands.
There is not much in these things perhaps, but there is something, and
the grooms riding behind remarked the difference, as all Irish people
do.
“Murphy is, I hear, doing very well indeed, in London,” answered Mr.
Waller. “He was a clever fellow, a man who loved you for your ailments,
who adored a complicated case, who—”
“Murphy!” repeated Mr. Gyton; “Murphy! a Mr. Murphy was telegraphed for
once when my father met with an accident at Tunbridge Wells—an awful
curiosity—he attended him afterwards in London. I remember the man
perfectly. A long, loose fellow, with rusty hair and greenish-grey eyes,
and an astonishing brogue. Is it likely to have been the same?” he
asked, turning towards Mr. Waller.
“Had he tremendous legs and no body to speak of, arms like flails, and a
habit of turning his side to you when he spoke?”
“Yes; and there was no one place where his clothes seemed to fit him. He
was all joints, too, and he used to turn up his coat-cuffs and the
wristbands of his shirt before he felt my father’s pulse. I remember
tooling him over to the station one morning, and he kept me in screams
all the way. He used to take people’s legs off ‘In the name of God.’ We
never ceased laughing from the time he came into the house till he went
out of it. He told us lots of stories about the notions of the Irish
concerning physic—how they considered doctors liked red-haired men the
best for ‘cutting up’—how they thought rhubarb was a decoction of dead
bodies—how they believed fever came up the road in a ‘swirl’ of dust,
and entered the house where it was destined to prove fatal like a
visible simoom—how they believed in ‘possessions’—how he was told of a
spirit who threw a bad man down stairs and broke his arm, and then
called out to him, ‘I have not done with you yet.’ ‘And they went on to
recount,’ added Mr. Murphy, ‘how the spirit twisted his head round on
his shoulders, and how, for the future, whenever he walked forward, the
back of his head came first. That was a case I should like to have
attended,’ he finished. ‘I candidly confess I should.’”
“It must have been our Murphy,” said Mr. Waller; “there could not be two
of the same kind of the same name.”
“This man was born in Roscommon, wherever that may be; for I remember
him telling me the morning I went over with him to the station, that
when the examiners were asking him for a certificate of baptism, he
said—
“‘And, my God, gentlemen, do you know so little about Ireland in England
as to ask a man from the County Roscommon for a certificate of his
birth? I have heard my mother, and a decent old woman she was too as
ever brought up a family on potatoes and buttermilk, say I was born the
day Widow O’Flynn’s cow was lost in the bog, and that is all the
information I can give you on the subject.’”
“What is he, surgeon, or physician, or what?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
“Surgeon,” answered Mr. Gyton. “My mother asked him something about it,
and he said, ‘If you want a leg or an arm taken off I shall be most
happy to oblige you, ma’am; but pills and potions are out of my line
altogether.’ I had enough of physic in Connaught to last me my lifetime,
and I prescribe for nobody. Operative surgery, ma’am, is enough for me;
“_Satis supraque;_” which being freely translated, for I won’t insult a
lady of your position by supposing you understand Latin, means, ‘Lashins
and Lavins.’”
“How the devil,” demanded Maxwell Drewitt, “does such a fellow contrive
to make his way into any respectable house?”
Mr. Gyton looked at him in surprise.
“There is nothing to prevent Mr. Murphy entering any house in England,”
he answered, a little stiffly. “Perhaps the Irish are more exclusive. He
stands very well in his profession; has a very good house in one of the
West-end squares; and though he is eccentric, he is not more eccentric
than many of our first-rate men have been.”
“John Hunter, for instance, was not merely eccentric, but vulgar,”
chimed in Mr. Pryor.
“Well, Murphy was never vulgar,” said Mr. Gyton. “He never said a word
to which you could have taken exception, and then he always brought such
a cheerful face with him that he was half the cure himself.”
“Was that the person who was Dr. Sheen’s assistant at the time of the
Duranmore election?” asked Mr. Pryor, looking towards Maxwell Drewitt.
“The same; a fellow without a second coat to his back, and possessed of
no one single talent except impudence,” was the reply.
“He must have put out his capital to great advantage, then,” said the
barrister dryly, “for it to have produced such results.”
“He married well,” explained Mr. Gyton; “he married a rich old maid, who
was, I believe, the first paying patient he ever had in London, and that
gave him a lift. Anyhow,” added Mr. Gyton, “he is a rising man now.”
They had been walking their horses up a steep hill during the latter
part of this conversation, but as the young Englishman concluded his
sentence they reached the top and saw Duranmore lying in the hollow
below them. Duranmore and the road branching off to Kincorth!
“I wonder how we shall find my uncle to-day,” said Maxwell, looking at
the woods in which the house lay sheltered; “perhaps if Mr. Murphy were
here now he could cure him.”
“Is Doctor Sheen not able to do so then?” inquired Mr. Pryor.
“It would seem not,” was the answer, “for he grows worse rather than
better,” and Maxwell Drewitt, after they got to the foot of the hill,
gave his bridle a shake, and the rest taking the hint touched their
horses lightly with whip and spur, and followed him at a hand gallop
along the shore road to the entrance-gates of Kincorth.