THE GLENDARES.
Twelve Irish miles from Kingslough, meaning fifteen or thereabouts
English measurement, stood Rosemont, the ancestral residence of the
Earls of Glendare.
That fifteen miles’ journey took the traveller precisely the same
distance from the sea; but it did not matter in the smallest degree to
any of the Glendares where the family seat was situated, since they
never lived on their own acres whilst a guinea remained to be spent in
London or Paris.
Once upon a time, as the fairy-books say, the Glendare rent-roll had
provided the head of the family with an income of one thousand pounds a
day. There were larger rent-rolls in the United Kingdom no doubt, but
still a thousand a day can scarcely be considered penury.
To the Glendares, however, it merely assumed the shape of pocket-money;
as a natural consequence the ancestral revenues proved ultimately
totally inadequate to supply the requirements of each successive earl.
They married heiresses, they married paupers, with a precisely similar
result.
The heiresses’ wealth was spent, the paupers learned to spend. Gamblers,
men and women, they risked the happiness and well-being of their tenants
on a throw of the dice. Rents, too high already, were raised on lands
the holders had no capital to get more produce out of.
“Money! money!” was the Glendare refrain; and money scraped together by
pence and shillings, money painfully earned in the sweat of men’s brows,
by the labour of women’s hands, went out of the country to keep those
wicked orgies going where my lord, and other lords like him, helped to
make a poor land poorer, and milady, all paint, and pride, and sin,
played not only diamonds and spades, but the heart’s blood of patient
men, and the tears and sobs of hopeless women.
In the quiet fields where the wheat grew and the barley ripened, where
the potatoes put forth their blossoms, purple and yellow, white and
yellow, where the meadows yielded crops that reached far above a man’s
knees, there was the Glendare rent sowed and planted, reaped, mown,
garnered, gathered, pound by pound, all too slowly for the harpies who
waited its advent.
The hens in the untidy farm-yards, the eggs they laid in convenient
hedges, the chickens they hatched were all in due course sacrificed on
the altar of rent. The cows’ milk, the butter it produced, the calves
they bore, might have been labelled “Rent.” The yarn spun by an ancient
grandmother, the cloth woven by a consumptive son had that trade-mark
stamped upon thread and web. The bees in the garden hummed unconsciously
the same tune, the pigs grunting on the dung-heap, wallowing in the
mire, exploring the tenants’ earth-floored kitchens, repeated the same
refrain.
Rent! the children might have been hushed to sleep with a song reciting
its requirements, so familiar was the sound and meaning of the word to
them. Rent! lovers could not forget the inevitable “gale days,” even in
their wooing.
What did it matter whether the tenants looked forth over land where the
earth gave her increase, or upon barren swamps, where nothing grew
luxuriantly save rushes and yellow flags? The rent had to be made up
somehow just the same. Did the pig die, did the cow sicken, did the
crops fail, did illness and death cross their thresholds, that rent,
more inexorable even than death, had to be paid by men who in the best
of times could scarcely gather together sufficient to pay it at all.
In the sweat of their brows was that income made up by the Glendare
tenantry, and the Jews had the money. Fortunately in those days penny
newspapers were not, and tidings from the great capital came rarely to
remote homesteads, otherwise how should these men have borne their lot;
borne labour greater than any working man of the present day would
endure, and superadded to that labour all the anxieties of a merchant?
The farmer then was a principal and yet he did his own labour. He had a
principal’s stake, a principal’s responsibilities, and as a
recompense—what? The privilege of being out in all weathers to look
after his stock and his crops; the right to work early and late so long
as he could make up his rent; the power to keep a sound roof over his
head if he saw to the thatch or the slating himself. Add to these
advantages a diet into which oaten meal entered largely and meat never;
the luxury of a chaff-bed; the delight of being called Mister by the
clergyman, the minister, the agent, and friends generally, and the
reader will have a fair idea of the sort of existence led by tenants on
the Glendare and other estates at that period of Ireland’s history.
Landlords in those days had no responsibilities. Responsibility was at
that time entirely a tenant question, which fact may perhaps account for
some of the troubles that have since then perplexed the mind of the
upper ten. By the grace of God and the king there was then a class
established to spend money; by grace of the same powers there was a
still larger class created to provide the money the former chose to
squander.
