Roland Cashel, Volume I (of II)

by Charles James Lever

To save our reader the tedious task of following Mr. Linton's movements, however necessary to our story some insight into them may be, we take the shorter, and therefore pleasanter course, of submitting one of his own brief notes to Roland Cashel, written some three days after his arrival at Tubbermore:—

“Still here, my dear Cashel, still in this Tipperary
Siberia, where our devotion to your service has called and
still retains us,—and what difficulties and dangers have
been ours! What a land!—and what a people! Of a truth, I
no longer envy the rich, landed proprietor, as, in my
ignorance, I used to do some weeks back. To begin: Your
Château de Tubbermore, which seems a cross between a jail
and a county hospital without, and is a downright ruin
within, stands in a park of thistles and docks whose
luxuriant growth are a contemptuous reflection upon your
trees, which positively don't grow at all. So ingeniously
placed is this desirable residence, that although the
country, the river, and the mountains, offer some fine
landscape effects, not a vestige of any of them can be seen
from your windows. Your dining-room, late a nursery for an
interesting family of small pigs, looks out upon the
stables, picturesque as they are in fissured walls and
tumbling rafters; and one of the drawing-rooms—they call
it the blue room, a tint so likely to be caught up by the
spectators—opens upon a garden,—but what a garden! Fruit-
trees, there are none—stay, I am unjust, two have been left
standing to give support to a clothes-line, where the
amiable household of your care-taker, Mr. Cane, are
pictorially represented by various garments, crescendo from
the tunic of tender years to the full-grown 'toga.' But why
enumerate small details? Let me rather deal in negatives,
and tell you there is not a whole pane of glass in the
entire building, not a grate, few doors, little flooring,
and actually no roof. The slates, where there are such, are
so loose that the wind rattles among them like the keys of a
gigantic piano, and usually ends with a grand Freischutz
effect, which uncovers a room or two. The walls are
everywhere so rotten, that if you would break a loop-hole,
you throw down enough to drive a 'break' through; and as
for the chimneys, the jackdaw may plead the Statute of
Limitations, and defy to surrender a possession which
certainly dates from the past century! Perystell is in
despair; he goes about sticking his thumb through the
rotting timbers, and knocking down partitions with a tick of
his foot, and exclaiming against the ignorance of the last
age of architects, who, I take it, were pretty much like
their successors, save in the thefts committed from Greek
and Roman models. This is not tempting, nor the remedy for
it easy. Stone and mortar are as great luxuries here as ice-
cream at Calcutta; there are no workmen, or the few are
merely artificers in mud. Timber is an exotic, glass and
iron are traditions; so that if you desire to be an Irish
country gentleman, your pursuit of territorial ascendancy
has all the merit of difficulty. Now, que faire? Shall we
restore, or, rather, rebuild, or shall we put forty pounds
of Dartford gunpowder in one of the cellars, and blow the
whole concern to him who must have devised it? Such is the
course I should certainly adopt myself, and only feel regret
at the ignoble service of the honest explosive.
“Perystell, like all his tribe, is a pedant, and begins by
asking for two years, and I won't say how many thousand
pounds. My reply is, 'Months and hundreds, vice years and
thousands'—and so we are at issue. I know your anxiety to
receive the people you have invited, and I feel how
fruitless it would be to tell you with what apologies I, if
in your place, should put them off; so pray instruct me how
to act. Shall I commission Perystell to go to work in all
form, and meanwhile make a portion of the edifice habitable?
or shall I—and I rather admire the plan—get a corps of
stage artificers from Drury Lane, and dress up the house as
they run up a provincial theatre? I know you don't care
about cost, which, after all, is the only real objection to
the scheme; and if you incline to my suggestion about the
fireworks for a finish, it will be perfectly appropriate.
“'My own cottage'—so far, at least, as I could see of it
without intruding on the present occupant—is very pretty:
roses, and honeysuckle, and jasmines, and such-like
ruralities, actually enveloping it. It is well placed, too,
in a snug little nook, sheltered from the north, and with a
peep at the river in front,—just the sort of place where
baffled ambition and disappointment would retire to; and
where, doubtless, some of these days, Tom Linton, not being
selected by her Majesty as Chief Secretary for the Home
Office, will be announced in the papers to have withdrawn
from public life, 'to prosecute the more congenial career of
literature.' There is a delicious little boudoir, too,—such
is it at present, you or I would make it a smoking crib,—
looking over the Shannon, and with a fine bold mountain,
well wooded, beyond. I should like a gossip with you in that
bay-window, in the mellow hour, when confidence, which hates
candles, is at its full.
“Have I told you everything? I scarcely know, my head is so
full of roof-trees, rafters, joists, gables, and parapets.
Halt! I was forgetting a pretty—that is not the word—a
handsome girl, daughter or granddaughter of our tenant, Mr.
Corrigan, one of those saintly, virginal heads Raphael
painted, with finely pencilled eyebrows, delicate beyond
expression above; severe, in the cold, un-impassioned
character of the mouth and lips; clever, too, or, what
comes to nearly the same, odd and eccentric, being educated
by an old St. Omer priest who taught her Latin, French,
Italian, with a dash of theology, and, better than all, to
sing Provençal songs to her own accompaniment on the piano.
You 'll say, with such companionship, Siberia is not so bad
after all, nor would it, perhaps, if we had nothing else to
think of. Besides, she is as proud as an Austrian
archduchess, has the blood of, God knows how many, kings—
Irish, of course—in her veins, and looks upon me, Saxon
that I am, as a mountain-ash might do on a mushroom.”

