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As if the strain on his memory to recal the precise words employed, and to bring back the whole scene, had been too much for him, or as though the emotions of the past had surged back to overwhelm him, the old peasant held his hand over his eyes, and sat several minutes without speaking.

“Did Luttrell come on the table, then?” asked Vyner.

“No, Sir; he was seen in court a short time before, but when he was called he couldn’t be found; nor from that day out was he ever seen in the streets of Castlebar. It was that sent him away to the island. His pride and his shame together.”

“You are less than just to my old friend,” said Vyner, warmly. “To know what he felt, to understand all the difficulties that he saw before him. you should be in his place as he was.”

“That’s as much as to say that I ought to be a gentleman before I condemned him,” said the old fellow, with a look of intense craftiness. “But the lawyer that defended me didn’t want to be a labourin’ man to explain what I felt, or what was passin’ in my heart. No, Sir, there’s things in the world that are just the same to the rich man as to the poor one, just as sickness and sorrow is. Get up, Kitty, we’re stayin’ too long here; it will be black night before we get home.”

“How many miles do you count it?”

“Twenty-one – long miles, too – the last four of them over shingle, and steep besides.”

“Shall I find an inn – well, shall I find shelter for the night?” said he, correcting himself.

“Shelter I could give you myself, but I’d rather you’d look for it anywhere else. I told you already why.”

“Well, I’m not afraid of your company, and, if you don’t dislike mine, we’ll travel together.”

The little girl said something with eagerness in Irish, and then turning to Vyner she took his hand, and said, “Yes, come with us.” And they set out.

CHAPTER XIII. THE PROJECT

It was on the evening of the second day after Vyner’s departure that Grenfell, never much given to anxieties about others, felt a certain uneasiness, and sauntered down the glen, wondering what might have detained him. He had not gone fully a mile, when he saw in the grey twilight a man approaching; he hailed, and was answered in his friend’s voice, “All right; it is I.”

“I was going to start the hue and cry, or whatever may represent that institution here, after you, Vyner. Where have you been all this time?”

“As to the where, my friend, it would require a very different tongue from yours and mine to say; Russian and Polish names are nothing in comparison. As to the how I have been, is easier to answer – never better; though with all due gratitude be it said, I have passed my time in rather questionable company.”

“At least they recognised the rights of hospitality?”

“Arabs themselves were never more punctilious. My host was the grandfather of our little friend the fairy queen, a man of nigh eighty, who had been tried on two capital charges, and ought, I suspect, to have been convicted on both. His friends, to the number of twenty odd, were all Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, or whatever other name includes lawbreakers of the first magnitude; and one, as handsome and frank-featured a young fellow as ever you saw, who accompanied me to the lake side this evening, had made his escape from Castlebar gaol when under sentence of death, and actually went back to the town to witness the execution of his cousins on the following Saturday, it being, as he said, the only mark of affection he was able to show them.”

“I make you my compliment, as the French say, on your company. And the women, what were they like?”

“I saw but two: an old hag that was brought down special to give an opinion upon me from external traits, and pronounce whether I had the colour of hair or eyes that indicated a tendency to bear witness against my neighbour; the other was a sickly creature, bedridden though in the prime of life, mother of little Katherine.”

“But explain how you could have prolonged your stay amongst such people. What were you doing? what were you saying?”

“Doing? The whole day we walked the mountains. They led me by paths known only to themselves over an immense mountain district, showing me all that was noteworthy, and pointing out effects of scenery and picturesque spots with a feeling and taste that amazed me. They used no cant of art, none of that tricky phraseology, it is true, which we accept as the vernacular of all landscape description; but in their wild imagery and reckless imagination they gave names to the places which showed how deeply objects of terror or beauty had appealed to them. Then at nightfall we gathered close to the turf fire and the potato ‘kish,’ a wide, open basket, which served as strainer and dish together. There we supped, talked politics, religion, law, and a little literature – at least so far as the Life of Freeny and the story of Moll Flanders enter into biographical letters.”