That property had its duties as well as its rights was a maxim which
would have been laughed to scorn by those whom the adage concerned.
Once again we may find in this, cause for the later effect, of the lower
classes now utterly denying that property has its rights as well as its
duties.
Revolutions come and revolutions go; there is a mighty one being wrought
at the present moment, which has arisen out of circumstances such as
those enumerated and others like them, and happy will this land be if
for once the wealthy can persuade themselves to personal abnegation as
the poor did in days gone by.
It is hard to do so with the eyes of body and understanding wide open,
but in proportion to the difficulty so will be the reward.
The great must give much now for the years wherein their fathers gave
nothing; and if they are willing to do so, the evil will right itself,
and a bloodless battle-ground shall leave an open field whereon the next
generation may ventilate the differences of centuries, and settle those
grievances which have been handed down from generation to generation,
but investigated truthfully and thoroughly by none.
In the days of which I write, taking society round, the rich were all
powerful, and the poor had none to help. It was a great and patient
population that rose up early and worked hard all day, that ate the
bread of carefulness and saved every groat which their poor lives could
spare in order that milady and other ladies like her should fulfil no
one single useful or grand purpose in life.
Were the sights of nature in her different moods sufficient reward for
their uncomplaining labour? So perhaps the men and the women who never
noticed nature at all, considered.
And yet there must have been some great compensation about the whole
business, which perhaps we shall never quite understand here—unless it
was to be found in the great contentment, the sweet patient adaptability
of the people of that far away time.
The love of wife and children was wonderfully dear to those toilers on
the land, and as a rule they had tender, helpful wives, and dutiful,
hard working children. There was peace at home, let the agent be never
so unquiet; there was no straining this way and struggling in that
direction.
The oaten meal porridge was eaten in thankfulness, and no dissension
curdled the milk with which the mess was diluted. They were too poor,
and too dependent one upon another to quarrel, added to which the
Almighty had bestowed upon them that power of knowing when to speak and
when to refrain, which adds so mightily to the well-being of households.
“The world,” says the old adage, “grows wiser and weaker;” comparing the
poor of these days with the poor of a long ago period, it is to be
feared they do not grow better.
Concerning the rich, it is to be hoped they grow wiser than their
progenitors.
Wickeder it might baffle some even of the men whose doings now astonish
worthy magistrates and learned judges, to become.
No man of the present day at all events dare emulate the doings of those
historical Glendares, and yet one redeeming point may be stated in their
favour. They exhibited their vices where they spent their money. On the
rare occasions when they honoured the family mansion with their
presence, they left their immoralities behind them. They came like
leeches to suck the life’s blood out of their tenants; to assert feudal
superiority in the matter of votes; to get out of the way of importunate
creditors; sometimes it might be to recruit health, enfeebled by London
hours and London dissipation: but no tenant ever had cause to curse the
day when his daughter’s pretty face was commented on by one of the
Glendares, old or young; no farmer’s wife ever had reason to weep for a
child worse than dead through them; no household held a vacant place in
consequence of any ill wrought by my lord or one belonging to him.
Indeed that was just the sort of evil my lord would not have brooked on
the part of one belonging to him.
He knew the people he had to deal with, and understood precisely the
straw which should break the camel’s back of their endurance.
So to put it, he and his were on their good behaviour when they crossed
the channel; and accordingly, though never worse landlords cursed a soil
than these men who had come in with the second Charles, and not gone out
with any of the Georges, the Glendares were popular and well liked.
Perhaps for the same reason that the Stuarts were liked. They had
winsome faces, gracious ways, familiar manners. The beggars in the
streets had free liberty to bandy repartee with my lord, who always kept
his pockets full of coppers for their benefit.
Coppers! the pence were much to them, but what were they to him? And yet
the farmer, from whose leathern pouches those coppers originally came,
and who gave out of their poverty a million times more than their
landlord out of his abundance, liked to hear the mendicants’ praise of
my lord, who had a word and a joke for everybody, “God bless him.”
