A high-spirited, deeply sensitive girl, caring nothing for such blows
and buffetings as life may please to deal her so long as they touch
herself alone, but very keenly alive to the wrongs and injuries of
others--especially those near and dear to her. Such is Norah
Sheridan, and such has she been from her childhood.
Hers is a poor little life-story; rather sordid, and rather pathetic.
It is a record of things that might easily have been so different,
that ought never to have been as they were. The record of a life
spent under conditions of topsy-turveydom, under the guidance of a
wrong-headed charming fool whom no one could ever advise: a man who,
with a brilliant intellect and immense powers of perception could
always be counted on to do the wrong thing under all possible
circumstances. It is, to say the least of it, a heavy handicap to
have such a man for a father!
His course of conduct, pursued consistently all through his life,
speaks the nature of the man. Daniel Sheridan while still a
youngster, is offered by a distant English relative a well-paid post
on a big estate; he refuses and elects instead to pick up the
scantiest of livings in the shady by-paths of literature--for which
he has not even a natural aptitude.
In the course of his career he falls under the influence of the
craziest firebrands of his countrymen, and imbibes a fierce hatred
against a land which has never done him the slightest harm in the
world.
After a while he migrates to this same hated land, settles down there
in the most elegant poverty, and remains there happily for the rest
of his life! He even marries an English girl, he is on the best of
terms with his English neighbours; he makes many close friends
amongst the English; if he has to leave the country to go to the land
of his birth he always comes back again with all possible speed and
with most obvious content. But, in spite of these things, it must
always be quite clearly understood that he hates England. Oh
yes,--and he writes endless poems on this theme, for now he has
become--by correspondence--one of the inner set of the Irish
"Intellectuals," and his own contribution to the new learning takes
the form of quite brilliantly clever but equally unwarranted poetry,
which no one will ever read unless it be his fellow Intellectuals;
and they are for the most part too busy writing their own works of
burning genius to read those of anyone else.
It is these same pungently clever poems that are the cause of his
daughter Norah's first enmity against society. Her first childish
recollection is that of seeing her father angrily rending the reviews
which have slated his works or worse still have treated them to a few
lines of insipid comment, and of hearing him break out into a tirade
against the dull-witted English who are too jealous or too brainless
to appreciate works entirely devoted to their abuse. She sees him
fling himself out of the house in a passion--and cannot follow him in
his encounter ten minutes later, with three or four cronies of the
theoretically hated Sassenach race with whom he discusses
rose-growing and the pre-Raphaelites with the utmost amiability and
complete forgetfulness of his financial and literary troubles. For
Norah there only remains seared on her brain the memory of her
father's bitterness.
And the knowledge of his poverty. That of course, is an ever present
fact. How the man manages to live he alone knows--he, and possibly
that distant English relative whose kindness was not soured by
Daniel's youthful refusal of his offer of work.
What more natural than that the grinding poverty and the conspiracy
to throw contempt on the genius of the brilliant Irish poet should
always be attributed in the girl's mind to the despicable tyranny of
the English despots? Her father has stated the fact a thousand times
in her hearing, and therefore, it must be so.
True, there have been moments when this theory has not appeared to
fit in altogether with her own reading of the facts of life. For
example, it is difficult to reconcile it with the witness of her own
English mother, who is neither tyrannical, despotic, nor despicable;
but the sweetest and most adorable mother in the world.
Only once did the puzzling contrast vent itself in an open question:
and that only after many days of silent heart-burnings:
"Mother darling, _are_ the English all as horrid and hateful as Daddy
says they are?"
Mother darling finds it hard to reply. She is somewhat of a
weakling, though a very dear and good woman; and much as she loves
her little daughter she is still more devoted, even ridiculously so,
to her fascinating irresponsible husband whose rodomontades she can
assess at their true value. Loyalty to him constrains her to reply
with a weak compromise:
"Not _all_ of them perhaps, dearest one; but I do not like to hear my
little girl questioning the truth of what she hears her father say."
Amiable fool! Or, perhaps it may be kinder to say, fond foolish
loving heart! The result is, of course, that Norah grows up from
childhood to girlhood all aflame with the sense of bitter injustice
done to her father, and accepts the alleged cause of it without
further questioning.
Occasionally she takes a trip to Ireland in company with her father.
And once is left behind with some Irish cousins for six months while
he returns to his home in England.
This visit has a great and lasting effect on Norah's character.
Those sentiments which were up till now merely fluid and formless
become crystallised, assuming a very definite shape--and hardness.
