HIS IRISH COUSINS.
Mr. Eugene Percival was seated in the dining-room of the Garrick Club, London, engaged in discussing a quiet little dinner consisting of a plate of real turtle, a red mullet, and a pin-tailed duck, preparatory to turning into Covent Garden to hear Titiens in Semiramide, when a servant approached him, bearing two letters upon a silver salver.
“Irish mail, sir.”
“For me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Percival quietly finished his glass of pale sherry and ordered a clean plate ere he troubled himself about his Hibernian correspondence.
“Irish letters!” he murmured. “Who could write to me from that out-of-the-world country? Jack Hotham, possibly. His regiment is quartered on some solid bit of bog called the Curragh.” He leisurely took up the nearest epistle. “A woman’s hand, by Jove! And such a hand. How she does scatter the ink! Place aux dames. Now, madam, I am prepared for the worst.” And throwing himself back in his chair, he proceeded to open the envelope. The letter ran as follows:
“Ballybo, Co. Mayo, June 1, 187-.
“Dear Cousin: A very nice young man, who says he is intimate with you, has been stopping here for a few days for the salmon-fishing. By the merest accident your name came on the tapis, and I immediately claimed you as a kinsman, my mother and your father having been second cousins. As kinsfolk should at least become acquainted with one another, I take this opportunity of letting you know that my eldest boy, Charley, and his sister Geraldine, are going to visit London next week, when any attention you can show them will be most gratefully received by your affectionate cousin,
“Martha Mary Grace Devereux.
“P. S. They will stop at the Charing Cross Hotel. Charley is twenty-three and Geraldine four years younger.”
“Of all the cool epistles I ever read this is the coolest,” muttered Percival, holding the letter at arm’s length, as though it were combustible. “I never heard of Martha Mary Grace Devereux before. I have no relations in Ireland. The idea of having a hulking savage with a brogue that would peel a potato, and dressed like a navvy, and an awkward, dowdy, gawky girl, thrust upon me is rather too good. No, no, my Irish friends. I respect you at Bally—Bally-what-you-may-call-it, but in Piccadilly not quite.” Here he commenced his ripe Stilton. “The idea of my being seen in Mayfair with—Pshaw! it’s too good.” He turned the second letter over with his knife.
“A school-boy’s hand. I suppose this is from Charley, with a modest demand for a box at the opera for himself and his sister for every night during their stay, seats on one of the Four-in-hand Club coaches, tickets for the Zoo for Sunday, invitations to swell balls. I know what Irish cousins mean, and, per Bacco! I’ll keep the Channel rolling between us. Let’s see what Charley says. A monogram, C. D. Gorgeous! Who’d have thought of so much civilization in Mayo—wherever that may be?”
“Ballybo.
“Mr. Charley Devereux’ compliments to Mr. Percival”—that’s civil at any rate—“and begs to say that in order to oblige his mother”—whose mother? My poor mother died when I was toothless—“he writes this note. Mr. C. D. doesn’t believe in bothering people who don’t care about him”—come, now, this is a sensible lad—“and he doesn’t care for people whom he doesn’t know”—sensible again. “If Mr. Percival wants to see Mr. C. D., he will find him at the Charing Cross Hotel on and after Monday next.”
“I say, Minniver, just come over and take your Lafitte here. I have such a bon bouche for you!” said Percival, addressing a gentleman seated at a neighboring table.
“What’s the row?” demanded Mr. Minniver, a tall, aristocratic man, whose hair was parted in the centre and whose eye-glass was the sole occupation of his life.
“Two letters from Ireland.”
“No!”
“Fact.”
“Take my glawss and decanter over to Mr. Percival’s table,” said Mr. Minniver, addressing a waiter.
“Shall I read ’em to you, Minniver?”
“Are they in Irish?”
“Oh! dear, no.”
“Then let me have the two barrels.”
“Congratulate me, old fellow.”
“On what?”
“I have been claimed by Irish cousins.”
“What a nuisance!” observed Mr. Minniver in a tone of intense disgust, and letting his eye-glass fall on the table with a click, whilst he took a sip of the rich, tawny wine.
“That’s not enough. To claim me does not fill their cup of happiness. They are coming over to see me.”
“By Jove!” wiping the glass carefully and screwing it hard into the corner of his eye.
“Yes. Just read this letter. This is the one that claims me, that takes me into the fold, and here’s another that repudiates me.”
“That’s a very extraordinary document, Percival,” observed Mr. Minniver with an owl-like glance, solemn, important, but vacant withal.
“Read this now; it’s from Charley.”
“Why, this ought to be framed and glazed. How old Thackeray would have chuckled over this in the smoking-room! You must let us have it in the smoking-room; the fellows are infernally dull just now.”
“Take both, my dear boy.”
“Thanks. What are you going to do?”
“Preserve a masterly inactivity.”
“You’ll reply?”
“I think not.”
“Drop a pasteboard at the Cross?”
“Cards are expensive luxuries just now. You forget it’s the height of the season, Minniver!”
“Then you’ll let it sink?”
“Most unquestionably.”
“I s’pose you’re right.”
“Well, rather. I can stand a good deal but Irish cousins. As the Princess Huncomun says in ‘Tom Thumb,’ ‘I shudder at the gross idea.’”
“It would never do, Percival—never, never.” And wagging his empty head sagaciously, Mr. Minniver again dipped his beak in the juice of the grape.
Mr. Eugene Percival is a swell of the first water; a bureaucrat in the most exalted sense of the term; a clerk in the Foreign Office, with expectations of a third secretaryship at no distant date. His mother, an heiress, died in giving him birth; his father, a captain in the Seventeenth Lancers, fell in the bloody ride of death at Balaklava. A guardian took possession of the boy, and, having placed him at Eton, later on transplanted him to Cambridge, where he took a degree, making a fair fight for honors. The failure of the banking firm of Overend & Gurney, of Lombard Street, deprived Percival of over half his property, and then he resolved upon work.
“I cannot live upon fifteen hundred a year and idleness,” he said.
“I could live, and live well, on a hundred a year with work.”
Through the influence of no less a personage than Benjamin Disraeli he was installed at the Foreign Office at a nominal salary, and the evening upon which this story opens he was twenty-five years of age, five feet eight inches in height, with yellow hair closely cropped, as is the fashion amongst the golden youth of the present hour, his eyes dark blue, his nose a delicate aquiline, his mouth and teeth unexceptionable, and the whole man bearing the unmistakable stamp of gentleman.
A few days subsequent to the receipt of his Irish letters Mr. Eugene Percival strolled from the Garrick into Covent Garden Market, but little altered in its appearance since the days when Sam Johnson and Topham Beauclerk went on a rouse amongst the vegetable wagons, and at unhallowed hours, as the worthy lexicographer subsequently—and sorrowfully—admitted.
Taking the central arcade, the bureaucrat stopped to admire bouquets that would have brought tears of envy into the pretty eyes of Mlle. Louise of the Marché aux Fleurs, so fearfully and wonderfully were they made up, so delicious in their harmonies, such veritable tone-poems in their lustrous yet satisfying effects. Stepping into a flower-shop, he invested in a two-shilling moss rosebud reclining upon the petals of a sprig of stefanotis, attached to his coat by a young lady who addressed him by name.
“Mr. Pommery ‘as just been ’ere, Mr. Percival.”
“What! another bunch of violets?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied with a saucy laugh.
“Why, he must be spending a small fortune.”
“These wiolets come from Algiers.”
“And he sends a bunch every day?”
“Every day, sir.”
“And you are sworn to secrecy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you won’t tell to whom those violets go?”
“Not for anything.”
“Where do they go?”
The young lady shook her head.
“It is refreshing,” laughed Percival as he quitted the shop, “to find one woman who can keep a secret.”
He strolled down the arcade, gazing at the flowers and fruits, and the bizarre crowd that gently surged hither and thither, from the costermonger who came for his salad and radishes, to the “Dook” who sought his five-guinea bouquet; from the weedy-looking woman, smelling horribly of gin, who shelled peas, to the countess in search of an orchid to make up her priceless collection.
He was standing opposite a window wherein lay exposed a basket of Belle Angevine pears labelled “£30 a dozen,” when a hand was laid on his shoulder and a cheery voice exclaimed:
“Not thinking of that lot, Percival?”
