“Rags, indeed,” said Catty. “It's well it becomes you to wear rags!” and her eyes sparkled with indignant passion. “Faith, if it comes to that,”—here she suddenly paused, and a pale hue spread over her features like a qualm of faintish sickness,—“may the Holy Mother give me help and advice; for sometimes I'm nigh forgetting myself!”
“My dear old Catty,” said Mary, fondly, “don't fret about me and my foolish speech. I only said it in jest. I have everything,—far more than I want; a thousand times more than I desire. And my excellent aunt never said a truer thing in her life than when she declared that 'everybody spoiled me.' Now, good-night.” And kissing the old woman affectionately, Mary gathered up the stray fragments of her riding-gear, and hurried away, her merry voice heard cheerfully as she wended her way up many a stair and gallery to her own chamber.
If Mary Martin's character had any one quality preeminently remarkable, it was the absence of everything like distrust and suspicion. Frankness and candor itself in all her dealings, she never condescended to impute secret motives to another; and the very thought of anything like mystery was absolutely repugant to her nature. For the very first time in her life, then, she left old Catty Broon with a kind of uneasy, dissatisfied impression. There was a secret, and she was somehow or other concerned in it; so much was clear. How could she convince the old woman that no revelation, however disagreeable in itself, could be as torturing as a doubt? “Can there be anything in my position or circumstances here that I am not aware of? Is there a mystery about me in any way?” The very imagination of such a thing was agony. In vain she tried to chase away the unwelcome thought by singing, as she went, by thinking over plans for the morrow, by noting down, as she did each night, some stray records of the past day; still Catty's agitated face and strange emotion rose before her, and would not suffer her to be at rest.
To a day of great excitement and fatigue now succeeded a sleepless, feverish night, and morning broke on her unrefreshed, and even ill.
CHAPTER XIV. A FINE OLD IRISH BARRISTER
Can any one tell us what has become of that high conversational power for which Ireland, but more especially Dublin, was once celebrated? Have the brilliant talkers of other days left no successors? Has that race of delightful con-vivialists gone and disappeared forever? Or are we only enduring an interregnum of dulness, the fit repose, perhaps, after a period of such excitement? The altered circumstances of the country will doubtless account for much of this change. The presence of a Parliament in Ireland imparted a dignity and importance to society, while it secured to social intercourse the men who made that Senate illustrious. The Bar, too, of former days, was essentially the career of the highest class, of those who had the ambition of political success without the necessity of toiling for it through the laborious paths of the law; and thus the wit, the brilliancy, and the readiness which gives conversation its charm, obtained the high culture which comes of a learned profession, and the social intercourse with men of refined understanding.
With the Union this spirit died out. Some of the brightest and gayest retired from the world, sad, dispirited, and depressed; some felt that a new and very different career was to open before them, and addressed themselves to the task of conforming to new habits and acquiring new influences; and others, again, sought in the richer and greater country the rewards which they once were satisfied to reap in their own. With the Union, society in Dublin—using the word in its really comprehensive sense—ceased to exist. The great interests of a nation departed, men sank to the level of the small topics that engaged them, and gradually the smallest and narrowest views of mere local matters usurped the place of great events and liberal speculations. Towards the end of the first quarter of the present century, a few of those who had once made companionship with Curran and Grattan and Lysaght and Parsons were still in good health and vigor. A fine, high-hearted, manly class they were, full of that peculiar generosity of character which has ever marked the true Irish gentleman, and with a readiness in humor and a genial flow of pleasantry which rendered their society delightful.
Of this school—and probably the last, for he was then the Father of the Bar—was Valentine Repton, a man whose abilities might have won for him the very highest distinctions, but who, partly through indolence, and partly through a sturdy desire to be independent of all party, had all his life rejected every offer of advancement, and had seen his juniors pass on to the highest ranks of the profession, while he still wore his stuff-gown, and rose to address the Court from the outer benches.
He was reported in early life to have professed very democratic opinions, for which he more than once had incurred the deep displeasure of the authorities of the University. The principles of the French Revolution had, however, been gradually toned down in him by time, and probably by a very aristocratic contempt for the party who advocated them; so that soon after he entered on his career at the Bar he seemed to have abandoned politics; nor, except by a sly jest or an epigram upon a party leader, no matter of which side, did he ever advert to the contests of statecraft.