A CONFIDENTIAL TALK
Dick Kearney walked the bog from early morning till dark without firing a
shot. The snipe rose almost at his feet, and wheeling in circles through
the air, dipped again into some dark crevice of the waste, unnoticed by
him! One thought only possessed, and never left him, as he went. He had
overheard Nina’s words to his sister, as he made his escape over the fence,
and learned how she promised to ‘spare him’; and that if not worried about
him, or asked to pledge herself, she should be ‘merciful,’ and not entangle
the boy in a hopeless passion.
He would have liked to have scoffed at the insolence of this speech, and
treated it as a trait of overweening vanity; he would have gladly accepted
her pity as a sort of challenge, and said, ‘Be it so; let us see who will
come safest out of this encounter,’ and yet he felt in his heart he could
not.
First of all, her beauty had really dazzled him, and the thousand graces
of a manner of which he had known nothing captivated and almost bewildered
him. He could not reply to her in the same tone he used to any other. If
he fetched her a book or a chair, he gave it with a sort of deference that
actually reacted on himself, and made him more gentle and more courteous,
for the time. ‘What would this influence end in making me?’ was his
question to himself. ‘Should I gain in sentiment or feeling? Should I have
higher and nobler aims? Should I be anything of that she herself described
so glowingly, or should I only sink to a weak desire to be her slave, and
ask for nothing better than some slight recognition of my devotion? I take
it that she would say the choice lay with _her_, and that I should be the
one or the other as she willed it, and though I would give much to believe
her wrong, my heart tells me that I cannot. I came down here resolved to
resist any influence she might attempt to have over me. Her likeness
showed me how beautiful she was, but it could not tell me the dangerous
fascination of her low liquid voice, her half-playful, half-melancholy
smile, and that bewitching walk, with all its stately grace, so that every
fold as she moves sends its own thrill of ecstasy. And now that I know all
these, see and feel them, I am told that to me they can bring no hope! That
I am too poor, too ignoble, too undistinguished, to raise my eyes to such
attraction. I am nothing, and must live and die nothing.
‘She is candid enough, at all events. There is no rhapsody about her when
she talks of poverty. She chronicles every stage of the misery, as though
she had felt them all; and how unlike it she looks! There is an almost
insolent well-being about her that puzzles me. She will not heed this, or
suffer that, because it looks mean. Is this the subtle worship she offers
Wealth, and is it thus she offers up her prayer to Fortune?
‘But why should she assume I must be her slave?’ cried he aloud, in a sort
of defiance. ‘I have shown her no such preference, nor made any advances
that would show I want to win her favour. Without denying that she is
beautiful, is it so certain it is the kind of beauty I admire? She has
scores of fascinations--I do not deny it; but should I say that I trust
her? And if I should trust her and love her too, where must it all end in?
I do not believe in her theory that love will transform a fellow of my
mould into a hero, not to say that I have my own doubt if she herself
believes it. I wonder if Kate reads her more clearly? Girls so often
understand each other by traits we have no clue to; and it was Kate who
asked her, almost in tone of entreaty, “to spare me,” to save me from a
hopeless passion, just as though I were some peasant-boy who had set his
affection on a princess. Is that the way, then, the world would read our
respective conditions? The son of a ruined house or the guest of a beggared
family leaves little to choose between! Kate--the world--would call my lot
the better of the two. The man’s chance is not irretrievable, at least such
is the theory. Those half-dozen fellows, who in a century or so contrive
to work their way up to something, make a sort of precedent, and tell the
others what they might be if they but knew how.
‘I’m not vain enough to suppose I am one of these, and it is quite plain
that she does not think me so.’ He pondered long over this thought, and
then suddenly cried aloud, ‘Is it possible she may read Joe Atlee in this
fashion? is that the stuff out of which she hopes to make a hero?’ There
was more bitterness in this thought than he had first imagined, and there
was that of jealousy in it too that pained him deeply.
Had she preferred either of the two Englishmen to himself, he could have
understood and, in a measure, accepted it. They were, as he called them,
‘swells.’ They might become, he knew not what. The career of the Saxon
in fortune was a thing incommensurable by Irish ideas; but Joe was like
himself, or in reality less than himself, in worldly advantages.