“Not quite, Pommery. They’re a cut above me. My buying price is sixpence, and I falter at anything above that lordly sum.”
“They’re not much, these Angevines. I had a cut into one last night at a little dinner Baby Bowles gave six of us at the Star and Garter—a pre-marital affair.”
“Pre-marital! Has the Baby surrendered at discretion?”
“He has surrendered, which says little for his discretion.”
“Pauvre garçon! By the way, you’ve been away, Pommery?”
“Yaas.”
“Whither?”
“Guess.”
“Norway, after the salmon?”
“No.”
“Monaco, after Rouge et Noir?”
“No.”
“Paris, after a good dinner?”
“You’d never guess. Hold on to your umbrella now, Percival, for I’m about to startle you. I’ve been in Ireland.”
“Never!”
“A fact, I assure you.”
“And you’re alive to tell the tale?”
“Ireland is not bad quarters, I can tell you. I was capitally fed. I had a game of Polo in the Phœnix Park—and that is a park. I had as good a rubber at the Kildare Street Club as ever I played at the Raleigh. I saw some very fit soldiering at the Curragh of Kildare. I landed my thirty-seven-pound salmon from a river with an impossible name in Connemara. I took to Connemara con amore—excuse the pun, it’s rather early. And I’ll let you into a secret, Percival: I mean to return for the grouse on the 20th of August.”
“Apropos of Ireland, get Minniver to show you two letters I received last week from some people calling themselves my cousins; they are the richest things in town. They have had nothing in the smoking-room of the Garrick so good since the night old Fladgate told Thackeray that, in order to render his lectures on the Four Georges a success, he should hire a piano.”
Jack Pommery is a clever, hard-working young barrister—a coming man. He was senior wrangler of his year at Cambridge, and carried off one or two “big things.” He rowed in the ‘varsity eight and boxed like a prize-fighter. Pommery, while he believes in work, stoutly maintains that the brain can only do a certain amount of it, and under cover of this theory casts aside wig and gown for a run with the Pytchley, a pull on the Thames, a breezer in the Channel under double reefs, a month on the moors—in a word, he goes in for what Micky Free termed “hapes o’ divarshin.”
“I’ve just seen your fleuriste, Jack. She still keeps the key of the blue chamber.”
“She’ll not sell me.”
“And you won’t let me into the secret—you won’t divulge the name of the violet lady?”
“Some day.”
“Some day is no day.”
“It’s a caprice, Percival. Every clever man has a caprice.”
“Bravo! Let me hear you blow that trumpet again. Why, the guard of the Windsor Coach doesn’t use his yard of tin with greater effect,” laughed Percival.
“Bah! chaff! The story is very simple. It is idyllic. I meet a girl, no matter where. She has violet eyes. She is as modest as a violet. Qui me cherche me trouve is her motto—a true woman’s motto, my man. I went spooney on her. I am spoons still. I told her that until I met her again I would send her a bunch of violets every day. I send the bunch of violets every day, et voilà tout!”
“Very pretty and sentimental, ’pon honor—worthy of being written by Wilkie Collins and set to music by Arthur Sullivan. I won’t press you on the subject, Jack, but I’ll tell you what I will press you to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Come back to the Garrick and have a steak—one of our famous fat slugs of beef that Thackeray revelled over after his favorite dish of tripe.”
“Try a chop at the Albion with me. It’s a real English chop-house, a tavern in the best sense of the good old English word. We’ll be sure to meet some queer people there. The theatrical stars most do congregate within its precincts. Toole, Irving, Barry Sullivan haunt it when not ‘on circuit.’ Confound their impudence in appropriating the pet terms of my honorable profession!”
“Have at thy chops, slave!” cried Percival melodramatically as they passed along through groves of cabbages, batteries of turnips, golden vistas of carrots, groups of women engaged in shelling peas.
The two entered the tavern, and, having seated themselves in a sort of loose box constructed of black oak, with a table set in the middle, Pommery gave the order to a waiter whose pronounced accent bespoke an intimate acquaintance with the road that leads from the Upper Lake at Killarney to Gougawn Barra. He was an honest-looking, open-faced, elderly man, civil without being servile, and the possessor of a twinkle in the corner of his eye that proclaimed the land of his nativity equally with his unctuous and oily brogue.
A loud rapping on the table in the next compartment made itself heard, while an authoritative voice called:
“Has that sheep been caught yet?”
“It’s on the fire, sir,” responded the waiter.
“I suppose you intend that as a sample of Irish wit.” This said with a sneer.
“Troth, mebbe it’s good enough for—” and the man checked himself.
“Let me have none of your impertinence, fellow. You Irish require to be kept under heel, every one of you.”
“Do we?”
“You do, and it takes an Englishman to do it.”
“See that, now,” said the waiter, angrily brushing the table, and by a vigorous effort keeping back the fierce retort that was on the leap in his heart.
“Get me my chop.”
“I’ll get it, never fear,” hurrying away.
Percival and his companion overheard this dialogue.
“If I were that waiter,” exclaimed Pommery, “I’d chuck the chop at that insolent fellow’s head.”
“What can the poor wretch do? He’s paid for this sort of thing.”
“He’s not paid to be insulted by a man who, the chances are, considers himself a gentleman.”
“It’s very bad form.”
The waiter returned with the autocrat’s luncheon.
“How dare you bring me a chop cooked in this way? Do you imagine I am in an Irish pig-sty? Send me an English waiter.”
At this moment a tall, awkward-looking youth, attired in a home-spun suit of gray frieze, ill-fitting if not shabby, slowly arose from a table right opposite, and, lounging over, quietly asked:
“Will I do?”
“Do what, sir?” demanded the irate Saxon.
“Wait on you.”
“Wait on me? You are not a waiter.”
“I am an Irishman; perhaps I might be able to please you better than my countryman.”
Pommery leaned over to Percival:
“There’s some fun here.”
“There’s danger,” was the reply.
The bully stared very hard at the young Irishman, surveying him from head to foot.
“I don’t want you,” he growled.
“Oh! you don’t,” still in the same calm tone.
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“You’ve had your answer, my gentleman. Go back to your luncheon.”
“Not for one moment. I’ve not quite done with you yet. I have heard your observations to this helpless old man”—his voice quivering, his eye flashing—“your brutal insolence.”
“Sir!” starting as if he had been stung.
“Your ruffianly comments,” continued the other. “You knew that your eighteen pence was your armor, and that you could insult both him and his country with impunity. Now, my good fellow, I am an Irishman, and, only that I happen to be in a very particular hurry, I’d compel you to eat that chop.”
“What do you mean, sir?” he gasped.
“Precisely what I say,” replied the other.
“How dare—”
“See here, now, my good fellow, keep your hectoring for helpless waiters and feeble women. I come from a country where the word dare reaps a crop of broken bones. I know you and your mongrel class. And before I leave let me give you a bit of advice. Don’t speak disrespectfully of Ireland until you are sure of your company. The moment you find yourself surrounded by your own set fire away.” And nodding jauntily, he walked to the cashier’s desk, paid his bill, gave the now hilarious waiter a shilling, and sprang into a hansom that awaited him at the door, leaving the bully turning red and white by turns and looking the very impersonation of baffled hate and rage.
“That’s no end of a brick,” cried Pommery glowingly.
“A gentleman to the back-bone.”
“I’ll swear it.”
“Blood will tell.”
“I wonder who he can be? Depend on’t he’s of the right lot.”
“What a nice touch of the brogue!”
“Just a soupçon. I’m awfully sorry he didn’t whip the fellow.”
After some fierce yet gloomy consultation with the manager and a couple of obsequious waiters the autocrat approached the table at which the two swells were seated.
“You have been witness to a ruffianly act,” clearing his throat, “on the part of a scoundrel who has just left. It amounts to an assault in the eyes of the law. I do not intend to let the matter drop here. I’m an Englishman, and I’d take it out of that sneak in double-quick. You saw a gentleman assaulted—”
“I saw him assault no gentleman,” said Percival.
“You saw him assault me, sir,” retorted the other loftily.