“How I should like to have drawn a cordon of policemen round the party and netted the whole.”

“You might like to have planned the campaign, but I’ll be sworn if you had been favoured with a look at the company you’d never have led the expedition.”

“What a traveller’s knack it is to exaggerate the war-paint of one’s Indian friends,” said Grenfell, superciliously. “But here we are with our supper waiting for us, and even Mr. ‘O’Rorke’s noble feast’ will contrast favourably with your host’s.”

The meal ended, they seated themselves on the door-sill, looking out into the still and starry night, and resumed the theme they were discussing.

“I take it that you said you were a mere tourist rambling for pleasure?” asked Grenfell.

“No, I told them I had come down to see the country, with some intentions to make a purchase. It was not so easy to explain that I was more eager to acquire a very beautiful and picturesque tract than a very remunerative one, but they believed me at last – that is, they gave credit to my sincerity at the cost of my shrewdness.” Grenfell nodded, as though he agreed with them, and Vyner went on: “We were a full house when I made my declaration – there were, I should say, six or seven-and-twenty present – and they concurred in applauding the frankness with which I spoke to them. A very old man, a venerable figure, whose high forehead and white beard would have impressed me, perhaps, more reverentially if I had not been told that he had been flogged by John Beresford, in the year ‘98, for some cruel outrage he had committed – this apart – he, however, complimented me highly on my straightforwardness, and said that if others would do like me there would be fewer disturbances about land; and the illustration he used was this: ‘If you go into a fair to buy a horse, and you see a splendid animal, strong-boned, well-ribbed, and powerful, with every promise of speed and strength; – you are as well satisfied with his price as with his perfections, but do your inquiries stop there? – not a bit of it. You know well that he may be a capital hunter and a noble roadster, but you want to learn what his temper is. All his fine qualities depend upon this, for if he be unruly and unmanageable, to what purpose is his power or his activity? It is precisely the same with a property: you may have wood and water, arable land and lay, mines and meadows, and, with all these, there may be a “temper” that renders them worthless. Landlords won’t believe this; buyers won’t listen to it. They say, “Make out my title clear and clean, and leave me to deal with it.” Men with money in the bank, and who, because they can live anywhere, are chained to nowhere, cannot understand the love of a poor labouring man to some mud-hovel or some shealing, to a brook where he has paddled in boyhood, to the mountain that he has seen from his earliest infancy. They do not, cannot, conceive why poverty should sharpen any susceptibilities – poverty, that can blunt so many – and they say, “Turn him out. I’ll find a place for him elsewhere.” But that’s a mistake; you might as well say you’d replace the child he has followed to the churchyard. The man, in the very proportion of his destitution, has bound up his heart with some half-dozen little objects that have, from time and long usage, grown to be part of him. The monotony that wearies the rich man is the luxury of the poor. To live where their fathers lived, to see an unchanged world around them, to have few contrasts of the present with the past, is their paradise – ‘”

“Where did you get all this?” broke in Grenfell. “From your friend of the cat-o’-nine-tails?”

“Exactly. The words of wisdom were all his own, and, unlike the fate of most wisdom, it was listened to. He showed me, in fact, that though the Law might give possession, it would not ensure me one of the rights of property: I might own, but not enjoy; I might have and hold, but neither sow nor reap; I might walk over and shoot over, but with no privilege to keep any other from doing the same, and that before I thought of preserving the game, I should take some measures about preserving myself. The man who enunciated these principles – for they were principles – declared them calmly and dispassionately, not as sentiments that conveyed anger or passion; far from it – he felt all the dignity of a sage instructing ignorance. He was a great Saquem delivering the laws of his tribe, and showing what had been their guides and directors for centuries. I did, indeed, once, only once, venture upon a mild remonstrance, that there were some things which a landlord possessed for the betterment of those under him; that he might assist them in many ways, and be the means of their advancement and prosperity; but he demurred to this, and so did his followers. Their experience, they said, did not confirm this: as a class, they had found landlords narrow-minded and selfish, very ignorant of the people, and very indifferent to them. They opined that, as an institution, landlordism had not succeeded, and half hinted that it was a Saxon innovation that was brought over in days of violence and oppression, and did not suit the conditions of the country at present.”