This pang of jealousy was very bitter; but still it served to stimulate him
and rouse him from a depression that was gaining fast upon him. It is true,
he remembered she had spoken slightingly of Joe Atlee. Called him noisy,
pretentious, even vulgar; snubbed him openly on more than one occasion, and
seemed to like to turn the laugh against him; but with all that she had
sung duets with him, corrected some Italian verses he wrote, and actually
made a little sketch in his note-book for him as a souvenir. A souvenir!
and of what? Not of the ridicule she had turned upon him! not the jest she
had made upon his boastfulness. Now which of these two did this argue: was
this levity, or was it falsehood? Was she so little mindful of honesty that
she would show these signs of favour to one she held most cheaply, or was
it that her distaste to this man was mere pretence, and only assumed to
deceive others.
After all, Joe Atlee was a nobody; flattery might call him an adventurer,
but he was not even so much. Amongst the men of the dangerous party he
mixed with he was careful never to compromise himself. He might write the
songs of rebellion, but he was little likely to tamper with treason itself.
So much he would tell her when he got back. Not angrily, nor passionately,
for that would betray him and disclose his jealousy, but in the tone of a
man revealing something he regretted--confessing to the blemish of one
he would have liked better to speak well of. There was not, he thought,
anything unfair in this. He was but warning her against a man who was
unworthy of her. Unworthy of her! What words could express the disparity
between them? Not but if she liked him--and this he said with a certain
bitterness--or thought she liked him, the disproportion already ceased to
exist.
Hour after hour of that long summer day he walked, revolving such thoughts
as these; all his conclusions tending to the one point, that _he_ was not
the easy victim she thought him, and that, come what might, _he_ should not
be offered up as a sacrifice to her worship of Joe Atlee.
‘There is nothing would gratify the fellow’s vanity,’ thought he, ‘like a
successful rivalry of him! Tell him he was preferred to me, and he would be
ready to fall down and worship whoever had made the choice.’
By dwelling on all the possible and impossible issues of such an
attachment, he had at length convinced himself of its existence, and even
more, persuaded himself to fancy it was something to be regretted and
grieved over for worldly considerations, but not in any way regarded as
personally unpleasant.
As he came in sight of home and saw a light in the small tower where Kate’s
bedroom lay, he determined he would go up to his sister and tell her so
much of his mind as he believed was finally settled, and in such a way as
would certainly lead her to repeat it to Nina.
‘Kate shall tell her that if I have left her suddenly and gone back
to Trinity to keep my term, I have not fled the field in a moment of
faint-heartedness. I do not deny her beauty. I do not disparage one of her
attractions, and she has scores of them. I will not even say that when I
have sat beside her, heard her low soft voice, and watched the tremor of
that lovely mouth vibrating with wit, or tremulous with feeling, I have
been all indifference; but this I will say, she shall not number _me_
amongst the victims of her fascinations; and when she counts the trinkets
on her wrist that record the hearts she has broken--a pastime I once
witnessed--not one of them shall record the initial of Dick Kearney.’
[Illustration: Kate, still dressed, had thrown herself on the bed, and was
sound asleep]
With these brave words he mounted the narrow stair and knocked at his
sister’s door. No answer coming, he knocked again, and after waiting a few
seconds, he slowly opened the door and saw that Kate, still dressed, had
thrown herself on her bed, and was sound asleep. The table was covered with
account-books and papers; tax-receipts, law-notices, and tenants’ letters
lay littered about, showing what had been the task she was last engaged on;
and her heavy breathing told the exhaustion which it had left behind it.
‘I wish I could help her with her work,’ muttered he to himself, as a pang
of self-reproach shot through him. This certainly should have been his own
task rather than hers; the question was, however, Could he have done it?
And this doubt increased as he looked over the long column of tenants’
names, whose holdings varied in every imaginable quantity of acres,
roods, and perches. Besides these there were innumerable small details of
allowances for this and compensation for that. This one had given so many
days’ horse-and-car hire at the bog; that other had got advances ‘in
seed-potatoes’; such a one had a claim for reduced rent, because the
mill-race had overflowed and deluged his wheat crop; such another had fed
two pigs of ‘the lord’s’ and fattened them, while himself and his own were
nigh starving.