“I did; but I saw him assault no gentleman,” coolly surveying the bully from head to foot. “You, sir, are what we call a cad. Come, Pommery.”
The autocrat muttered something with reference to “swells,” eyes, blood, and other full-flavored language as the two young men sauntered forth in the direction of “the Garden.”
“There’s nothing to be done at the office to-day; suppose we go to the Park—the Ladies’ Mile. Alice Lindsay has been presented by her uncle, Sir Winifred, with a superb mount; let’s see how she takes to it.”
It is right genial pleasure to lean upon the rails in Hyde Park and watch equestrians and equestriennes flash past on satin-coated, arch-necked, dainty-limbed horses; to meet one’s friends beneath the shade of the elms, and to enjoy a good round gossip, than which there is nothing pleasanter under the sun.
Percival and Pommery knew everybody worth knowing. Nods, becks, and wreathed smiles greeted them right, left, and centre. Fair dames showered graciousness upon them, handsome cavaliers nodded familiarly.
“Well, you Pylades and Orestes, Castor and Pollux, Siamese twins, how am you?” exclaimed a dapper little gentleman mounted upon a rattling cob, reining in and addressing our two friends.
“Ah! Lindsay, you here? I thought you were in Constantinople,” greeted Percival.
“So I were,” perverting his English; “but I left my fez behind me to show my ’fiz’ here. Twiggey voo?”
“How is your sister?”
“Pretty bobbish.”
“I hear she has a superb mount.”
“Too superb, mon camarade. She’s a lucky girl if her collar-bone isn’t fractured before twenty-four hours. The brute is a good brute, but just as fit for a woman to ride as a wild zebra. Here she comes. By Jove! she can’t hold him.”
A young girl cantered up, very red in the face from hard pulling.
“Well, Alice, you’ve had enough of that brass elephant, hasn’t you?”
“Not a bit of it,” cried Miss Lindsay, a bright, aristocratic-looking, blue-eyed, tow-haired young lady, with lines of decision around a saucy mouth, and with a form that bespoke the use of dumb-bells and all those minor appanages relating to the development of muscular Christianity.
“Shall I ride with you?”
“No, Fred; I can do the mile with Bertie,” a younger brother astride a shaggy Shetland.
“Don’t you see two fellows whom you know, Alice?”
“Why, of course I do. I’ve nearly nodded my head off at both of them, and they have jerked the rims of their beavers out of shape,” laughed the girl. “Allons, Bertie.” And lightly touching the magnificent but vicious-looking animal, which she sat à ravir, she started off like an arrow from a bow, followed by the shaggy Shetland.
“Have a lift behind, queer fellows? No? Then I’ll leave you to your meditations.” And Fred Lindsay trotted off in the direction taken by his sister.
“That’s the happiest dog I know, Percival,” observed Pommery. “Ten thousand a year, a house in May-Fair, a villa on the Thames, a shooting-box in Scotland, a loving tailor, a careful cook, and the constitution of a horse and cart.”
“He has, as the Americans say, a good time of it. By the way, who’s to woo and win his sister?”
“Dymoke, of the Guards.”
“Why, he hasn’t—but, I say, what’s this? A runaway, by George!—a woman. She’ll get thrown; she reels in the saddle,” jumping excitedly on a seat. “She’s a brick. She’s pulling the brute. Yes—no—it’s Miss Lindsay. She can do nothing. She’ll be killed if she loses her seat. The pace is awful. She’s lost her head. She’s done for.”
Such were the exclamations rapidly uttered by Eugene Percival as the fainting form of Miss Lindsay was borne past him like a flash.
“Magnificently done!” shouted Pommery. “That fellow is a man, whoever he is.”
Just as the young girl was swaying heavily from side to side in her saddle, and about to sink fainting to the earth, one of the onlookers plunged forward, and, seizing the reins of the maddened horse in a grasp of steel, brought the animal almost to his haunches. The swooning girl was thrown violently forward, to be received in his arms as though she were a down pillow cast at him in play.
Percival and Pommery forced their way through the crowd.
“Make way, please; we are friends of this lady,” cried Percival. “Let her have air. Carry her into the shade.”
Miss Lindsay was borne to the pathway and placed upon one of the benches, while some cold water was dashed in her face.
“How splendidly she behaved!” cried one of the bystanders.
“Such nerve!”
“Such English pluck!”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed the gentleman who had been the means of rescuing her, “I know twenty Irish girls who would have brought that brute to his senses without any of this sort of fuss.”
At this juncture Fred Lindsay galloped up.
“Is she much hurt?” he anxiously demanded.
“She’s not hurt at all; she’s frightened.” And half a dozen persons volunteered a statement of the occurrence, all speaking together.
“How can I thank you?” said Lindsay, turning to the stranger. “Let me have your name and address. By Jove! I must do something to express our gratitude.”
“I stop twenty horses a day in the fields at home, and wickeder brutes than that, so don’t say one word.” And ere Lindsay could interpose the other had mingled with the crowd.
“Did you see him?” asked Percival of Pommery.
“Who?”
“The young fellow who rescued Miss Lindsay.”
“Not particularly.”
“Why, it’s our Irishman.”
“So it is. I’m awfully sorry not to have spoken to him. What a fellow he is, to be sure!”
Eugene Percival, amongst other invitations, received a card for a dinner-party at the Lindsays’ for the following Tuesday.
“We’ve been sadly put about,” said Miss Lindsay as he arrived, “groomed to a hair.” “Our party was made up, fitting oh! so nicely. I had my old man and my old lady, and the man who can talk opera, and the girl who can talk Tennyson, and my M. P. who can talk politics. I had the agricultural element and the lawn-tennis element, and a man who can talk across the table, and the man who knows everything—yourself—and lo! a wicked fairy bon gré mal gré adds two unexpected guests to my party by a wave of her wand, and spoils it. Isn’t it awful?” cries the hostess piteously, elevating a superb bouquet to her dainty nose.
“What did she give you?”
“Only fancy—two Irish people!”
“This is ironical of destiny,” laughed Percival.
“I won’t know what to say to them, what to do with them. I want you to stand in the gap, Mr. Percival, to see me through this miserable contretemps.”
“Put me down for anything, from the Annals of the Four Masters to dancing an Irish jig. I haven’t the faintest idea who the Four Masters are, and I’ve never seen the jig danced, but ’shure I’ll troy,’” endeavoring to imitate the Irish brogue, and failing dismally, as does every cockney rash enough to venture upon the experiment.
“I’ve never seen these people. I called at their hotel yesterday, but they were out doing St. Paul’s, or the Tower, or the Houses of Parliament, or the Thames Tunnel, as is the habit of tourists proper.”
“How did you drop into this trap, Miss Lindsay?”
“This wise: My uncle, Sir Winifred, spent some weeks last autumn with them in Ireland. He is a man who is ever anxious to repay a courtesy twofold.”
“I wonder, if I lent him ten sovereigns, would he return me twenty?” laughed Percival.
“If it was en règle, he would most decidedly. He, it appears, met them—wherever do you think?”
“I’m sure I cannot say.”
“At Madame Tussaud’s.”
“Sir Winifred at such a place! What an old wax-work it is!”
“He loves that Chamber of Horrors, and every time a murderer’s head is added to it my uncle potters off directly to have a look at it. He encountered his Irish friends in this Chamber last Saturday, and instantly takes them to the Star and Garter at Richmond to dine. He had them at the Zoo on Sunday, last night at the opera, and to-night he has foisted them on me; so you won’t mind roughing it a little, will you?”
“Certainly not. Is there anything Irish in the house? One must talk Ireland, you know.”
“Nothing except a genuine Ulster that never crossed the Channel in its life. We bought it last year at the Robber of the North’s, McDougal, at Inverness.”
“Were you in Scotland lawst year?” drawled a pink-faced young man, lounging up.
“Oh! yes; we did the Kyles of Bute, and the Crenan Canal, and Oban, and on by Ballachullish to the Pass of Glencoe, and we slept at Bannavic, and went up the Caledonian Canal.” And Miss Lindsay went off into a gush of rapture over the glorious scenery of the land o’cakes.
