Roland grew deadly pale, but in a faint voice replied, “It is true.”
“Are you willing to keep your pledge?” said Rica, firmly.
Cashel made no answer but a slight motion of the bead.
“Then she is yours,” said Rica, placing Mary Leicester's hand in his; while Maritaña, in a transport of feeling, fell into her father's arms and sobbed aloud.
“Then we are all bound at once for Ireland,” cried Mr. Corrigan; “and I trust never to leave it more.”
“I will not promise,” said Cashel, as he drew Mary closer to him. “The memories I bear of the land are not all painless.”
“But you have seen nothing of Ireland that was Irish!” exclaimed Tiernay, boldly. “You saw a mongrel society made up of English adventurers, who, barren of hope at home, came to dazzle with their fashionable vices the cordial homeliness of our humbler land. You saw the poor pageantry of a mock court, and the frivolous pretension of a tinsel rank. You saw the emptiness of pretended statesmanship, and the assumed superiority of a class whose ignorance was only veiled by their insolence. But of hearty, generous, hospitable Ireland—of the land of warm impulses and kindly affections—you saw nothing. That is a country yet to be explored by you; nor are its mysteries the less likely to be unravelled that an Irish wife will be your guide to them. And now to breakfast, for I am famishing.”
Where the characters of a tale bear a share in influencing its catastrophe, the reader seems to have a prescriptive right to learn something of their ultimate destiny, even though the parts they played were merely subordinate. Many of ours here cannot lay claim to such an interest, and were seen but like the phantoms which a magic lantern throws upon the wall,—moving and grouping for a moment and then lost forever.
It is from no want of respect to our reader, if we trace not the current of such lives; it is simply from the fact that when they ceased to act, they ceased, as it were, to exist. Are we not, all of us in the world, acted upon and influenced by events and people,—purely passers-by, known to-day, seen perhaps for a week, or known for a month, and yet never after met with in all life's journey? As on a voyage many a casual air of wind, many a wayward breeze helps us onward, and yet none inquire “whence it cometh or whither it goeth,”—so is it in the real world; and why not in the world of fiction, which ought to be its counterpart?
Of those in whom our interest centred, the reader knows all that we know ourselves. Would he, or rather she, care to learn that the elder Miss Kennyfeck never married, but became a companion to Lady Janet, who on the death of Sir Andrew, caused by his swallowing a liniment, and taking into his stomach what was meant for his skin, went abroad, and is still a well-known character in the watering-places of Germany, where she and her friend are the terror of all who tremble at evil-speaking and slandering?