MR. DANIEL BRADY RECEIVES.
At one time, a pernicious habit obtained across the channel, a habit
which unfortunately appears to have latterly been imported into England,
of bestowing Christian names on country-seats. A son, fond of his
mother, bought a property possessed of some old Irish cognomen, and
forthwith the place became Kittymount, or Hannah Ville, or Jinny Brook,
or St. Margaret’s. Sometimes men also came in for their share of this
delicate attention, and Robertsford, and Williamsford, and Mount George,
or Knock Denis, perpetuated the name of some favoured member of the
race.
To this custom Maryville, the seat of Mr. Daniel Brady, owed its
nomenclature.
A certain heiress, in the days when the Bradys owned a considerable
amount of property, married a younger son of that family.
With her money a small estate, on which stood an unpretending cottage
residence, was purchased, a large house erected, a park fenced in,
gardens laid out, lodge and lodge-entrance provided, and then Mr. and
Mrs. Theophilus Brady took up their abode at Maryville.
Acre after acre the principal estate changed hands; one by one the older
branches of the family died out. My Lord Ardmorne owned all the broad
lands that had once belonged to the old Bradys, but Maryville still
remained to the descendants of Theophilus. The porter’s lodge was in
ruins, the gates hanging on one hinge stood wide, the park was a
wilderness, in the gardens weeds grew knee-deep, and the currant and
gooseberry trees were smothered with bind-weed and convolvulus.
As for the house, a few of the rooms were habitable, and these Mr.
Daniel Brady occupied. He lived there all alone, in company with an
elderly housekeeper, whose age and looks were sufficient guarantee for
her propriety; lived there, a man at war with society, a man who was at
feud with the world, a man who said he was determined some day to get
the better of society, and make those who had once snubbed him glad of
his company.
“It is all a question of money,” he said openly. “If they thought I was
rich, they would be glad enough to ask me to their houses, hang them.”
However great a cad a man may be, it is extremely unlikely he should
acknowledge the fact, even to himself. Indeed, he is always the only
person who remains entirely unconscious of the circumstance, and
therefore, although Mr. Brady was aware that for a considerable period
those of his race who had preceded him had found themselves neglected by
the upper ten of Kingslough and its neighbourhood, that for generations
his people had dropped out of the rank of gentry, and that his own
existence was virtually tabooed by persons who made the slightest
pretension to respectability; still he persisted this social ostracism
originated in circumstances entirely independent of character; that the
Bradys had gone down, not because they were, in their humbler way, as
bad, and wild, and reckless, and selfish, and self-willed as the
Glendares, but because his great-grandfather had married a shopkeeper’s
daughter, and his aunt had elected to go off with the particularly
handsome son of a small farmer, who was no higher in rank than a
labourer, while his mother, sick, doubtless of the Bradys and people
like them, chose for her second husband an Englishman who made her
comfortable, though he did drop his h’s, and whose connexion with
himself Mr. Daniel utterly repudiated.
After her marriage, the youth, then in his very early teens, was taken
by his maternal grandfather, who, spite of wars and rumours of wars,
spite of various threats expressive of an intention to kick his grandson
out of his house, spite of the contempt he felt for “that cur,” as he
habitually designated Daniel, left to that young man everything of which
he died possessed, and passing by his daughter, devised and bequeathed
his small corn-mill, his farm, held at an almost nominal rent for a long
term, his furniture, his horses, and his blessing to the youthful
reprobate.
No one ever believed Mr. Farrell signed that will knowing its contents.
Most people went so far as to believe he never signed it at all, and
amongst the latter number was included the heir’s mother. This idea and
a stormy interview with her first-born were the proximate causes of her
death. She had three children by her second marriage, and counted no
doubt on inheriting the greater portion of her father’s property, which
in turn she would be able to bequeath to them. From the day of Mr.
Farrell’s funeral, she never held up her head. Gradually she drooped,
and pined, and died of a broken heart, that disease which doctors try to
diagnose in vain.