A powdered-headed flunky announced Mr. and Miss Devereux, but in such a manner that the name might as well have been Smith. Miss Lindsay courteously advanced to receive her guests with “So pleased to see you! Called at your hotel yesterday. How long have you been in London? How do you like Babylon? Your first visit?”
Charley Devereux—for ’tis he—gazes very hard at his hostess. Could he be mistaken, or is not this the young lady whom he “chucked off” the runaway horse?
“Are you fond of riding?” he abruptly asked.
“Oh! passionately. I ride every day.”
“Did you ride in the park on Friday?”
“Yes, and was nearly killed. My horse, a thoroughbred, bolted. I fought him as long as I could. I got giddy, and I can recollect nothing till I found myself stretched on a bench beneath one of the trees on the side path.”
“Were you thrown?” asked Miss Devereux, of whom more anon.
“Well, yes and no. A man in the crowd—a young mechanic, my brother says—stopped the horse and caught me as I was flying through the air.”
“Charley, don’t you know something—”
A look from her brother silenced Miss Devereux.
“Were you present?” asked Miss Lindsay.
“I should rather say he was,” interposed Lindsay, who had just entered, giving a finishing touch to his toilette as he bounded down the stairs. “Why, hang it, Alice, don’t you know that it is to this gentleman you probably owe your life?”
Miss Lindsay opened her blue eyes very wide.
“Is this possible?” she cried.
“Why, of course it is. My dear fellow,” exclaimed Lindsay, seizing Charley Devereux by both hands, “need I say what intense pleasure it is to find my sister’s rescuer in the person of a friend of my uncle?”
“Mr. Devereux,” added Alice, presenting two dainty hands in gloves of many buttons, and impulsively flinging away her brother’s hands, “this is a joyous surprise. Why, Fred told me you were a mechanic—that is,” she added with a blush—“you see he is awfully near-sighted.”
“Don’t apologize, Miss Lindsay. My old home-spun suit is becoming very dingy, but I like it so well that I wouldn’t part with it for one of Smallpage’s marvellous frocks.”
The pompous flunky announced dinner.
“You will take me down, Mr. Devereux. I shall jilt Lord Jocelyn for the preux chevalier who has so charmingly proved that the age of chivalry is not yet dead. By the way, I must do my devoirs.” And summoning Percival from a distant corner of the room, she presented him to Miss Devereux.
He did not catch the name, but, offering that young lady his arm, he moved towards the door.
“Now for pigs and potatoes,” he thought.
He took a good look at the young girl on his arm, and he beheld a very charming form, soft brown wavy hair in a glorious luxuriance, tastefully and neatly bound up in plaits, a fair skin slightly freckled, a nose a little tip-tilted like the petal of a flower, a rich red mouth, and earnest gray eyes shaded by long, sweeping lashes.
“Your first visit to London?”
“My first.”
She turned her face to him, and then he perceived its delicate oval, its low, straight forehead, its pencilled brows, its charming innocence and purity of expression. This was not the brogue he expected to hear. This was not the face or form he had so dreaded to meet. Why, he could get on with this charming bit of Emerald without any reference to the Isle, save what it might please her Serene Greenship to indulge in.
“And how do you like London?” he asked, after the gentle fuss of seat-taking had subsided, and every person had opened his or her napkin after his or her own particular fashion.
“It oppresses me.”
“In what way?”
“It is too vast, too grand, too colossal. It wearies. I have had more headache since I came here than ever I earned over my Latin grammar.”
“Latin grammar! Are you so deep as Latin?”
“I have taught Latin,” and, seeing his puzzled expression, “to my very young brothers.”
“By Jove!” It’s all Percival has to say, and he says it.
Miss Devereux indulged in a low, musical laugh at her cavalier’s expense.
“You’re laughing at me?” said the bureaucrat, giving a tremendous tug to his moustache.
“I am,” was her reply.
“Why?”
“It’s singularly amusing to hear an Englishman focus all his energies upon his favorite exclamation.”
“And what do you say in Ireland?” he retorted, somewhat nettled.
“You must ask my brother.”
“If he waits till I ask him,” thought Percival, “he’ll be as gray as a badger.”
Mr. Percival indulged in another gaze at his fair companion, who was engaged in the unromantic task of enjoying her dinner, while he found himself hors de combat after a spoonful of soup and a devilled whitebait. He discovered a certain magnetism about her that irresistibly attracted him. The charm of her beauty was not in her golden hair, whose wavelets threw up the brilliancy of her rich color; not in the pure cream-tinted skin, not in the exquisitely delicate curve of the chin and cheek, nor in the sauciness of her retroussé nose; it was the unconscious pleasure in her face, a joy that positively breathed happiness from every feature.
“How does it come that you have no brogue?” he abruptly asked.
“Oh! dear, yes I have. I would shame the bogs of Ballynashaughnagaun if I did not fairly represent them in the land of the Saxon.”
“Do pronounce that jaw-breaker again.”
“Ballynashaughnagaun.”
“How dreadful!”
“We have longer names than that.” And Miss Devereux, to Percival’s intense amusement, proceeded to run over the townlands surrounding her wild Connemara home.
“Only fancy if a man got lost in Knocka-what-you-may-call-um; why, he’d perish by the wayside ere he could ask his way to the place from whence he came.”
“I am quite prepared to think that you would,” she laughed.
“I’m rather a dab at languages,” he said, with a certain tinge of self-satisfaction in his tone.
“I beg your pardon—a what?”
“A dab.”
“May I ask which of your languages is that word borrowed from, Mr. Percival?”
“It’s supposed to be English,” he laughed.
“Oh! I am so relieved. I was afraid you were going to attach it to Ireland, and then—”
“And then?”
“Guerra al cuchillo—war to the knife.”
“Are you a dab?—I beg pardon; do you speak Spanish?”
“I do; we are quite an Irish-Spanish colony.”
“An Irish-Spanish colony! In the name of wonder what is that?”
“I’ll tell you. The Infanta, one of the largest of the vessels attached to the Spanish Armada, was wrecked on the coast of Mayo. The survivors settled along the coast as far as Galway. My great, great, great, ever so great-grand-mamma was a daughter of one of the officers.”
“How is it that you come to have such glorious gray eyes?” This was said enthusiastically.
“Do not let that iced soufflet pass, Mr. Percival; it is too good to snub so unmercifully.”
“What a facer!” thought the Foreign Office clerk as he called back the servant with the entrée in question.
Miss Devereux did not understand any gentleman’s gushing in this manner upon an acquaintance of twenty minutes. If young ladies would only ice menkind occasionally, instead of permitting them to say what they will, their sway would be absolutely without limit; but, alas! the girls of to-day are too—but I will not be cynical.
“What part of Ireland do you come from, Miss ——?” He has not heard her name, and mumbles something unintelligible to fill up the gap.
“Connemara.”
“I know some people living out there.”
“Indeed! As I know everybody living out there, I am quite sure we shall discover mutual friends.”
Now, Mr. Eugene Percival, not having the remotest idea of who Miss Devereux might be, imagines that this is a very good opportunity for being very amusing, and he accordingly plunges in medias res without more ado.
“The name is Devereux,” he said.
“Devereux?” she repeated. “There is but one family of that name in Mayo.”
“Of Bally—something.”
“Ballybo?”
“That’s it. Ballybo. Do you know them?”
She gave one short, sharp glance at him. Was this Englishman about to amuse himself at her expense? Was he going to exercise his English stupidity in a practical joke? No; she instinctively felt that Percival was a gentleman and would not dare take a liberty; and she perceived him so full of suppressed mirth that she resolved upon letting him have it all his own way.
“Yes, I know them,” she replied.
“What sort of people are they?”
“Oh! very commonplace, and somewhat old-fashioned in their ways,” hardly able to keep back a burst of laughter.
“I thought as much. I’ll tell you a capital thing that has occurred within the last week.” Here he indulged in a series of gentlemanly chuckles. “I had a letter from Ballyporeen.”
“Ballybo? You, Mr. Percival?” she exclaimed in a surprised way.
“Yes, from an excellent lady, who addresses me as her cousin, and signs herself Martha Mary Grace Devereux, and who informed me that her son and daughter were coming to town, and begged of me to take care of them.”
Miss Devereux, dropping her knife and fork, gazed steadily at Percival. She became very white, while a sudden anger flamed in her expressive eyes.
