Poor Owen would have shed his best blood to be able to ask after Mary—to learn how she was, and how she bore up under the disasters of the time; but he never mentioned her name: and as for Phil Joyce, his gloomy thoughts had left no room for others, and he parted from Owen without a single allusion to her. “Good night, Owen,” said he, “and don't forget your promise to come and see us soon.”
“Good night, Phil,” was the answer; “and I pray a blessing on you and yours.” A slight quivering of the voice at the last word was all he suffered to escape him; and they parted.
THIRD ERA
From that day, the pestilence began to abate in violence. The cases of disease became fewer and less fatal; and at last, like a spent bolt, the malady ceased to work its mischief. Men were slow enough to recognise this bettered aspect of their fortune. Calamity had weighed too heavily on them to make them rally at once. They still walked like those who felt the shadow of death upon them, and were fearful lest any imprudent act or word might bring back the plague among them.
With time, however, these features passed off: people gradually resumed their wonted habits; and, except where the work of death had been more than ordinarily destructive, the malady was now treated as “a thing that had been.”
If Owen Connor had not escaped the common misfortune of the land, he could at least date one happy event from that sad period—his reconciliation with Phil Joyce. This was no passing friendship. The dreadful scenes he had witnessed about him had made Phil an altered character. The devotion of Owen—his manly indifference to personal risk whenever his services were wanted by another—his unsparing benevolence,—all these traits, the mention of which at first only irritated and vexed his soul, were now remembered in the day of reconciliation; and none felt prouder to acknowledge his friendship than his former enemy.
Notwithstanding all this, Owen did not dare to found a hope upon his change of fortune; for Mary was even more distant and cold to him than ever, as though to shew that, whatever expectations he might conceive from her brother's friendship, he should not reckon too confidently on her feelings. Owen knew not how far he had himself to blame for this; he was not aware that his own constrained manner, his over-acted reserve, had offended Mary to the quick; and thus, both mutually retreated in misconception and distrust. The game of love is the same, whether the players be clad in velvet or in hodden grey. Beneath the gilded ceilings of a palace, or the lowly rafters of a cabin, there are the same hopes and fears, the same jealousies, and distrusts, and despondings; the wiles and stratagems are all alike; for, after all, the stake is human happiness, whether he who risks it be a peer or a peasant! While Owen vacillated between hope and fear, now, resolving to hazard an avowal of his love and take his stand on the result, now, deeming it better to trust to time and longer intimacy, other events were happening around, which could not fail to interest him deeply. The new agent had commenced his campaign with an activity before unknown. Arrears of rent were demanded to be peremptorily paid up; leases, whose exact conditions had not been fulfilled, were declared void; tenants occupying sub-let land were noticed to quit; and all the threatening signs of that rigid management displayed, by which an estate is assumed to be “admirably regulated,” and the agent's duty most creditably discharged.