Through an entire column there was not one case without its complication,
either in the shape of argument for increased liability or claim for
compensation. It was makeshift everywhere, and Dick could not but ask
himself whether any tenant on the estate really knew how far he was
hopelessly in debt or a solvent man? It only needed Peter Gill’s peculiar
mode of collecting the moneys due, and recording the payment by the notched
stick, to make the complication perfect; and there, indeed, upon the table,
amid accounts and bills and sale warrants, lay the memorable bits of wood
themselves, as that worthy steward had deposited them before quitting his
master’s service.
Peter’s character, too, written out in Kate’s hand, and only awaiting her
father’s signature, was on the table--the first intimation Dick Kearney had
that old Gill had quitted his post.
‘All this must have occurred to-day,’ thought Dick; ‘there were no
evidences of these changes when I left this morning! Was it the backwater
of my disgrace, I wonder, that has overwhelmed poor Gill?’ thought he, ‘or
can I detect Miss Betty’s fine Roman hand in this incident?’
In proportion to the little love he bore Miss O’Shea, were his convictions
the stronger that she was the cause of all mischief. She was one of those
who took very ‘utilitarian’ notions of his own career, and he bore her
small gratitude for the solicitude. There were short sentences in pencil
along the margin of the chief book in Kate’s handwriting which could not
fail to strike him as he read them, indicating as they did her difficulty,
if not utter incapacity, to deal with the condition of the estate. Thus:--
‘There is no warranty for this concession. It cannot be continued.’--‘The
notice in this case was duly served, and Gill knows that it was to papa’s
generosity they were indebted for remaining.’--‘These arrears have never
been paid, on that point I am positive!’--‘Malone’s holding was not
fairly measured, he has a just claim to compensation, and shall have
it.’--‘Hannigan’s right to tenancy must not be disputed, but cannot be used
as a precedent by others on the same part of the estate, and I will state
why.’--‘More of Peter Gill’s conciliatory policy! The Regans, for having
been twice in gaol, and once indicted, and nearly convicted of Ribbonism,
have established a claim to live rent-free! This I will promise to
rectify.’--‘I shall make no more allowances for improvements without a
guarantee, and a penalty besides on non-completion.’
And last of all came these ominous words:--
‘It will thus be seen that our rent-roll since ‘64 has been progressively
decreasing, and that we have only been able to supply our expenses by sales
of property. Dick must be spoken to on this, and at once.’
Several entries had been already rubbed out, and it was clear that she had
been occupied in the task of erasion on that very night. Poor girl! her
sleep was the heavy repose of one utterly exhausted; and her closely
clasped lips and corrugated brow showed in what frame of intense thought
she had sunk to rest. He closed the book noiselessly, as he looked at her,
replaced the various objects on the table, and rose to steal quietly away.
The accidental movement of a chair, however, startled her; she turned, and
leaning on her elbow, she saw him as he tried to move away. ‘Don’t go,
Dick, don’t go. I’m awake, and quite fresh again. Is it late?’
‘It’s not far from one o’clock,’ said he, half-roughly, to hide his
emotion; for her worn and wearied features struck him now more forcibly
than when she slept.
‘And are you only returned now? How hungry you must be. Poor fellow--have
you dined to-day?’
‘Yes; I got to Owen Molloy’s as they were straining the potatoes, and sat
down with them, and ate very heartily too.’
‘Weren’t they proud of it? Won’t they tell how the young lord shared their
meal with them?’
‘I don’t think they are as cordial as they used to be, Kate; they did not
talk so openly, nor seem at their ease, as I once knew them. And they did
one thing, significant enough in its way, that I did not like. They quoted
the county newspaper twice or thrice when we talked of the land.’
‘I am aware of that, Dick; they have got other counsellors than their
landlords now,’ said she mournfully, ‘and it is our own fault if they
have.’
‘What, are you turning Nationalist, Kitty?’ said he, laughing.
‘I was always a Nationalist in one sense,’ said she, ‘and mean to continue
so; but let us not get upon this theme. Do you know that Peter Gill has
left us?’
‘What, for America?’
‘No; for “O’Shea’s Barn.” Miss Betty has taken him. She came here to-day to
“have it out” with papa, as she said; and she has kept her word. Indeed,
not alone with him, but with all of us--even Nina did not escape.’
‘Insufferable old woman. What did she dare to say to Nina?’
‘She got off the cheapest of us all, Dick,’ said she, laughing. ‘It was
only some stupid remark she made her about looking like a boy, or being
dressed like a rope-dancer. A small civility of this sort was her share of
the general attention.’