“You, then, are Mr. Eugene Percival?” she said, a harshness in her voice.
“Yaas.”
“Of the Foreign Office?”
“I have the honor to be attached to that blundering institution.”
“If I do not mistake, Mr. Percival, you received more than one letter from Ballybo.”
“Yaas, I got one from a sulky young Irishman who—”
“Have you met him?” she interrupted.
“No, thank Heaven! and I hope I never shall.”
This was uttered so fervently that Miss Devereux, yielding to an ungovernable impulse, rang out a peal of musical laughter so bright, so joyous, so contagious that the remainder of the company ceased their colorless prattle in order firstly to listen and then to join in it.
“You are having all the fun to yourself,” cried Lindsay, addressing Geraldine Devereux. “What is the mot? Do send it round; we want something more piquante than an entrée at this stage of the proceedings.”
Geraldine, all blushes at this unlooked-for notoriety and isolation, declared that her laughter arose from a story that was being narrated to her by Mr. Percival.
“It’s the first time Percival ever succeeded in making anybody laugh with him,” exclaimed a sour-looking old gentleman who wore the red ribbon of a C. B. round his neck.
“Let us have it, Percival, pro bono publico.”
“Is it any secret of the office, Mr. Percival?” demanded Miss Lindsay. “Because if it is there’s ’a chiel amang ye takin’ notes.’ Eh, Lord Jocelyn?”
“Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house,” was Percival’s retort.
“Is it worth hearing?—that is the question.”
“Very well worth hearing,” said Geraldine.
“It’s merely an Irish adventure,” observed Percival.
“Merely? Why, where is adventure to be achieved, if not in Ireland? Come, Percival, let us have it,” urged his host.
This was too good a chance for the member of Parliament. “I was in the House the night the Home-Rulers—” And he commenced an anecdote under cover of which the Foreign Office clerk was enabled to beat a retreat.
“It’s an awfully funny story, but some of the people here wouldn’t see it, you know.”
“I can’t see it yet, Mr. Percival; you have only just commenced. Pray proceed.”
“Well, you see, I got this letter raking me up, you know, and the other letter from the young Irish wolf-dog, who wouldn’t have me at any price. How awfully emerald these people must be to imagine that I could—may I use an Irish word?”
“No,” hotly.
“Bother myself about them, especially in the height of the season.” And Mr. Percival emptied a glass of champagne to his own sentiment.
“Poor things! And you don’t intend taking any notice of them?”
“No more than if they never existed.”
“And are you their kinsman?”
“I believe so, now that I have looked into the matter.”
“Don’t you think you are acting rather shabbily?”
“So Jack Pommery says.”
“And Jack Pommery is right,” exclaimed Geraldine, clinching her little left hand and bringing it down into the rosy palm of her right.
“Do you know Jack Pommery?” asked Percival.
“I—I have met him.”
“Here?”
“No.”
“It must have been in Ireland, then,” earnestly.
“It was.”
“By Jove!”
This exclamation caused Geraldine to observe Percival. There was a mysterious knowingness on his face that sent the mercury of her curiosity up into the nineties.
“Is Mr. Pommery an acquaintance of yours, Mr. Percival?”
“He is my alter ego, my better man; and I think I have got at his secret.”
“Surely such strong friends have no secrets from one another.”
“Jack kept one bottled up ever so tight, wired down like the bitter beer they send to India. May I ask you a question?” turning abruptly to Geraldine.
“You have asked so many that usage has almost become a right, Mr. Percival.”
“Are you fond of violets?”
A red, red rose-blush spread itself over the young Irish girl’s face and neck and shell-like ears—a blush that came and glowed and refused to be put down—a blush that wooed and caressed and fondled.
“Why do you ask me?” she palpitated.
At this moment Miss Lindsay telegraphed for the ladies to retire, and the usual uprising, and rustle and removal of chairs, and grim punctilio of menkind, and saucy insouciance of womenkind took place. When the gentlemen had reseated themselves the host cried:
“Close quarters, mes braves. Approach to the attack of this fortress of Château Lafitte. Get up here, Percival; you were lost to me for the last two hours.”
In obedience to the mandate of his host the bureaucrat moved more above the salt, and, casting his eyes across the table, he was astonished and delighted to discover the young Irishman who had so pluckily distinguished himself upon the two occasions already detailed in this truthful narrative.
“I am awfully glad to meet you,” he said, taking up his glass and moving to a vacant chair beside Charley Devereux.
Charley bowed stiffly and awkwardly.
“I was at the Albion with a friend last Thursday when you dropped upon that disgusting cad.”
Devereux blushed like a schoolgirl.
“He was a low, swaggering blackguard, and, only I had an appointment with my sister, I’d have kicked him into Covent Garden among the cabbages,” he warmly exclaimed.
“He wanted my friend and I to witness what he called the assault, but we gave him scant encouragement. I also saw you the very same day do a very plucky thing in Hyde Park.”
“Oh! I know what you mean. Pshaw! it’s not worth mentioning.”
“Isn’t it? The eyes of our fair hostess tell another story.”
Charley Devereux drained a glass of claret and remained silent.
“As you announced your nationality at the Albion, I know that you are Irish.”
“To the backbone, I hope.”
“Do you reside here?”
“No; I’ve only run over for a few days.”
“I shall be glad to make you an honorary member of my club.”
“What club is it?” asked Charley.
“I belong to two, the Garrick and the Reform. I can make you an honorary member of the Reform; at the Garrick we are powerless.”
“Thanks. I won’t trouble you, my stay is so short. I know, at least I do not know, a member of the Garrick.”
“What’s his name?”
“Well, he’s not worth naming. He’s what you call in this country a cad.”
“We don’t patronize cads in Garrick Street, Covent Garden,” said Percival, somewhat coldly.
“Well, you’ve got one full-blossomed cad amongst you at all events—what we would call in my country a shoneen.”
“Of course, as there’s a black sheep in every flock, there’s a shady man in every club. May I ask who this shoneen is?”
Charley Devereux was on the point of uttering the two words “Eugene Percival” when Lindsay burst in.
“I say, you two fellows, you’re snubbing my cellar most awfully. You remind me of two pashas whom I met at a dinner-party at Constantinople, who—”
“Speaking of Constantinople,” interrupted the member of Parliament, “Sir Stafford Northcote on Tuesday night—” commencing a sing-song, Dryasdust House of Commons story which lasted until coffee was announced.
As the gentlemen were ascending the stairs Percival observed to Devereux:
“I took a countrywoman of yours down to dinner.”
“You took my sister.”
“Indeed! You do not resemble one another.”
“There is just a family likeness, that’s all.”
“Do you reside in Dublin?”
“Not exactly; we live in the wildest portion of Connemara.”
“Will you permit me to exchange cards with you?”
“I haven’t got a card, but my name is Devereux.”
“Devereux!” exclaimed Percival, staggering against the wall.
“Yes, Charley Devereux.”
“Of Ballybo, County Mayo?” turning red and white by turns.
“Quite right.”
“And—and—the girl I took down to dinner is your sister?”
“You took Miss Devereux into dinner,” said Charley proudly.
Percival said nothing. The situation revealed itself in a lurid flash. It was too ghastly. Miss Devereux had listened to his miserable story, and, while he imagined he had been amusing her, he had been engaged in digging a pitfall in which it were well he had broken his neck. He had been constructing a pillory wherein he had sat to be pelted with contumely and ridicule. And Devereux, this lion-hearted young Irishman, whose pluck was of the age of chivalry—this splendid specimen of an Irish gentleman whom he had disowned—had written him down a cad. What should he do? What could he do? What could he say? All the water in the Irish Channel were not sufficient to wash him clean of the stains imprinted by his own bovine ignorance. What idiotic folly tempted him to rush into the details of that wretched episode? Why had he not acted as a gentleman? Why had he not replied to the letter of Mrs. Devereux and left his card on his kinsfolk? The affair would have died out then and there, and he would have done his devoir. He felt sick and giddy. The worst impeachment is that which comes from one’s self. No sentence so stern, no torture so severe. He felt that, blinded by prejudice, he had acted a mean, unmanly part, and was now hoist on his own petard. Nemesis had followed him, and the sword of Damocles descended how unexpectedly! Of course Miss Devereux despised him. She was civil because conventionality demanded it and because true blood always tells. To her brother he should reveal himself, cost what it would. All that a gentleman can do is to apologize, and the amende honorable was already an overdue draft.