Clear of all relations, possessed of a sum of money which, if really
small, seemed comparatively large to a man whose family had for so long
a time been drifting in a rotten boat along the river of incapable
expenditure to the river of ruin, Mr. Daniel Brady removed his
grandfather’s furniture to Maryville, which had long stood empty, gave
the man who had rented the land during his minority notice to quit, let
his corn-mill to a Scotch Irishman, whose soul was not above grinding
and meal, as was the soul of the heir, and began to lead that life for
which he had long panted—a life of cheap debauchery, of economical
villany, of consistent moneymaking.
Looking at the moss-covered drive, at the rusty gates, at the desolate
park, at the weed-covered gardens, a stranger might have said, rashly,
“The owner of this place must be a beggar.”
But Mr. Brady knew what he was about. A well-kept avenue, gates that
opened noiselessly, grass closely mown, gardens filled with fruit and
flowers, all these things would have cost much whilst they returned
nothing. They could return nothing to a man who wanted no help such as
the appearance of wealth occasionally enables people to obtain. What he
seemed would not, he was shrewd enough to understand, have the smallest
weight with a community who mentally counted every sixpence of his
inheritance the moment he laid claim to it. What he had would, he knew,
be regarded ultimately with respect. Perhaps the Irish may not like
moneyed men, but certainly they reverence them.
The almighty dollar will exercise its influence as well amongst persons
who swear against it as amongst those who swear by it. Mr. Daniel Brady
was no fool in worldly matters, and he had early recognized the truth of
that maxim which states, “Money is power.”
What would the end find him? A pretentious snob, or a grubbing miser?
The soil on which both grow is the same. The earth of which he was made
could be moulded as readily into one as the other. He had youth in his
favour, and youth is pliable. If a selfish, self-indulgent, insolent,
meanly extravagant braggart be preferable in the reader’s opinion to a
wretched old miser, there is a chance for Mr. Daniel Brady exhibiting
himself in the former character. At the time this story opens, however,
he was in training for a miser. He was that most wonderful thing in
creation, a young man niggardly even over his pleasures, calculating
even concerning the things his soul most longed for, who was never led
away by the voice of praise, or turned by that of censure, who had no
impulses of generosity, kindliness, remorse; a wonderful thing, but not
an uncommon. The world has a great many Daniel Bradys travelling through
it, though we may reck not of their existence.
If the characters of men could be revealed when they give up their
railway-tickets at the end of their morning journeys, it might surprise
a good many unsuspecting people to discover the number of unmitigated
scoundrels who have lent them the _Times_, or discoursed to them about
the state of the weather and the funds.
Mr. Brady was an unmitigated scoundrel. The higher orders tabooed his
existence; the middle regretted he had come to Maryville; the lower
hated him.
Now the love of the lower orders is often open to be viewed with
suspicion. Meretricious qualities may win it, adventitious circumstances
secure it. About their hate there is no such mistake. They hate a man
because of such and such qualities, which he possesses or does not
possess, and there is an end of the matter. Had Mr. Brady announced to
the beggars of Kingslough and its neighbourhood that on a given day he
would distribute fifty pounds in charity, they would have known he had
an ulterior object in view.
As it was, he never gave them a halfpenny, and that seemed a vice to the
majority in those remote days, ere the Marquis of Townshend had begun
his crusade against mendicants.
Then most people gave according as he or she could, gave to beggars who
asked, and gave to the decent and reticent poor who would not ask, but
whom they sought out and assisted.
Not a practicable thing to do, perhaps, at this time of the world, when
the workhouse doors stand hospitably open to receive those who like to
enter in and relinquish hope. Certainly not a practicable thing to do
now, when the labouring classes say they are the dictators; that they
will have pence, and sixpences, and sovereigns out of the pockets of
capitalists, whether capitalists lose or gain; but then—then—ah!
heaven,—what was not a gift thrown to a half-naked beggar? It meant a
day’s food. What good did not the present stealthily bestowed on a
family too proud too ask, too lonely to have friends, effect? It enabled
struggling people to turn many an ugly corner, to keep a home, poor
though it was, together, and avoid that last vague necessity of “going
out on the world,” a phrase which expresses in such few words a fearful
calamity.
But neither openly nor by stealth did Mr. Brady perform any of those
small acts of charity so universal and so needful at that time in his
country, and his sins of omission were as duly set down to the debit of
his account by an observant and exacting population as those of
commission.