To begin with, she is greatly delighted at being able to have a
friend of her own sex in the person of her cousin Netta: she has
never had a girl friend before--indeed no friend of any sort except
her own parents; seclusion and poverty coupled with pride and
gentility do not tend much to the promotion of friendships.
So Netta comes into her life almost as a revelation. Intercourse
with another girl opens up a vista of happiness hitherto almost
undreamt of. What Netta does and what Netta says become in the first
flush of the newly-formed attachment a perfect model and a true
gospel.
What Netta says, unfortunately, is often no more than an echo caught
from the dark sayings of her elder brother Patrick. There are but
these two, brother and sister, the former older by some fifteen years
than Netta. To the authority due to his greater age, is added the
weight of a dominating character, sombre and gloomy.
Like his Uncle Daniel, Norah's father, whom he nearly equals in age,
Patrick Sheridan is a professed hater of England and all things
English. But the difference between the two men is just this, that
whereas in Daniel the professed hatred dissipates itself in an
effervescence of words, in Patrick it is a living faith, the guiding
motive of his whole life. He is misguided, unreasonable, fanatical,
anything you like; but at least he is sincere and lives for his
convictions. He despises the dilettante nationalism of his poetical
cousin, and only waits for the day to put his professions into
practice.
In Norah he finds the ground already prepared by the willing though
shallow tillage effected by Netta's feeble copy of his words and
sentiments. Patrick enters the field with all the forcibility of his
overwhelming character, digs furiously and deeply into the soil,
breaks it up and turns it over effectively to absorb the air of his
stormy reasonings, and sows it well with the seeds of his political
faith.
Norah was ready from the first to give him hero-worship; but the
effect of the two highly-strung dispositions meeting together is
something far more tempestuous and forceful than what she was
prepared for. She finds herself carried off her feet and swept away
by the violence of the man's passionate character.
To a certain extent she is repelled by him; his thoughts and words
are so dark and malignant. But in spite of this she never for a
moment hesitates to follow him implicitly in his devious paths.
Where he leads she must perforce follow.
And always for this reason above all others: that he is continually
sounding the chord of injustice, tyranny, and oppression, a chord
which finds an immediate response in her sensitive soul.
Thus is worked out by degrees the result, strange but not
unintelligible, of a pure and high-minded young girl devoting herself
to black dishonour for honour's sake, calling evil good and good evil
from motives which seem to her lofty beyond all others, hypnotised by
morbid suggestion into a state of mind where the gravest
inconsistences are possible. And at last all her whole being is so
lulled into this dangerous somnabulistic state that only two things
remain to be made clear, two questions to be answered--will her dark
dreams take form in action? And will she ever awake again to her
true self? Ah, the awaking is to come, indeed, but too late! First
comes the dreadful deed; and it comes as the culmination of a great
tragedy in Norah's young life.
A tragedy to her; to her father it is a tragedy made ironical by the
intermingling of farce, consistently with all his career. Such as
his life has been, such is his death.
Going over to Ireland on one of his periodical visits, Daniel
Sheridan has no deeper purpose than that of interviewing a publisher
who, to his great surprise, has made him quite a favourable offer for
his latest volume of poems. Such a thing has never happened to him
before, and it almost seems as though the tide is turning and setting
in the direction of prosperity. The reason is really not far to
seek. The cult of Irish letters has lately spread from an
insignificant circle of literary people to widen out and embrace
almost the whole of the nation. A real native Irish poet above the
class of minor rhymesters is just what the nation has been crying
aloud for, and in Daniel Sheridan the nation's literary aspirations
bid fair to be realised.
The poet is almost beside himself with joy at his pleasant prospects.
Not only does he secure a substantial sum for his present work, but
he also carries away with him a very handsome offer for his literary
output of the next two years. He looks forward to spending his
remaining days in England with ease and comfort, and sketches many a
rosy picture of the future.
What he does not quite understand, however, is the extent to which
the intellectual movement in his native land is intertwined with
political aspirations. And subsequently, when carried away by the
stream of Patrick's wild oratory and the enthusiasm of his other
intellectual associates he finds himself drawn into the whirlpool of
a Dublin riot on the larger scale, he is to the last unable to
discriminate entirely between what is the desire to revive the
ancient glories of the land of saints and scholars, and what is mere
hot-headed revolt.
Still in this state of indecision he unfortunately gets in the way of
a bullet not intended for him, and never knows for what cause he lays
down his life.
But when he is lowered into his grave by a band of sworn
patriots--and when his weak and adoring wife, bereft of her pillar of
life, collapses and dies heart-broken at the very graveside, Norah
clutches at the hand of her cousin Patrick and looks at him from that
moment onwards to help her in her sacred quest for justice and
vengeance.