To do Eugene Percival justice, he was not a bad sort of fellow. He was only thoroughly English; and, whilst the English love the Irish individually, collectively they despise them. This farcical ignorance of Ireland and the Irish leads to a deal of misconception, and there are thousands of Saxons who would travel across Central Africa sooner than undertake the four hours between Holyhead and Kingstown, the sixty-three miles separating North Wales from the county of Dublin.
They had reached the drawing-room landing. At the open door Miss Devereux was chatting with considerable animation to Miss Lindsay.
“Mr. Devereux,” said Percival, “will you oblige me by stepping this way?” advancing to where the ladies stood.
“Well, Mr. Percival,” exclaimed Alice Lindsay, “when are we to have your Irish story?”
“Now.”
There was something in the tone that compelled attention. Miss Devereux, with a woman’s quick perception, felt the approaching dénouement, and, like a true woman, endeavored to spare this man his utter humiliation.
“Irish stories should be told in Ireland,” she cried.
“There is one Irish story that must be told here, Miss Lindsay,” said Percival gravely, “and I would beg your attention for a very brief moment.”
“Why, it must be a very tragic one,” cried the hostess. “You are as grave as the entire senate when Othello addressed them,” to Percival. “You, my dear little Irish girl, from being as joyous as Nora Creina, are as sad as poor suffering Erin herself; and you, caballero mio,” to Devereux, “have summoned a winter cloud of frown to your brow, behind it thunder. If Mr. Percival insists let us hear his horrible tale in comfort. Messieurs et mesdames, asseyez vous.”
No one took a seat but the hostess, and she sought a coigne of vantage upon the stairs.
“I hardly know how to begin,” said Percival very slowly. “I can make no amende beyond the utter humiliation the narration of the story will inflict, and no ordeal that I could be put to could possibly prove more bitter. Until five minutes ago I was in utter ignorance that to Miss Devereux and her brother I could claim relationship.”
“Relationship! How awfully jolly!” exclaimed Miss Lindsay, fanning herself violently.
“You, then, are Eugene Percival?” cried Charley Devereux, surveying him with a glance in which scorn and anger struggled for mastery.
“I am Eugene Percival, your kinsman. Stay,” he added as Charley was about to interrupt him. “I ask to be heard—that is all. To err is human, to forgive divine. I have made a ghastly mistake; I now eat the humblest of pie. I can urge nothing in extenuation for my silly small-talk. It was weak, it was shabby. I pillory myself. I beg to assure you, my cousins, that within the last five minutes I have passed through a bitter agony. I did not catch your name, Miss Devereux, when the honor was conferred upon me of taking you down to dinner. I had not the faintest conception who you were whilst my stupid tongue babbled. I was not aware that this gentleman was your brother. I did not know who he was until within five minutes. Fate has been playing at cross purposes with me. I offer no apology for my bad form in not replying to the letters I received. There is none that could be accepted. A chain of circumstances has woven itself which ties me to the earth. I can only say that I earnestly hope some chance may be granted me of showing how anxious I am to redeem myself with my Irish cousins.” And making a deep bow, Eugene Percival hurried down the stairs and from the house.
Upon the day following this dénouement Percival called upon Jack Pommery at the lodgings of the latter in New Bond Street.
“Have you been appointed secretary of legation at Ujiji?” laughed Jack. “You look about as cheerful as if you were in for the yellow fever.”
“Drop chaff, Jack; I want to have a long talk with you.”
“Take that chair, old fellow, and out with it, whatever it is,” cried Pommery, rolling a luxurious arm-chair to his companion and flinging himself upon a sofa.
“Jack, go and call at the Charing Cross Hotel to-day.”
“What to do?”
“Miss Geraldine Devereux is stopping there.”
“Miss who?” demanded the other, springing like an acrobat to his feet.
“Miss Geraldine Devereux, of Ballybo, County Mayo.”
“You don’t mean it, Percival!” a great wave of joy passing over his handsome face.
“I do indeed.”
“How did you come by this?”
“I met her at dinner yesterday at the Lindsays’.”
“What!”
Percival repeated his reply.
“And I was asked there, and refused for a vile whitebait dinner at Greenwich,” said Pommery with a dismal groan.
“She is absolutely charming, Jack—so naïve, so frank, so coquettish, and so pure.”
“Are you hit?”
“I would be if my proof-armor had not been buckled on by my friend Pommery. No, Jack, I want to ask you all about these people, and I’ll tell you why: they are my Irish cousins.”
“Not the—”
“Yes, the writer of one of those fatal letters was Mrs. Devereux; of the other, Charley.”
“This is a bad business, Percival,” observed Pommery after a silence.
“It is a bad business. I am written down a cad, and, by George! I deserve the appellation,” cried Percival, smiting the arm of the chair a severe blow.
“Giving those letters to that ass Minniver was bad form, and I said so.”
“I have got them here. Luckily, Minniver has been down with Bertie Baging for the Ascot week, and, except to old Fladgate, he has never shown them to mortal. Do you know who Devereux turns out to be?”
“Who?”
“The young fellow who so pluckily sat upon the rowdy at the Albion.”
“By Jove!”
“And only fancy, he did not know who Alice Lindsay was until he came to dinner at Curzen Street.”
“By Jove!” repeated Jack Pommery.
Impart a piece of startling intelligence to an Englishman, and he will always exclaim, “By Jove!”
“Now, Jack, tell me all about the Devereux—all that you know. She has younger brothers. Has she a sister?”
“She has.”
“Younger?”
“Yes.”
“Anything like your girl?”
“She is not MY girl, Percival. I only wish that she was,” he added with fierce energy.
“You should have seen how she blushed when I asked her if she liked violets.”
“Percival!” exclaimed Pommery, “that was hardly fair.”
“Don’t agitate yourself, old fellow; the subject was handled, as we say at the office, ‘delicately.’ How old are the younger brothers?”
“One is about eighteen.”
“Bright?”
“Very. He showed me one of Browning’s poems done into Latin, French, and some other language—I think German.”
“You are certain of this, Jack?” cried Percival earnestly.
“I am certain the lad showed them to me, and that he said they were his own translations. He’s in Trinity College at Dublin.”
“What are they going to do with him?”
“They were speaking of the civil service or the Irish bar. Entre nous, they haven’t much money, and it’s a wonder they have a stiver, they are so recklessly hospitable. Why, my dear fellow, there were fifteen guests stopping at Ballybo while I was there, and we met a whole caravan traversing the beautiful road that runs from Westport along the Atlantic when en route for the train.”
“This is admirable,” muttered Percival, half thinking aloud.
“What is admirable?”
“Never mind. Is Ballybo a handsome place?”
“It’s a fine old mansion of that order of architecture so much in vogue when Queen Anne was busying herself in distributing largess to Marlborough. It is surrounded by superb trees, in which ten thousand rooks keep up a cawing that is almost deafening. An inlet of the Atlantic almost brings the seaweed to the hall door-steps. The stables are fit for the Duke of Beaufort, and I can tell you there are horses in the stalls that would bring their five hundred guineas at Tattersall’s.”
The “Wild Irishman,” as the express from London to Holyhead has been termed, on account of the almost reckless speed at which it travels, was about to start from Euston Square when Mr. Eugene Percival made his appearance upon the platform, and, walking along the line of carriages, suddenly stopped opposite a first-class coupé. The compartment was occupied by a young lady and gentleman. The lady was Miss Geraldine Devereux, the gentleman her brother.
Percival had called at the Charing Cross Hotel, merely leaving cards. His visit was not returned. He sent Miss Devereux a box for the opera, with a superb bouquet from Covent Garden. The box voucher was sent back with the compliments of Mr. Devereux; the flowers Miss Devereux retained. For the few days that his Irish cousins remained in London Eugene Percival made no sign.
Removing his hat, he respectfully bowed to the occupants of the coupé. Miss Devereux sat nearest the window at which he stood.
