“But in Ireland, when you return there, the society, I conclude, is very good?” asked Foglass, gradually drawing him on to revelations of his future intentions and plans.
“Who knows if I'll ever see it again? The estate has left us. 'T is them Onslows has it now. It might be in worse hands, no doubt; but they 've no more right to it than you have.”
“No right to it, how do you mean?”
“I mean what I say, that if every one had their own, sorrow an acre of that property would be theirs. 'T is a long story, but if you like to hear it, you 're welcome. It 's more pleasure than pain to me to tell it, though many a man in my situation would n't have the heart to go over it.”
Foglass pronounced his willingness at once; and, a fresh jorum of punch being concocted, Dalton commenced that narrative of his marriage, widowhood, and loss of fortune, of which the reader already knows the chief particulars, and with whose details we need not twice inflict him.
The narrative was a very long one; nor was it rendered more succinct by the manner of the narrator, nor the frequent interruptions to which, for explanation's sake, Foglass subjected him. Shall we own, too, that the punch had some share in the intricacy, Dalton's memory and Foglass's perceptions growing gradually more and more nebulous as the evening wore on. Without at all wishing to impugn Dalton's good faith, it must be owned that, what between his occasional reflections, his doubts, guesses, surmises, and suspicions, his speculations as to the reason of this and the cause of that, it was very difficult for a man so deeply versed in punch as Foglass to carry away anything like a clear notion of the eventful occurrences related. The strength of the potation, the hour, the length of the story, the parenthetical interruptions, which, although only bypaths, often looked exactly like the high-road, and probably, too, certain inaccuracies in the adjustment of the ear-trumpet, which grew to be very difficult at last, all contributed,—more or less, to a mystification which finally resembled nothing so much as a very confused dream.
Had the worthy ex-Consul then been put on his oath, he could n't have said whether or not Sir Stafford had murdered the late Mr. Godfrey, or if that crime should be attributed to Dalton's late wife. Between Sir Gilbert Stafford and Sir Stafford Onslow, he had a vague suspicion of some Siamese bond of union, but that they were cut asunder late in life, and were now drifting in different currents, he also surmised. But which of them “got the fortune,” and which had not, who held the estate at present, and how Dalton came to be there at that moment relating the story, were Chinese puzzles to him.
Murder, matrimony, debts, difficulties, and Chancery suits danced an infernal reel through his brain; and, what with the scattered fragments of Irish life thrown in incidentally, of locking dinner-parties in, and barring the sheriff out, of being chased by bailiffs, or hunting them, all these divertissements ending in a residence abroad, with its manifold discomforts and incongruities, poor Foglass was in a state which, were it only to be permanent, would have presented a spectacle of very lamentable insanity.
The nearest approach to a fact that he could come to was that Dalton ought to be enormously rich, and that now he hadn't a sixpence; that the wealthy banker was somehow the cause, Count Stephen being not altogether blameless; and that Kate was living a life of extravagance and waste, while her father and sister were waging a hard fight with the very “grimmest” of poverty.
“L'homme propose,” &c., says the adage; and the poet tells us an instance, that “those who came to scoff remained to pray.” So in the present case, Mr. Foglass, whose mission was to pump Peter Dalton out of every family secret and circumstance, had opened such an unexpected stream of intelligence upon himself that he was actually carried away in the flood.