The very beggars hated him. The idiots, who then wandered loose about
every town and village in Ireland, never with grotesque gesture and
jabbering tone entreated a halfpenny of him. Instinctively the blind,
knowing the sound of his horse’s hoofs slunk on to the side path, or
close up beside a wall or a hedge, on his approach; the ragged,
shoeless, homeless children never ran after that rider, praying him to
throw them a “farden;” the deaf and dumb, who, according to popular
belief, had “knowledge,” and whom it was not well to anger, looked at
him menacingly and raised clenched fists when he had passed; whilst
“Trust in the Lord,” so named because he was the religious begging
impostor of Kingslough, maddened the young man by piously folding his
hands when Mr. Brady crossed his path, and uttering ejaculatory and
audible prayers for all sinners, more especially “for this sinner, who
may be called the chief of them all.”
As for Katty Clancy, who had begged her bread, and worn the same scanty
petticoat, and covered her shoulders with the same washed out, ragged,
picturesque, patchwork counterpane for forty long years, “a dissolute
orphan,” as she styled herself, till the absurdity of the lament was
pointed out by Mrs. Hartley; as for Katty, Mr. Daniel Brady hated that
woman with a completeness of detestation to which no words could do
justice.
Others of her profession refrained from asking him for alms, but she
took a delight in doing so, and in flinging some bitter taunt or jibe
back in his face when he refused, generally with an oath, to give her
one copper.
Their conversations were usually carried on somewhat as follows:—
“Good mornin’, Mr. Brady, isn’t that the beautiful day, God bliss it?
Yer astir airly. An’ where is it yer honour’s goin’ to in sich a hurry?”
“To ——,” Mr. Brady replied, mentioning what Lord Stowell, in one of his
judgments, styled a “favourite place of consignment.”
“Ach, well yer honour, it’s a long journey, and I wish ye safe there,”
said Katty, with persistent courtesy, and then Mr. Brady, muttering an
oath, walked off, while Katty solemnly shook her head, and said _sotto
voce_, “There’s many a true word spoken in jest, and it’s my belief, Dan
Brady, ye are thravellin’ that road as fast as time will let ye.”
Before Nettie O’Hara, however, Mr. Brady had contrived to appear the
incarnation of every manly virtue. He told the girl how much he loved
her, spoke of his own lonely life at Maryville, of his solitary home, of
the unjust stories his enemies had circulated to his prejudice, of the
manner in which he was excluded from society for no reason in the world
except that some of his family had made mésalliances, and that he
himself was poor.
“But I mean to be rich one of these days, Nettie,” he finished, “if you
will only help me—if you will only try to grow fond of me.”
Nettie, unhappily, had no occasion to try to grow fond of him. She loved
his handsome face, and the notion of sharing his lonely home had no
terrors for her.
She knew and he knew, it would be idle to ask her friends’ consent.
Indeed, he did not want it. He wanted her and he had got her. Flight was
sudden at the last, but Nettie had long understood she meant to go off
with him some day.
And that day, and many, many other days had come and gone, and Nettie
was home at Maryville, walking about the weed-covered garden, when her
relatives the Rileys, father and son, paid their first visit to the
house.
Amongst the other rarities and attractions Maryville had once boasted
were a fish-pond and a sundial. The first was green with slime and
choked with the leaves of water-plants, whilst round the rotting pillar
of the dial climbed briony and convolvulus.
Beside the pond, with one hand resting on the slate time-teller, Nettie
stood motionless. She did not hear the footsteps of her relatives as
they fell silently on moss-covered walks and grass-grown paths. She was
dressed in white, she had a blue ribbon round her waist, and another of
the same colour kept back her hair—her long, bright, beautiful hair.
Never afterwards did General Riley forget that picture, never could he
quite efface from his memory the sight of that girl, almost a child,
standing amongst that wilderness of rank vegetation, looking across the
pond at a belt of dark firs which separated this portion of the gardens
from the open park beyond.
“Nettie,” John said softly; then with a start she turned and saw them, a
colour rising in her face, and smiles dimpling her cheeks the while.
“Oh, General! Oh, John! this is kind of you,” she said eagerly; “I did
not think—that is, I did not hope—” and then she stopped and looked at
them both, and General Riley looked at his son, and John at his father,
perplexed as to what they were to do next.