“And you listened to these rascals coolly propounding such doctrines?”

“Yes; and so would you have done too, had you been in my place, my dear George! A minority is never very truculent when the majority could pitch it over a cliff without the slightest risk of being called to account for it.”

“It would have pushed my patience hard, though.” “It would have been your prudence, and not your patience, that you’d have consulted.”

“Well, I’ll not quarrel with the rogues if they have disabused you as to the pleasures of Irish proprietorship; they’ve done you a good service, but, I must say, I think their case a more hopeless one, now that I see lawlessness is a system.”

“I don’t think you would if you talked with them! They were too argumentative not to be open to conviction; too logical, with all their prejudices, not to be approachable by reason. I was, all the time we were talking, so impressed with this, that I could not help imagining what a race so quick-sighted and intelligent might become when educated and instructed. Take my word for it, George, Hodge will have no chance against Paddy if he ever get book-learning.” A mocking laugh was Grenfell’s answer.

“So satisfied am I of the truth of what I say, that I’m going to give a proof of it.”

“What, going to set up a school in the wilds of Donegal!” “No. I’m going to carry away that pretty child, and educate her with Ada.”

“You’ll not do anything so foolish, I trust!” “It is all settled, the conditions arranged, the terms agreed to. I have given her grandfather ten pounds for her outfit, some few things she needed, and as much more to pay their journey over to Wales, for the old fellow, with a caution that was creditable to him, wished to see the ladies to whom his child was to be confided, and confer a little with them besides.”

“All your scheme for the property was absolute wisdom compared with this!” “How so?”

“Where everything is so absurd one cannot decide what to ridicule. Suppose you succeed – and it is what I by no means grant – what will you do with her? You’ll give her the tastes, the accomplishments, and the habits of a lady – to marry her to your gamekeeper or your gardener. You’ll turn her brain with ten years of luxury – to make the whole of her after life a dreary servitude. You’ll excite ambition, whose very least evil will be bitter disappointment; and for what? To gratify a caprice, to paint the moral of a vapid theory about Irish intelligence. No, no, Vyner, don’t make such a blunder as this, and a serious blunder too; for, amongst other pleasant contingencies, Paddy MacHackaway is sure to call you to account some fine day: why you dared to do this, or omitted to do that; and with all your respect for his reasoning qualities, he sometimes expresses his sentiments with a bludgeon.”

“The thing is done, George, if you were to rail at it for a week. It is done, and cannot be undone, even if I wished it.”

“But why not? What is easier than to send for this old rascal who has so over-blarneyed you, and compromise the matter? A couple more of those crisp ten-pounders that I must say you displayed before these creatures with an unpardonable rashness – ”

“Be it so,” broke in Vyner. “But let me tell you that they saw my pocket-book full of them; they saw on the window-seat, where by chance I had left it, a purse heavy with gold, and yet these poor fellows were proof against the temptations; and it was the gaol-breaker himself who carried my knapsack on my way back, which contained, as he knew, both purse and pocket-book; so that against their honesty I’ll not listen to a word.”

“Let them have all the virtues under the sun if you will; call them all Arcadians. All I ask is that we should have no dealings with them. Send off O’Rorke; let him bring this old fellow before me, and I’ll answer for it that I settle the question at once.”

“No, no; my word is pledged, and I’ll not break it.”

“I don’t ask you to break it. What I propose is, that you should be released from a very ill-judged contract, certain to turn out ill to all it includes. Let me at least try if what I suggest is not practicable.”

“If the negotiation were to be carried on with men of your own rank and condition, Grenfell, there is not any one to whom I would with, more confidence confide it; but forgive me if I say that you’re not the man to deal with these people.”

