Dick Kearney walked the bog from early morning till dark without firing a shot. The snipe rose almost at his feet, and wheeling in circles through the air, dipped again into some dark crevice of the waste, unnoticed by him! One thought only possessed, and never left him, as he went. He had overheard Nina’s words to his sister, as he made his escape over the fence, and learned how she promised to ‘spare him’; and that if not worried about him, or asked to pledge herself, she should be ‘merciful,’ and not entangle the boy in a hopeless passion.
He would have liked to have scoffed at the insolence of this speech, and treated it as a trait of overweening vanity; he would have gladly accepted her pity as a sort of challenge, and said, ‘Be it so; let us see who will come safest out of this encounter,’ and yet he felt in his heart he could not.
First of all, her beauty had really dazzled him, and the thousand graces of a manner of which he had known nothing captivated and almost bewildered him. He could not reply to her in the same tone he used to any other. If he fetched her a book or a chair, he gave it with a sort of deference that actually reacted on himself, and made him more gentle and more courteous, for the time. ‘What would this influence end in making me?’ was his question to himself. ‘Should I gain in sentiment or feeling? Should I have higher and nobler aims? Should I be anything of that she herself described so glowingly, or should I only sink to a weak desire to be her slave, and ask for nothing better than some slight recognition of my devotion? I take it that she would say the choice lay with her, and that I should be the one or the other as she willed it, and though I would give much to believe her wrong, my heart tells me that I cannot. I came down here resolved to resist any influence she might attempt to have over me. Her likeness showed me how beautiful she was, but it could not tell me the dangerous fascination of her low liquid voice, her half-playful, half-melancholy smile, and that bewitching walk, with all its stately grace, so that every fold as she moves sends its own thrill of ecstasy. And now that I know all these, see and feel them, I am told that to me they can bring no hope! That I am too poor, too ignoble, too undistinguished, to raise my eyes to such attraction. I am nothing, and must live and die nothing.
‘She is candid enough, at all events. There is no rhapsody about her when she talks of poverty. She chronicles every stage of the misery, as though she had felt them all; and how unlike it she looks! There is an almost insolent well-being about her that puzzles me. She will not heed this, or suffer that, because it looks mean. Is this the subtle worship she offers Wealth, and is it thus she offers up her prayer to Fortune?
‘But why should she assume I must be her slave?’ cried he aloud, in a sort of defiance. ‘I have shown her no such preference, nor made any advances that would show I want to win her favour. Without denying that she is beautiful, is it so certain it is the kind of beauty I admire? She has scores of fascinations—I do not deny it; but should I say that I trust her? And if I should trust her and love her too, where must it all end in? I do not believe in her theory that love will transform a fellow of my mould into a hero, not to say that I have my own doubt if she herself believes it. I wonder if Kate reads her more clearly? Girls so often understand each other by traits we have no clue to; and it was Kate who asked her, almost in tone of entreaty, “to spare me,” to save me from a hopeless passion, just as though I were some peasant-boy who had set his affection on a princess. Is that the way, then, the world would read our respective conditions? The son of a ruined house or the guest of a beggared family leaves little to choose between! Kate—the world—would call my lot the better of the two. The man’s chance is not irretrievable, at least such is the theory. Those half-dozen fellows, who in a century or so contrive to work their way up to something, make a sort of precedent, and tell the others what they might be if they but knew how.
‘I’m not vain enough to suppose I am one of these, and it is quite plain that she does not think me so.’ He pondered long over this thought, and then suddenly cried aloud, ‘Is it possible she may read Joe Atlee in this fashion? is that the stuff out of which she hopes to make a hero?’ There was more bitterness in this thought than he had first imagined, and there was that of jealousy in it too that pained him deeply.
Had she preferred either of the two Englishmen to himself, he could have understood and, in a measure, accepted it. They were, as he called them, ‘swells.’ They might become, he knew not what. The career of the Saxon in fortune was a thing incommensurable by Irish ideas; but Joe was like himself, or in reality less than himself, in worldly advantages.
This pang of jealousy was very bitter; but still it served to stimulate him and rouse him from a depression that was gaining fast upon him. It is true, he remembered she had spoken slightingly of Joe Atlee. Called him noisy, pretentious, even vulgar; snubbed him openly on more than one occasion, and seemed to like to turn the laugh against him; but with all that she had sung duets with him, corrected some Italian verses he wrote, and actually made a little sketch in his note-book for him as a souvenir. A souvenir! and of what? Not of the ridicule she had turned upon him! not the jest she had made upon his boastfulness. Now which of these two did this argue: was this levity, or was it falsehood? Was she so little mindful of honesty that she would show these signs of favour to one she held most cheaply, or was it that her distaste to this man was mere pretence, and only assumed to deceive others.
After all, Joe Atlee was a nobody; flattery might call him an adventurer, but he was not even so much. Amongst the men of the dangerous party he mixed with he was careful never to compromise himself. He might write the songs of rebellion, but he was little likely to tamper with treason itself. So much he would tell her when he got back. Not angrily, nor passionately, for that would betray him and disclose his jealousy, but in the tone of a man revealing something he regretted—confessing to the blemish of one he would have liked better to speak well of. There was not, he thought, anything unfair in this. He was but warning her against a man who was unworthy of her. Unworthy of her! What words could express the disparity between them? Not but if she liked him—and this he said with a certain bitterness—or thought she liked him, the disproportion already ceased to exist.
Hour after hour of that long summer day he walked, revolving such thoughts as these; all his conclusions tending to the one point, that he was not the easy victim she thought him, and that, come what might, he should not be offered up as a sacrifice to her worship of Joe Atlee.