And perhaps there was some praise due to a nobleman who, situated as my
lord was, had a word and a joke for anybody.
It is not in the slightest degree likely that a single reader of these
lines can know from experience the irritating effects which a persistent
dun is capable of exciting on the serenest temper. Still less can the
present race of debtors understand the horror that encompassed even a
nobleman when he knew at any moment the hand of a bailiff might be laid
on his shoulder.
Fancy capping jests under these circumstances with a bare-footed,
imperfectly clothed Hibernian beggar who had never washed her body nor
combed her hair for forty years or thereabouts. Could you have done it?
No, you answer with a shudder; and yet that was the way in which gentry
courted popularity, and “made their souls” in the good old days
departed.
To the poorest man who touched his hat to him, my lord raised his; let
the humblest Irish equivalent of John Oakes or Tom Styles ask audience,
he was asked into the presence-chamber. On his agent, on his lawyers, my
lord thrust the unpleasant portion of the land question, and every
tenant on that wide estate was from his own personal experience firmly
convinced that if his landlord could only be privately informed how
wrong many things were, he would publicly redress them.
“Not but what the lawyers and the agent were very pleasant gentlemen,
only it was not natural they should take the same interest in the soil
as his lordship,” and so forth. Whereas those unhappy gentlemen were
always trying to moderate his lordship’s demands, always striving to
make that most worthy nobleman understand there was a limit to a
farmer’s purse, a point beyond which a man could not, physically or
pecuniarily, be safely bled.
Besides Rosemont the Glendare owned other residences in Ireland:
Glendare Castle, a black ruin, the foundations of which were washed by
the wild Atlantic waves; Beechwood, a lovely property occupied by a
certain Major Coombes, who kept the place in good order to the exceeding
mortification of his landlord, who considered the well-kept lawns and
trim flower-gardens and richly stocked conservatories a tacit reproach
to himself; to say nothing of several dilapidated shooting-lodges that
were either rented by poor gentlemen farmers, or else going to ruin as
fast as damp and neglect could take them.
Had any one of the family set himself to the task of freeing the
estates, he might have succeeded. Had any fresh earl when he returned to
Rosemont, after laying the body of his predecessor in the old Abbey
overlooking the sea, faced the question of his difficulties, and
determined to rid his property of debt and the Jews, he might even at
the eleventh hour have saved those broad acres for his posterity and won
ease of mind and blessings from his inferiors for himself. Until the
very last, the disease though deep seated was not incurable; but not one
of those careless earls ever had courage to endure the remedy.
After the funeral of each successive nobleman, the next heir hied him
back to London, or Paris, or Baden, or some other favourite resort; and
the Jews and the lawyers and the middle-men prospered and fattened on
the Glendare pastures, whilst both landlord and tenants led wretched,
anxious lives, the first driven almost mad by the harpies, whose cry
from January to December was “More, more,” the latter toiling to fill a
purse out of which the money poured faster than it could be thrown in.
Yes, they were doomed in those days of which I write—the Glendares
gracious in manner, false at heart; lightly had their lands been won,
lightly it seemed destined they should go. And yet there was one of the
family towards whom the eyes of the tenantry turned with hope, though he
was not heir-apparent, or presumptive, or anything of the sort.
He was resident, however, and that, in the estimation of the Glendare
dependents, was a virtue and a promise in itself. Since his earliest
youth Robert Somerford had lived amongst his uncle’s tenantry; not from
any desire on his part to do so, the reader may be certain, but simply
because Mrs. Somerford having no money to live anywhere else, had been
glad enough when left a widow, to embrace Lord Glendare’s offer for her
to take up her abode at Rosemont, and make her moderate income go as far
as she could in one wing of that commodious family mansion.
The Hon. Mrs. Somerford never made even a pretence of being contented
with this arrangement. She gave herself airs, she openly stated her
dislike to the country and its inhabitants; she never visited the poor,
or the rich either if she could help it, for that matter; she never
assisted the sick and needy; the ready graceful charity of that generous
peasantry she laughed to scorn; indeed, as Mrs. Hartley, herself a
distant kinswoman of Lord Glendare’s relative declared, “Mrs. Somerford
was a truly detestable person.”