“Why not?”

“For a number of reasons. First of all, you are strongly prejudiced against them; you are disposed to regard them as something little better than savages – ”

“Pardon me, there you are wrong – as not one whit better.”

“That’s enough, then; you shall be no envoy to them from me.”

“Well, I’ll knock under; I’ll agree to your high estimate of them, intellectually and morally, only with that detractive element of poverty which makes even clever men submissive, and occasionally squeezes conscience into a compromise. You tell me they are very amenable to reason; let me see if I agree with you. You assure me that with all their seeming impulsiveness and headlong rashness they are eminently calculating and forecasting. I want to see this. Bethink you what a grand witness I shall be to the truth of your theory when I am converted. Come, consent to send for this old fellow; make any pretext you please for seeing him, so that I may have a quarter of an hour’s talk with him.”

“To what end? You could scarcely address to him the arguments you have just used to me – ”

“Leave that to my discretion. I suspect, Vyner – mind, it is mere suspicion – but I suspect that your Celtic friend will be far more practical and business-like in his dealings with me than with you; that his shrewdness will show him that I am a common-place man of the world, not caring, nor indeed believing, in any great regeneration for Ireland, and that all our intercourse must take the shape of a bargain.”

“I consent,” said Vyner; “but, I own, less from choice than necessity, for time presses, and I find by a note I have just received that M’Kinlay, my man of business, has arrived at Westport, and whatever we decide on must be done at once.”

“If I’m not very much mistaken, Vyner, my negotiation will not take ten minutes, and perhaps as many pounds, so that you may order whatever it be that is to carry us hence, and I’ll guarantee to be ready.”

While Vyner hastened to give the necessary orders, Grenfell opened his writing-desk, from which he took some bank-notes and gold, and thrust them together in his pocket.

CHAPTER XIV. A DISCUSSION

“When that old man comes,” said Grenfell – “Malone, I think, is the name – let him come in here. I want to speak to him.”

“He’s outside now, before the door,” said O’Rorke, whose prying looks showed how eager he felt to know what might be the subject of their conversation.

“Does he hold any land in this neighbourhood?”

“He’s like the rest,” replied the other, half sullenly; “he lives where he can, and how he can.”

“What you would call a squatter?” said the Englishman, who smiled at his own sharpness in employing the word.

“What I wouldn’t call any such thing,” replied O’Rorke, firmly. “No more than I’d say it was squatting to sit down on my own hearthstone.”

“Which, perhaps, wouldn’t be your own, my good friend, if you were merely a tenant, and not a solvent one.”

“You may talk that way up in Leinster, or some of the counties that border on Leinster; but I tell you that you know mighty little of Ireland if you think that what your newspapers call the ‘Great name of England’ terrifies any one down here. Just try it. It’s about fifty miles from this to the Land’s End, and I’ll give you all that distance to find ten, no, but five men, that you’ll frighten by the threat of British law or British vengeance – which is about the same thing.”

“I’m sorry to hear it; that is to say, I should be sorry it was true.”

“Well, if you mean to deny, why don’t you prove it? What’s easier than to tell the carman we’re not going to Westport, we’re going up through Donegal to count the people that’s in love with the British rule in Ireland! You shake your head. I don’t wonder, indeed; no shame to you, that you wouldn’t like the journey. But I’ll tell you what you can do instead of it,” said he, with a firm and steady voice.

“What’s that?”

“Leave sixpence here, in my hands, and it will treat every well-wisher of England from this to the Giant’s Causeway! Isn’t that a fine investment for you?”

Grenfel’s face flashed, his brow darkened, and he tarned to hurl a stern reproof to this insolence; but he saw in the elated look of the other all the delight of one who was gradually drawing an adversary into the lists, and to a combat in which practice had given him a certain dexterity.

Determined, at all events, to foil this design, the Englishman affected indifference, looked at his watch, turned over some papers that lay on the table, and then carelessly said, “Send in Malone here.”