“Are you quite well, Nettie?” asked the young man, after a moment’s
pause, looking a little doubtfully in her face, which, now the flush
caused by their sudden appearance had died away, looked paler and
thinner than ever he remembered to have seen it.
“Yes, very well, thank you,” with an unnecessary emphasis on the very.
“I am a little tired; we only came home the evening before last, and you
know I am not much accustomed to travelling.”
“Did you like Scotland?”
“Greatly, but I think I like Ireland best.” There was a wistful anxious
look in the blue eyes that neither man could help noticing, and Nettie
perceiving that they did so, went on to ask, quickly, “How is Grace?”
“Well, I believe,” John answered.
“You believe?” she repeated.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I have not seen Grace for some weeks. The fact
is, she has refused me, and I am going away. You have not been in the
neighbourhood, or you would have heard all about that long ago.”
Nettie did not reply, she stood looking at the fir-trees with great
serious eyes. She seemed prettier then than John had ever before thought
her—poor little girl.
“We were told we should find Mr. Brady here,” broke in General Riley at
this juncture. “I suppose the servant made some mistake.”
“_Then you did not come to see me!_” she exclaimed, taking her eyes from
the firs and fastening them on their faces.
“Of course we came to see you,” said John falsely, but kindly. He could
not endure the dumb anguish of her expression.
“You did not,” she said vehemently. “Don’t tell untruths to me, John
Riley; you have come to talk to my husband about me, and to meddle in my
concerns, but you did not come to see me as relations should come to see
one another. You think I have disgraced myself by marrying out of your
rank—yours, what is it?—and you do not want to visit me yourselves or to
let your sisters do so. When my husband has a large property like yours,
and money to keep it up, which he will have, and you never will, then I
shall be able to pick and choose my friends, but till then I must be
content to live without any.”
Then, with a catching sob, she stopped, her eyes flashing, her cheeks
aflame, while John Riley, preventing his father answering, and passing
over the sting her words held, said,—
“No one will be better pleased than we to hear you and your husband are
happy and prosperous, Nettie. It would be useless to deny that we did,
and do, regret the step you have taken, but that step has been taken,
and it behoves us, as your nearest male friends, to see that its
consequences prove as little disastrous to you as may be.”
“You are very kind,” said Nettie sarcastically.
“Our intentions are so, at all events,” answered John, with a temper and
a humility which touched even Nettie.
“I believe,” she said, “you are the best person in the world, and I am
sure your intentions are always good and kind, but you have made a
mistake this time. It is not well to meddle between man and wife.”
“When were you made man and wife?” asked the General, charging like an
old soldier direct to the point he wanted to reach.
“What business is that of yours, General Riley?” she retorted. “It was
not you Mr. Brady married.”
“Be reasonable, Nettie,” interposed John. “On my word we do not want to
make or to meddle; we only desire to protect. If we fail in our duty
now, the day may come when you will say to us, ‘I was but a girl,
ignorant of the world, and you left me to bear the consequences of my
rashness; you never advised, you never helped me.’ All we want to know
is that you have been so securely married no doubt can be thrown upon
the matter, and afterwards——” he stopped.
“What about afterwards?” she asked.
“We must leave afterwards to take care of itself, having done all it
seemed possible in the present.”
“Do you think I am not married, then?” she asked; “that I would come
back to Kingslough if—if——”
“There is no necessity for you to get into a passion with us, Nettie,”
interrupted her cousin. “We think no evil of you, but you are only a
young and inexperienced girl, and to put the argument in a nutshell, we
have taken this matter up, and mean to have it put in proper form.”
“You had better see my husband, then,” she exclaimed. “I do not suppose
he will give you much of a welcome, but if you choose to insult a man in
his own house, you have only yourselves to thank if you meet with scant
courtesy,” and with her head up in the air, and her blue ribbons
floating, and her golden curls glinting in the sunlight, Nettie led them
out of the garden, and by a side door, into a small sitting-apartment,
which had, in the days when Maryville was in its glory, been an inner
drawing-room or boudoir—my lady’s closet, perhaps, where she conducted
her correspondence, or worked at her embroidery.