‘And how did Nina take the insolence?’
‘With great good-temper, or good-breeding. I don’t know exactly which
covered the indifference she displayed, till Miss Betty, when taking her
leave, renewed the impertinence in the hall, by saying something about the
triumphant success such a costume would achieve in the circus, when Nina
curtsied, and said: “I am charmed to hear you say so, madam, and shall wear
it for my benefit; and if I could only secure the appearance of yourself
and your little groom, my triumph would be, indeed, complete.” I did not
dare to wait for more, but hurried out to affect to busy myself with the
saddle, and pretend that it was not tightly girthed.’
‘I’d have given twenty pounds, if I had it, to have seen the old woman’s
face. No one ever ventured before to pay her back with her own money.’
‘But I give you such a wrong version of it, Dick. I only convey the
coarseness of the rejoinder, and I can give you no idea of the ineffable
grace and delicacy which made her words sound like a humble apology. Her
eyelids drooped as she curtsied, and when she looked up again, in a way
that seemed humility itself, to have reproved her would have appeared
downright cruelty.’
‘She is a finished coquette,’ said he bitterly; ‘a finished coquette.’
Kate made no answer, though he evidently expected one; and after waiting a
while, he went on: ‘Not but her high accomplishments are clean thrown away
in such a place as this, and amongst such people. What chance of fitting
exercise have they with my father or myself? Or is it on Joe Atlee she
would try the range of her artillery?’
‘Not so very impossible this, after all,’ muttered Kate quietly.
‘What, and is it to _that_ her high ambitions tend? Is _he_ the prize she
would strive to win?’
‘I can be no guide to you in this matter, Dick. She makes no confidences
with me, and of myself I see nothing.’
‘You have, however, some influence over her.’
‘No; not much.’
‘I did not say much; but enough to induce her to yield to a strong
entreaty, as when, for instance, you implored her to spare your
brother--that poor fellow about to fall so hopelessly in love--’
‘I’m not sure that my request did not come too late after all,’ said she,
with a laughing malice in her eye.
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ retorted he, almost fiercely.
‘Oh, I never bargained for what you might do in a moment of passion or
resentment.’
‘There is neither one nor the other here. I am perfectly cool, calm, and
collected, and I tell you this, that whoever your pretty Greek friend is to
make a fool of, it shall not be Dick Kearney.’
‘It might be very nice fooling, all the same, Dick.’
‘I know--that is, I believe I know--what you mean. You have listened to
some of those high heroics she ascends to in showing what the exaltation
of a great passion can make of any man who has a breast capable of the
emotion, and you want to see the experiment tried in its least favourable
conditions--on a cold, soulless, selfish fellow of my own order; but, take
my word for it, Kate, it would prove a sheer loss of time to us both.
Whatever she might make of me, it would not be a _hero_; and whatever I
should strive for, it would not be her _love_.’
‘I don’t think I’d say that if I were a man.’
He made no answer to these words, but arose and walked the room with hasty
steps. ‘It was not about these things I came here to talk to you, Kitty,’
said he earnestly. ‘I had my head full of other things, and now I cannot
remember them. Only one occurs to me. Have you got any money? I mean a mere
trifle--enough to pay my fare to town?’
‘To be sure I have that much, Dick; but you are surely not going to leave
us?’
‘Yes. I suddenly remembered I must be up for the last day of term in
Trinity. Knocking about here--I’ll scarcely say amusing myself--I had
forgotten all about it. Atlee used to jog my memory on these things when he
was near me, and now, being away, I have contrived to let the whole escape
me. You can help me, however, with a few pounds?’
‘I have got five of my own, Dick; but if you want more--’
‘No, no; I’ll borrow the five of your own, and don’t blend it with more, or
I may cease to regard it as a debt of honour.’
‘And if you should, my poor dear Dick--’
‘I’d be only pretty much what I have ever been, but scarcely wish to be any
longer,’ and he added the last words in a whisper. ‘It’s only to be a brief
absence, Kitty,’ said he, kissing her; ‘so say good-bye for me to the
others, and that I shall be soon back again.’
‘Shall I kiss Nina for you, Dick?’
‘Do; and tell her that I gave you the same commission for Miss O’Shea, and
was grieved that both should have been done by deputy!’
And with this he hurried away.