With the dogged air of one disappointed and baffled in his designs, O’Rorke left the room, and soon after the old man entered, stroking down his white hair as he came forward, and making his reverences with a strange mixture of servility and defiance.

“Your name is Malone?” said Grenfell.

“Peter Malone, Sir.”

“Come nearer, Malone. I have heard a good deal about you from my friend, whom you treated so hospitably up in the mountains, and he has also spoken to me of a sort of plan – I won’t call it a very wise one – that he struck out the other night, and which, it appears, you agreed to, about your granddaughter.” He paused, hoping that the peasant would speak, but the old man simply bent his two dark and piercing eyes on him, and nodded. Grenfell went on: “I have pointed out to him some, though very far from all, of the inconveniences of the scheme, and I have asked his leave to point them out to you, and from what he has told me of your good sense and clear-headedness, I suspect I shall not have undertaken my task in vain.”

“Does he mean that he wants to go back of it?” asked Malone, with a calm and resolute look.

“Listen to me patiently, and you shall hear all.” It is not necessary I should weary my reader with a sermon where the text conveys so much. The chief burden of Grenfell’s argument was what he had addressed to Vyner; and upon this he expanded freely, laying much stress on the misfortune that must accrue to any young girl raised to a temporary elevation, from which she must come down to meet a life of perhaps privation and hardship. He pictured an existence of luxury on the one hand, and of poverty on the other, and asked what right had any one to expose another to such extremes – what preparation could ease and indulgence be to a life of toil and suffering? “How were the acquirements of the one to be made applicable to the other? – how,” he asked, “is the young lady – for she will have become a young lady – to change at once to the condition of the ill-fed, ill-dressed, hard-worked country girl?”

Had the orator only glanced as he spoke at the features of the listener, he would have seen what a lamentable blunder his rhetoric had made. At the mention of the words “young lady,” the whole expression of the old man’s face altered; his half-sullen obduracy, his rugged sternness, disappeared, his eyes lighted up; his lips parted, his nostrils dilated, and his whole face beamed with a joy that was positively triumphant. “Go on, Sir! – go on!” he cried, as though he yearned for a perfect picture of what imagination had but sketched an outline.

“You cannot mean, my good man,” said Grenfell, hastily, “that you would think it any benefit to be placed where you couldn’t remain? – to stand at a height where you couldn’t balance yourself? It’s not enough that people can dress well, and talk well, and look well; they must have, besides, the means to do all these, day after day, without an effort, without as much as a care or a thought about them. Do you understand me?”

“Sure, people wasn’t born ladies and gentlemen from the beginnin’ of the world?”

“No; great families took their rise in great actions. Some by courage, some by cleverness, some by skill, and some by great industry.”

“Just so!” broke in the old man. “There was always some one to begin it, and likely enough too in a mighty small way. Dare I ax your honour a question?”

“Ask freely, my good fellow.”

“Though I suppose your honour will have to go back very far, can you tell me what was the first of your own great family?”

From the purpose-like energy of the old peasant’s manner, and the steady and penetrating look of his bright eyes, Grenfell felt certain that the man had been prompted to put this insult upon him, and in a voice broken by passion, he said:

“You’ll gain very little by insolence, old man! With my family you have nothing to do; they were in no wise connected with yours.”

“Be gorra! I knew it,” cried the peasant, slapping his thigh with his hand. “I’d have taken my oath of it. I was as sure of it as I was of my skin that you were not a born gentleman. You may be as rich as you please, and have houses, and lands, and cows, and hones, but there’s not a dhrop of the real blood in your body! I said it the first minute I looked at you, and I say it again.”

Pale and quivering with anger, Grenfell could not utter a word. The savage violence of the peasant came on him so much by surprise, that he was actually overwhelmed by it; and though he darted on the old fellow a look of fury, he turned away without speaking, and entered the house.

Vyner had just received tidings that Mr. M’Kinlay had arrived at Westport to await his instructions, and he was writing a honied line to despatch by the messenger, to say, that he would return there on the morrow, when Grenfell entered, and threw himself into a chair.

