Lord Kilgobbin

by Charles James Lever

Though he had steeled his heart against the emotion such a leave-taking was likely to evoke, he was in nowise prepared for the feelings the old place itself would call up, and as he opened a little wicket that led by a shrubbery walk to the cottage, he was glad to throw himself on the first seat he could find and wait till his heart could beat more measuredly. What a strange thing was life—at least that conventional life we make for ourselves—was his thought now. ‘Here am I ready to cross the globe, to be the servant, the labourer of some rude settler in the wilds of Australia, and yet I cannot be the herdsman here, and tend the cattle in the scenes that I love, where every tree, every bush, every shady nook, and every running stream is dear to me. I cannot serve my own kith and kin, but must seek my bread from the stranger! This is our glorious civilisation. I should like to hear in what consists its marvellous advantage.’

And then he began to think of those men of whom he had often heard—gentlemen and men of refinement—who had gone out to Australia, and who, in all the drudgery of daily labour—herding cattle on the plains or conducting droves of horses long miles of way—still managed to retain the habits of their better days, and, by the instinct of the breeding, which had become a nature, to keep intact in their hearts the thoughts and the sympathies and the affections that made them gentlemen.

‘If my dear aunt only knew me as I know myself, she would let me stay here and serve her as the humblest labourer on her land. I can see no indignity in being poor and faring hardly. I have known coarse food and coarse clothing, and I never found that they either damped my courage or soured my temper.’

It might not seem exactly the appropriate moment to have bethought him of the solace of companionship in such poverty, but somehow his thoughts did take that flight, and unwarrantable as was the notion, he fancied himself returning at nightfall to his lowly cabin, and a certain girlish figure, whom our reader knows as Kate Kearney, standing watching for his coming.

There was no one to be seen about as he approached the house. The hall door, however, lay open. He entered and passed on to the little breakfast-parlour on the left. The furniture was the same as before, but a coarse fustian jacket was thrown on the back of a chair, and a clay-pipe and a paper of tobacco stood on the table. While he was examining these objects with some attention, a very ragged urchin, of some ten or eleven years, entered the room with a furtive step, and stood watching him. From this fellow, all that he could hear was that Miss Betty was gone away, and that Peter was at the Kilbeggan Market, and though he tried various questions, no other answers than these were to be obtained. Gorman now tried to see the drawing-room and the library, but these, as well as the dining-room, were all locked. He next essayed the bedrooms, but with the same unsuccess. At length he turned to his own well-known corner—the well-remembered little ‘green-room’—which he loved to think his own. This too was locked, but Gorman remembered that by pressing the door underneath with his walking-stick, he could lift the bolt from the old-fashioned receptacle that held it, and open the door. Curious to have a last look at a spot dear by so many memories, he tried the old artifice and succeeded.

He had still on his watch-chain the little key of an old marquetrie cabinet, where he was wont to write, and now he was determined to write a last letter to his aunt from the old spot, and send her his good-bye from the very corner where he had often come to wish her ‘good-night.’

He opened the window and walked out on the little wooden balcony, from which the view extended over the lawn and the broad belt of wood that fenced the demesne. The Sliebh Bloom Mountain shone in the distance, and in the calm of an evening sunlight the whole picture had something in its silence and peacefulness of almost rapturous charm.

Who is there amongst us that has not felt, in walking through the rooms of some uninhabited house, with every appliance of human comfort strewn about, ease and luxury within, wavy trees and sloping lawn or eddying waters without—who, in seeing all these, has not questioned himself as to why this should be deserted? and why is there none to taste and feel all the blessedness of such a lot as life here should offer? Is not the world full of these places? is not the puzzle of this query of all lands and of all peoples? That ever-present delusion of what we should do—what be if we were aught other than ourselves: how happy, how contented, how unrepining, and how good—ay, even our moral nature comes into the compact—this delusion, I say, besets most of us through life, and we never weary of believing how cruelly fate has treated us, and how unjust destiny has been to a variety of good gifts and graces which are doomed to die unrecognised and unrequited.

I will not go to the length of saying that Gorman O’Shea’s reflections went thus far, though they did go to the extent of wondering why his aunt had left this lovely spot, and asked himself, again and again, where she could possibly have found anything to replace it.

‘My dearest aunt,’ wrote he, ‘in my own old room at the dear old desk, and on the spot knitted to my heart by happiest memories, I sit down to send you my last good-bye ere I leave Ireland for ever.