“I have come to beg forgiveness,” he said. “Do not go back to Ireland without uttering my pardon.”
Now, it so happened that Charley Devereux, who had been dining with an old college chum, was in very good humor, all his war-paint having been removed under the pleasurable influences of a renewed friendship. So, thrusting forth his hand, he exclaimed:
“Don’t say anything more about it, Percival. I’m sure you’re sorry. You’ll do better next time, and won’t let your English prejudice bolt across country with you.”
“And you, Miss Devereux?”
“I may forgive you, and perhaps call you cousin, when you shall have made a lengthened tour in my own sweet land.”
“Am I to avoid Ballybo?”
“And commit another mistake?” she archly exclaimed.
“I have done with mistakes for ever.” And as he uttered the words the train moved silently but swiftly away.
About three weeks after Miss Devereux had regained her wild mountain home she was considerably astonished one morning upon receiving from out the post-bag a large, important-looking document with the words, “On Her Majesty’s Service,” in front, and an enormous seal on the back, with the royal arms of England stamped upon the red sealing-wax and “Foreign Office” underneath them.
“Can this be from Eugene Percival?” she thought, as she tore it open and read:
“Foreign Office, July 26, 187—.
“Dear Cousin Geraldine Devereux: I enclose a nomination for the Foreign Office for my cousin, Patrick Sarsfield Devereux, your brother. From the correspondence which has taken place between my dear friend Jack Pommery and my kinsman on the subject of his future, I trust that this opening is one that will prove suitable to his tastes and his talents. It is not impossible that I may visit your ‘impossible country’ when Mr. Pommery runs over for the grouse-shooting. With kindest regards to all my kinsfolk, I remain, dear Cousin Geraldine Devereux, your friend and cousin,
“Eugene Percival.”
“He’s a good fellow after all,” cried Geraldine with streaming eyes, “and has made more than the amende honorable to his Irish cousins.”
ENGLISH STATESMEN IN UNDRESS.
LORD CARLINGFORD AND JOHN FRANCIS MAGUIRE.
The English statesman whose personal acquaintance I first made was the present Lord Carlingford, who was at that time the Hon. Chichester Fortescue, Secretary of State for Ireland in the cabinet of Mr. Gladstone. I had in my possession a letter of introduction to him, but I was unwilling to use it as a means of “interviewing” Mr. Fortescue. I desired to obtain certain information from him which he might not be willing to give; and I did not wish that my possible indiscretion in asking for the information should reflect at all upon the friend who had given me the letter. I wrote to Mr. Fortescue, telling him simply who I was and what I wanted, and asking whether he would permit me to call upon him. I received a note from his secretary, informing me that at a certain hour Mr. Fortescue would receive me at his office in Great George Street, Westminster. This was before the new government offices in Whitehall were completed, and when the various governmental bureaus were scattered about, hither and thither, in houses that were not altogether magnificent or imposing. By an error of my own in estimating the time necessary for a drive from Bayswater to Great George Street, I was some minutes behind the appointed hour; and when I gave my card to the servant in waiting he regarded me with a reproachful air. “You have been asked for, sir,” he said, as he conducted me up-stairs and ushered me into an ante-room very plainly, almost poorly, furnished. In a few moments he reappeared, and, leading me through a narrow hall, opened the door of a larger room, and I found myself in the presence of the Irish secretary: a tall, slim, thin-faced, handsome man, dressed with scrupulous neatness, rather starched and stiff, not unlike Fernando Wood in his prim correctness. Motioning me to a chair in front of his table, he resumed his seat behind it, and the conversation began. Cold and calm at first, he soon warmed with the subject, and spoke with earnestness and freedom, at times with enthusiasm. Her majesty’s government, he assured me, were earnestly anxious to do justice to Ireland; he thought they had proved this by their past acts. If they remained in power they would convince all the world of their sincere desire to remove every legitimate grievance of which Ireland could complain. He appreciated the force of my suggestion that the reflex action of public opinion in America upon public opinion in Ireland was not to be despised. He questioned me closely upon the extent to which the American press was influenced by Irish thought; were there many Irish writers in the New York newspaper offices? who were they? what were their opinions? were the adverse criticisms upon the Irish policy of the imperial government inspired by them, or were these the spontaneous thoughts of American observers?
I began to think I was the interviewed and not the interviewer; but Mr. Fortescue was ready enough to answer questions in his turn. It was quite true, he said, that the land question and the question of higher education in Ireland bristled all over with difficulties. If the demands of the tenant-farmers in Ireland were granted, a precedent would be set up that might be attended with most inconvenient consequences in England; if Mr. Gladstone were to propose a measure for university education in Ireland that would be satisfactory to Cardinal Cullen, he would encounter a storm of opposition from the Irish and English Protestants, and from the even then rapidly-growing secularist party in England, that might overwhelm him. I remember the earnestness with which Mr. Fortescue refuted a chance suggestion of mine that Mr. Gladstone was at heart a foe to the Catholic Church. The very contrary was the case; he leaned, if anything, too much the other way. Archbishop Manning was his near and dear friend. He incurred the suspicion and the latent enmity of the ultra-Protestants, and especially of the Nonconformists, by his unconcealed anxiety to compensate the Irish Catholics for the wrongs they had suffered in the past, and to make the future equable and pleasant for them. In Mr. Fortescue’s belief, an American having it in his power to influence and enlighten American opinion, and especially Irish-American opinion, respecting the real wishes of the leaders of the Liberal party regarding Ireland, could not do a better work than to impress upon the minds of his countrymen the fact that England—at least the England of that day—was heartily and sincerely anxious to do justice to Ireland. The success of the then contemplated measures of the government would depend very much upon the spirit in which the Irish people received them.
Mr. Fortescue was evidently not thoroughly satisfied with the state of feeling in Ireland, and he made some remarks concerning the Irish press that it is not necessary to repeat. He returned again, however, to the subject of the influence that Americans, and Irish-Americans in particular, had upon Irish opinion; and his observations upon this point convinced me that the secret-service department of his bureau was not badly conducted. Towards the end of our conversation I mentioned that I had a letter of introduction to him from ——, and presented it, explaining why I had not done so in the first instance. We had a laugh over what he called my “un-American scrupulousness,” and we parted very good friends. Mr. Fortescue is the possessor of very enviable qualities. I was quite convinced of his sincerity; but I reflected that the fascination of his manner when he was aroused and anxious to make a point might easily blind the judgment. We met occasionally after this from time to time; and I last saw him at his residence at Strawberry Hill, where his wife, the Countess Frances Waldegrave (whose own history is a romance), is the centre of a circle of no small political and social importance. The future of which we had talked in our first interview had become the past: Mr. Gladstone had played his trump cards and had lost his game, Mr. Disraeli reigned in his stead, while Mr. Fortescue had become Lord Carlingford and was not unhappy. But Ireland was not happy yet; and I ventured to say so to his lordship. “What would you have?” he asked—“Catholic university education on Cardinal Cullen’s plan; a tenant-right law that would make the landlord the slave of the occupier; and Home Rule, under which the tragedy of the Kilkenny cats would be enacted all over Ireland until none were left to tell the tale, or tails. Ce n’est pas possible, mon ami.”
The words “Home Rule” recall the memory of a very dear friend whose acquaintance I made in London, and who has now gone to rest. With sad but pleasant reminiscences I rummage through my letter-cases, filled with cherished epistles, until I come upon a packet tied with black tape and labelled “John Francis Maguire.” He was a splendid man, impulsive and quick, but with a sound judgment that held his emotions under sufficient control; full of lofty and poetic aspirations for his country’s future, but guided in his actions by the most sober and practical common sense. In the midst of arduous political and professional labors, all the more severe from the pressure of a constant struggle with inadequate pecuniary resources, from the demands of an exacting constituency, and from the burning passion of his soul for the happiness of Ireland, he found time for literary work that was at once a source of profit and of pleasure to him. Every one will remember his Irish in America and his Pontificate of Pius IX.; but it is with a pang that I remember the pages of manuscript that he read to me on my last visit to him. They were portions of a novel he was writing—and it was to be a Jesuitical novel. What Eugene Sue had done to vilify and traduce the Society of Jesus he would do to vindicate and exalt it. He described to me the plot; disputed with me over the proposed dénouement; laughed over the skill with which he had introduced well-known personages into the story; and asked me if, under the disguise of Sir Guichet de Nouvelle, I recognized that Don Quixote of Protestantism, Mr. Newdegate.