A second door led to the drawing-room, which was bare of all furniture,
unless a huge chandelier, a cracked girandole, and a rickety sofa could
be so considered; but the door was closed, and the Rileys could not see
the nakedness of the land.
Instead, they beheld an apartment furnished with a few chairs and a
couple of tables, the floor covered with a somewhat faded Kidderminster
carpet; but, taking one thing with another, the place did not look
poverty stricken or uncomfortable.
“It is not much of a home I am able to welcome you to,” said Nettie,
turning defiantly upon her relations, “but at least it is clear of
debt.”
“Nettie,” replied John Riley, “you cannot hurt us, so say what you
please; at the same time I would ask if you think it worth while to try
and insult those who have no object in being here beyond that I have
stated.”
“Some day, child,” added the General, “you may understand it is better
to be honestly indebted than dishonestly clear of debt.”
“I never could understand paradoxes,” said Nettie, and she sat down
beside the window, her white hands linked together in her lap, and her
pretty head averted from her visitors till Mr. Brady, for whom she had
sent, entered.
Ere long Mr. Brady appeared. He came in with a slight swagger, looking a
little nervous, but handsome and defiant as ever.
“This is a pleasure I did not hope for so soon,” he began. “Glad to see
you, General. How do you do, Squire?” and he extended his hand to the
visitors, but General Riley crossed his behind his back, and John thrust
his in his pockets.
It was not a pleasant position for any one of the four, most unpleasant
of all, perhaps, for Nettie, and yet she alone was equal to the
occasion.
“Do you mean, John Riley,” she said, turning upon him like a fury, “that
you refuse, having voluntarily come into this house, to shake hands with
its master, my husband?”
“No man will be more ready than I, Nettie, to give my hand to Mr. Brady
when he has proved himself worthy to take it,” John answered steadily.
“I understand you,” answered Mr. Brady, “this is a business visit?”
“Strictly so,” was the reply.
“You had better leave us to discuss business, Annette,” said Mr. Brady
slowly. “Pray be seated, gentlemen;” then after the sound of Nettie’s
footsteps had died away he went on, “Now what do you want? what is it?”
“We want to know if you are married to my cousin?” said John.
“You had better have put that question to her.”
“We have.”
“And what answer did she give you?”
“She evidently considers she is legally your wife.”
“Then, what more do you want?”
“Proof that her idea is correct.”
“Supposing I refuse to give it?”
“We will make you give it, sir,” interposed the General.
“Two to one is scarcely fair,” remarked Mr. Brady, “still curiosity
makes me inquire how you propose to make me open my mouth if I choose to
keep it shut?”
“I do not know—” the General was beginning, when his son interrupted him
with—
“One moment, father. I hope you misunderstood Mr. Brady’s reply. This is
not a matter, I should think, about which he would wish to keep us in
the dark. It is absolutely essential,” he went on, speaking to Mr.
Brady, “that we should understand my cousin’s position.”
“Why?”
“Because if she be not your wife already, you must immediately make her
so.”
“Again I ask, why?”
“Do you suppose we should allow her to remain with you an hour longer
excepting as your wife?”
“I really do not see how you are to help yourselves.”
“Mr. Brady,” began John, “I cannot believe you are speaking seriously. I
think you must be trying to annoy us by persisting in what is at best
but a very sorry sort of jest. We have not come here to reproach you for
the scandal you have caused a respectable family, for the advantage you
have taken of an ignorant and unprotected girl. We merely desire to know
if you have made her the only reparation in your power. Is she legally
your wife?”
“That is a question I decline to answer.”
“Is she not your wife?”
“That, likewise, is a question I decline to answer.”
“You villain!” exclaimed the General, “we will find means to make you
answer,” and he was advancing with raised hand and threatening gesture
towards Mr. Brady, when his son stepped between them.
“We shall not do any good by using violence, father,” he said, putting a
curb on his own temper, and clenching his fingers, which were itching to
grasp his riding-whip, and lay it about the shoulders of the
self-possessed scoundrel who stood before him, smiling contemptuously.
“There is only one course left open for us to pursue now; we must take
Nettie away, and get legal advice as to what we ought to do next.”
“I apprehend your legal adviser will say that even loving relatives like
you cannot separate husband and wife,” replied Mr. Brady.