But Lord Glendare had loved his younger brother, her husband, and for
the sake of the dead gave shelter to the widow and her son, the latter
of whom grew up amongst the Irish people as has been stated.
Had fate so willed it, he would gladly have left Ireland and the people
behind him for ever. Aliens the Glendares were when to John Somerford,
first Earl, King Charles granted those lands, privileges, and so forth,
of which mention has already been made; and aliens they remained through
the years that followed. They were not of the soil; better they loved
the pavement of Bond Street than all the shamrocks of the sainted isle;
but as already hinted, they were a plausible and an adaptable race,
possessed of manners that might have pleased their first royal patron,
not given to tramp unnecessarily on people’s corns and blessed with that
ready courtesy, which if it mean in reality very little, conveys the
idea of intending a great deal.
Certain were the tenants that some day Mr. Robert would put matters
right for them with my lord.
“He is like one of ourselves, bless his handsome face,” said the women,
enthusiastically. “He has sat down there,” and the speaker would point
to a settle opposite, “many and many a time, and taken the children on
his knee, and rested his gun in the corner, and eaten a potato and salt
with as much relish as if it had been a slice off a joint.”
“And his tongue is like ours,” some man would continue. “Even my lord
talks English, and so do his sons, fine young gentlemen though they be,
but Master Robert is Irish to the backbone. He will go away to Dublin
and make a great name for himself one of these days, and then he won’t
forget the ‘gossoons’ he played with once, but ‘insense’ my lord into
the wrongs that are put upon us in his name.”
“There never was a Somerford a patch upon Mr. Robert,” sometimes cried a
female voice when the conversation turned upon Rosemont and its
inhabitants. At which juncture a tenant more wise, more just, or more
prudent than the woman-kind, was certain to interpose with a cautious
remark—
“Hoot! ye shouldn’t say that, the young lords are wonderful fine lads to
be sure.”
From all of which it will be perceived that another earl now received
the Glendare rents from that lamented nobleman who ruled over his
vassals at the time George the Fourth began his glorious reign.
He lay in Ballyknock Abbey securely cased in elm and soldered down in
lead, and, for greater safety, boxed up a third time in oak; and Louis,
the son he hoped might obtain an appointment in the Royal Household, and
who did obtain it, reigned in his stead.
Thus a new race was springing up not one whit less extravagant, selfish,
short sighted, and evilly inclined than the former generation. Strange
tales about the Glendare _ménage_, and the Glendare doings, found their
way across the channel to Dublin, and thence down to the better class of
houses in the colder and darker north,—tales whereat sometimes society
lifted up its hands and covered its face, tales at which it shook its
decorous head, tales of shifts and subterfuges at which it was not in
Irish nature to avoid laughing.
A volcano was threatening the land, but the Glendares danced unconscious
on the edge of the crater. The skeleton ruin was creeping up to their
gates, but they only threw those gates open the wider, and bade more
guests enter. A cloud of debt, once no bigger than a man’s hand, now
covered almost the whole of their social future, and yet, each day,
fresh debts were contracted.
The Countess was one of the queens whose voice was potent at Almack’s.
She had been a great beauty in her youth. Artists had painted, sculptors
moulded her, poets had written verses in her honour, philosophers had
basked in her smiles, statesmen esteemed it an honour to receive a tap
from her fan.
But the loveliness was gone, as the lands were going, and everybody knew
it.
She had immediately before the period when this story opens, received an
intimation from her husband that as an election was imminent, it would
be necessary for them both to repair to Ireland; and when she looked in
the glass, to trace precisely the change which the years come and gone
since she had canvassed for votes before had wrought, she sighed at the
alteration made not so much by time as by the harassing life led of her
own choice and her own free will.
“Heigho!” she thought, “who would imagine I had once been the beautiful
Lady Trevor?” and then she put on a little more rouge, and decided that
after all the change was more apparent to her than it could be to any
one else.
Happy in this delusion, my lady arrived at Rosemont on the morning of
the day when all Kingslough was in consternation at high noon by reason
of Nettie O’Hara’s disappearance.