There was no erasure but one, and that very slight, and seeming unimportant; he had written Tubber-beg at the top of the letter, and, perceiving it, had changed it to Tubber-more, the fact being that he had already established himself as an inmate of the “Cottage,” and a guest of Mr. Corrigan. We need not dwell on the arts by which Linton accomplished this object, to which, indeed, Mr. Corrigan's hospitable habits contributed no difficulty. The “doctor” alone could have interposed any obstacle; and he, knowing the extent of Linton's power, did not dare to do so, contenting himself to watch narrowly all his proceedings, and warn his friend whenever warning could no longer be delayed.

Without enjoying the advantages of a careful education, Linton's natural quickness counterfeited knowledge so well that few, in every-day intercourse, could detect the imposition. He never read a book through, but he skimmed some thousands, and was thoroughly familiar with that process so popular in our Universities, and technically termed “cramming” an author. In this way, there were few subjects on which he could not speak fairly,—a faculty to which considerable fluency and an easy play of fancy lent great assistance. His great craft, however, was—and whatever may be said on the subject, it would seem the peculiar gift of certain organizations—that he was able, in an inconceivably short time, to worm himself into the confidence of almost all with whom he came in contact. His natural good sense, his singularly clear views, his ever ready sympathy, but, more than all, the dexterity with which he could affect acquaintance with topics he was all but totally ignorant of, pointed him out as the very person to hear the secrets of a family.

Mr. Corrigan was not one to exact any great efforts of Linton's tact in this walk; his long isolation from the world, Joined to a character naturally frank, made him communicative and open; and before Linton had passed a week under his roof, he had heard all the circumstances of the old forfeiture, and the traditionary belief of the family that it had been withdrawn under a special order of the King in council.

“You are quite right,” said Linton, one night, as this theme bad been discussed for some hours, “never to have alluded to this in any correspondence with Cashel. His hasty and excitable temper would have construed the whole into a threat; and there is no saying how he might have resented it.”

“I did not speak of it for a very different reason,” said old Corrigan, proudly; “I had just accepted a favor—and a great one—at his hands, and I would not tarnish the lustre of his noble conduct by even the possibility of self-interest.”

Linton was silent; a struggle of some kind seemed working within him, but he did not speak, and at last sauntered from the room, and passed out into the little garden in front.

He had not gone far, when he heard a light footstep on the gravel behind him. He turned, and saw Mary Leicester.

“I have followed you, Mr. Linton,” said she, in a voice whose agitation was perceptible, “because I thought it possible that some time or other, in your close intimacy with Mr. Cashel, you might allude to this topic, and I know what distress such a communication would occasion to my grandfather. Our claim—if the word be not inapplicable—can never be revived; for myself, there is no condition of privation I would not rather meet, than encounter the harassing vicissitudes of a struggle which should embitter my poor dear grandfather's few years on earth. The very mention of the theme is sure to render him irritable and unhappy. Promise me, then, to avoid the subject as much as possible here, and never to advert to it elsewhere.”