Mr. Maguire died before his novel was completed—at least, I never heard of its completion. When I first knew him he lived in pleasant apartments in Bessborough Gardens, and there it was I last parted from him. The presentation of my letter of introduction resulted in an invitation to dine with him the next day; and this was the first of a long series of little banquets that we had together, alternately at his apartments and in a cosey room on the third floor of the London Tavern, Fleet Street, where I played the host. Charming were these symposiums, generally held on Saturday nights, because the House was not then in session, and sometimes lasting far beyond midnight. I remember one of these occasions, on a lovely night in June, when, having sat together until two o’clock in the morning, I proposed that we should walk to Pimlico together, where I would leave him at his door. Our route took us through Temple Bar, up the Strand, down Parliament Street, past the Parliament houses and Westminster Abbey, and through St. James Park. The morning air was delicious. At this season of the year the night in London is very short; one can see to read without gaslight as late as nine o’clock, and the stars begin to pale as early as two o’clock in the morning. They were beginning to pale as we left the tavern and began our walk. The moon, hastening to hide itself before the sun arose, threw a soft light over the scene; all that was ugly and commonplace in the glare of day was hidden or disguised; all that was beautiful was arrayed in new and seductive splendor. The Strand was almost deserted; here and there a policeman paced his beat; here and there the form of some poor wretch glided out of the shade of an archway, lingered a moment, and disappeared. Trafalgar Square was glorious; the fountains made music for Marochetti’s lions at the base of Nelson’s pillar, and the little lion on the top of Northumberland House seemed to wag his tail as if beating time to the melody. Presently the grand vista of the Abbey and the Parliament houses opened before us; but scarcely had I glanced at it ere Mr. Maguire hurried me through a narrow passage to the left. “Come,” said he, “let us see where a king’s head fell.” I had seen it before—the little square in Whitehall where Charles I. was beheaded, and where the statue of James II. stands, the king pointing with his sceptre to the spot where the head of his father fell. In the daytime the place has a mean and squalid appearance, although the Crescent and gardens around it are handsome and trim enough. At this moment the surroundings of the place were bathed in a light that hid their deformities and enhanced their beauties, and the memories of the tragic scene enacted there had nothing to disturb them. The ghastly drama re-enacted itself before our mental vision. There was the window of Whitehall Palace in front of which the scaffold had been erected. From this window the king emerged; he stood on the scaffold, with his head erect, wishing to address the people; but the troops filled the place, and the populace were kept at a distance. “I can be heard only by you,” said the king to the soldiers; “I will therefore address to you a few words.” And he repeated to them a little speech which he had prepared. A curious discourse it was—grave and calm, “even to coldness,” as Guizot has it. He had been in the right, he said; every one else was in the wrong; the deprivation of the rights of the sovereign was the true cause of the unhappiness of the people; the people should have no voice in government; it was only on this condition that the kingdom could regain peace and liberty! While he was speaking some one touched the axe. “Do not dull the axe,” he exclaimed; “if it is dull it will hurt me.” The executioner directed him to gather up his long hair under a silk cap which he wore, and the Protestant Bishop Juxon assisted him to arrange it.
“I have,” said the king, “a good cause and a clement God.”
“Yes, sire,” replied Juxon. “There is only one more step before you; it is full of agony, but it is short, although it will transport you from earth to heaven.”
The king replied: “I pass from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; there I shall fear no sorrow.” Then, after asking the executioner if the block was firmly fixed, and saying to Juxon the mysterious word “Remember!” he knelt down and extended his head upon the block. “I shall say a short prayer,” said he, “and when I extend my hands, then—” In a few moments the king stretched out his hands; the executioner struck, and the head fell directly over the spot where we were then standing.
“It was a wretched piece of work,” said Mr. Maguire as we walked away; “but the men who did it had the courage of their opinions. Who has the courage of his opinions now?”
“Mr. Gladstone, perhaps,” I suggested.
“Yes, no doubt; but what are his opinions? Those of to-day will be discarded to-morrow. He is all on our side now; there is nothing he would not do for us to-day; but to-morrow, if affairs go wrong, he will throw us over, and Ireland and the church may find in him their worst foe. The man wants a balance-wheel,” continued Maguire, warming with his theme as we walked on, “and only the grace of God can give it him. I think sometimes that he will have it yet. I admire him, I esteem him. If he were only a Catholic he would have a guide that would keep him from mischief. There,” said he, as we came to the end of Whitehall—“there is Westminster Hall, where Charles I. received his sentence; and there is Westminster Abbey, where his body was carried in the face of a blinding snow-storm and buried with maimed rites. There, too, is the door through which they carried the body of his murderer, Cromwell, to bury it among the kings. But the ashes of the kings are yet there, while Cromwell’s grave was broken open, his body dragged out and hung upon a gallows in Tyburn. He deserved it, the brute! Do you know the story of how, after his post-mortem execution, his head was cut off and stuck upon a spike on the top of Westminster Hall, just there in front of us, and how it remained there, blackening and withering in the air, until one stormy night it was blown down and picked up by the sentry on guard, who was an old Cromwellian himself? He hid the precious relic under his jacket, and afterwards sold it to a gentleman in Kent, in whose family the skull still remains.”
Had Mr. Maguire lived a few years longer it is probable that the Home-Rule movement would have taken a somewhat different shape, and possibly might have been brought to a successful realization. When I first met him he was engrossed in developing and shaping his ideas on the subject; and I spent a whole night with him in explaining, in all its minutiæ, our own system of duplex government, State and federal, and showing how State rights and federal sovereignty were both preserved. He was the real father of the Home-Rule movement, and to his untimely death must be ascribed, in a great measure, the present apparent collapse of the party. No member of the House of Commons was more generally respected and esteemed than he; Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli alike regarded him with admiration. Uncompromising in principle, he knew how to be firm without being offensive; and he did not commit the too common error of insisting upon impossibilities. Even Mr. Newdegate cherished a sneaking liking for the man; and Mr. Maguire once happened to let me into the secret of that strange affection. “I can turn the laugh on him any day,” said he, “and if it comes to serious work he gets the worst of it; but often it is best to let him have his fling. Occasionally I give him a lift over a stile, knowing quite well that if he goes on a little farther he will tumble into the ditch and scramble out all covered with mud.”
Respecting Home Rule, Mr. Maguire’s favorite idea was a confederation of the three kingdoms, England, Ireland, and Scotland, upon such a basis as that of our Union, with a written constitution defining with exactness the limits of provincial autonomy and of imperial sovereignty. It was to perfect this plan that he made me expound to him, in the most minute detail, the workings of our own duplex system of government; and among his papers should have been found an elaborate scheme for the British Confederation, the joint result of our deliberations. I was summoned to these momentous conferences by such notes as these—and I select with a sad heart the last I received from him, a few months before his death:
“I shall be at home this evening altogether, and would be glad to see you, and we could spend an hour or two over wine or whiskey-punch. Or I shall be at home to-morrow after seven o’clock. Send me a line quick to say when you will come.”
“Wine” and “whiskey-punch” had an esoteric meaning as well as their ordinary significance; for “wine” meant mere gossip, while “whiskey-punch” was understood to be the accompaniment of very serious political discussions.
THE CREATED WISDOM.[[163]]
BY AUBREY DE VERE.
III.
My flowers are flowers of gladness: mine
The boughs of honor and of grace:
Pure as the first bud of the vine
My fragrance freshens all the place.
The mother of fair Love am I:
With me is Wisdom’s name and praise:
With me are Hope, and Knowledge high,
And sacred Fear, and peaceful days.
Be strong all ye that love your God:
He maketh Wisdom to abound
Like Tigris swollen with vernal flood,
Like broad Euphrates harvest-crowned.
Through garden-plots my course I took
To bathe the beds of herb and tree:
Then to a river swelled my brook:—
Ere long my river was a sea.
More high that sea shall rise, and shine
Far off, a prophet-beam of morn,
Because my doctrine is not mine,
But light of God for seers unborn.