“It will be for you then to prove that you are her husband.”
“And what if Annette refuses to go?”
“She will not remain here when I tell her how she has been deceived,”
was the answer, and John Riley took up his hat and whip, and was
following his father to the door, when Mr. Brady stopped them.
“A moment,” he said; “do not be in such a hurry, gentlemen. If you,
General, will kindly restrain your temper, and you, Mr. Riley, will
kindly hold your tongue, perhaps some arrangement may be come to. I have
declined,” he went on, after a pause, “to tell you whether the young
lady in whose affairs you have interfered so officiously is my wife or
not, for the extremely simple reason that I am not at all clear on the
point myself. I think she is my wife if I like to claim her; I think she
is not my wife if I choose to repudiate her. It is an awkward position
for her, certainly, and I do not imagine it can be a pleasant one for
her relatives.”
“Well, sir?” said General Riley, to whom this speech was specially
addressed.
“To make the thing secure for her we certainly ought to go through some
sort of ceremony, otherwise I do not see how she is either to prove that
she is married or unmarried. It is an awkward affair for me, too. I am a
poor man. I had enough burdens before, without hampering myself with a
wife. I cannot say I have much taste for domestic felicity; and after
the specimen of good breeding you have given me to-day, I can imagine
many things more desirable than a connexion with the Riley family.”
“In heaven’s name what are you driving at?” asked the General. “We do
not want a dissertation on your tastes and prejudices, we want to know,
in a word, whether you will marry Nettie, or whether you will leave us
to seek our remedy elsewhere.”
“Meaning at law?”
“Meaning at law, and also that I will give you a thrashing you shall
remember to your dying day,” said John Riley.
“I requested you to hold your tongue, did I not?” retorted Mr. Brady
coolly. “As I was saying,” he continued, addressing the General, “the
holy state of matrimony is not one into which I have the least desire to
enter, more especially with such a remarkably useless young lady as your
relative; still I am willing to meet your views. I am not desirous of
raising any scandal, and if you like to make it worth my while I will
take her for better for worse.”
“Make it worth your while?” repeated the General.
“Yes, you do not expect me to do something for nothing, do you? I shall
have to board and clothe a young woman for the remainder of her days,
and resign my liberty in addition. I do not want, however, to drive a
hard bargain, or take advantage of your difficulty. The girl has, I
believe, a hundred pounds or so of her own. Make it up five hundred, and
I will send for the minister here, or marry her in church, whichever you
like.”
“I’ll see you——”
To what lot or in what place General Riley intended to say he would see
the speaker may be imagined, but can never now be exactly known, for
while he was uttering these words the door between the outer and the
inner drawing-room opened, and Nettie herself appeared.
“Take me away, John,” she said, “take me anywhere out of this house,
away from him.”
“You have been listening,” observed Mr. Brady, disconcerted for the
first time.
“Yes, it was my affair and I had a right to hear. Take me away, John,
from that bad, false man. Do you understand what I say? Oh! and I was so
fond of him, and I believed him. I did,” and she burst into a fit of
hysterical weeping, and her face, her shamed, grief-stained face,
covered with her hands, hurried from the room.
“Go after her, John,” said the General, “and keep her in the garden till
I have settled this matter one way or other.”
“And hark ye, mister,” called out Mr. Brady, “she does not leave this
place without my consent; ay, and, for all her crying, she does not want
to leave it.”
Which last clause was hard to believe in the face of Nettie’s passionate
entreaties for John to take her away, away at once.
“And to think of how I trusted him,” she moaned. “If the whole world had
spoken ill of him it could not have changed me. I thought I knew him
better than anybody, and this is the end of it all, this is the end.”
And so she moaned on for some fifteen minutes, whilst John stood leaning
against a tree.
In truth he did not know what to say. His heart was full of compassion
for her, but he could not think of a word of comfort good to speak. She
had done so evil a thing for herself that he did not see how any one
could make a better of it, and so, whilst she, seated amongst the long
rank grass, made her bitter lamentations, sobbed her tears, and bewailed
her lot, John Riley did, perhaps, the kindest and wisest thing possible
under the circumstances, he held his peace, he let her alone.