“I have met with ruffianism in most shapes, Vyner,” cried he, “but so insolent a scoundrel as that yonder never came across me before.”

“Insolent! Is it possible? What pretext could he have for insolence?”

“I know well, with your infatuation for these people, what a hopeless task it would be to persuade you that they were not miracles of good manners, as well as of loyalty and good conduct. I am quite prepared to hear that I mistook, or misunderstood – that, in short, what I fancied was insult was Irish naïveté.”

“But tell me what passed between you; what he said.”

“I will not.”

“Will you not let me judge of what you accuse him?”

“I will not; nay, more, I make it a charge upon you, as you desire our friendship to continue, that not only you never interrogate me on this matter, but that you neither question nor permit that man to be questioned upon it. Such a fellow should have as small a place in one’s memory as in one’s esteem, and I’d rather forget him.”

“Tell me, at least, what have you done in the negotiation?”

“Nothing. He opines that you have given him a pledge, to which as a gentleman you are bound, and as he sees neither peril nor inconvenience to result from converting a peasant child into a mock young lady, I suppose you have no choice, but must carry out your fine project with all the success it deserves.”

“I wish you would let me know what passed between you. If there was any intentional offence I’d certainly not overlook it.”

“I’ll tell you nothing.”

“Shall he ask your pardon?”

“‘He may; but he shall never have it.”

“You are provoking, George, I must say. You are not just to either of us; for certainly if I were convinced that you were aggrieved to the extent you suppose – ”

“I tell you once again, and for the last time, I will not discuss it; and as you have promised me not to open the matter with this fellow, it may be forgotten at once.”

“You really wish this?”

“I insist upon it.”

“That is sufficient.” Vyner took out his pocket-book, and walked to the door. “Malone,” cried he; and the old man came forward bareheaded and respectful, without a shade of passion on his face. “Malone, I am not so fully assured as I felt last night when I first proposed it, that my plan for your grandchild would be a wise one; at least, reflection has shown me some difficulties about it – ”

“Just tell me, Sir, do you want to draw back?” said the old man, resolutely, but respectfully.

“It would be better that you heard me out,” said Vyner, severely. “I am willing to do all that I offered – ”

“That will do, Sir. I never doubted the word of a real gentleman.”

“I was going to say, that if, instead of taking your child from you, you preferred that I should settle a certain sum of money on her, to be her marriage portion – ”

“No, Sir; no, Sir. What you offered or nothing. Make her a lady, as you said you would, or leave her where she is.”

“I think, my good man, you suffer your hot blood to get the better of your judgment occasionally, and it would be as well if you would give yourself some more time for reflection.”

“My blood is just as God gave it to me, neither hotter nor colder; and what I say now, I’d say to-morrow. Keep your word, or break it, whichever you plaze!”

“I can very well understand how my friend – ” Vyner stopped himself in time, and, after a second’s pause, proceeded: “You hold me, then, to my bargain?”

“How can I hould you? You may hould yourself, but I can’t hould you!”

Vyner’s cheek flushed, partly with anger, partly with shame, and he said: “With this you will buy what clothes your grandchild will require at present. Do not spend more of it than you like, for these things shall be looked to by others; and this will pay the cost of your journey. I have written down the way you are to go, and also the name and place of my house. My present intention is to be at home within a fortnight; but if you arrive before that, you will be equally welcome.”

“Very well, Sir,” said the old man, as he deposited the bank-notes in a leather purse. “I may go now?”

“Yes, you may go. Remember, however, Malone, that if between this and next Thursday week, you are inclined to think that my last offer is a better one – ”

“No fear of that, your honour!” broke in the old man, with a laugh. “I’m a poor man and an ignorant man, but I know what’s best for the stock I come from. It isn’t money we want. It’s the place where we can make money, and more than money;” and with a jerk of his frieze coat over his shoulder, the old fellow strode away down the valley.