“It is the strict truth, sir,” said Repton. “The whole history of the case adds one to the thousand instances of the miserable failures men make who seek by the indulgence of their own caprices to obstruct the decrees of Providence. Darcy Martin died in the belief that he had so succeeded; and here, now, after more than half a century, are the evidences which reverse his whole policy, and subvert all his plans.”
“But what could have been the object here?” asked Nelligan.
“Simply his preference for the younger-born. No sooner had the children arrived at that time of life when dispositions display themselves, than he singled out Godfrey as his favorite. He distinguished him in every way, and as markedly showed that he felt little affection for the other. Whether this favoritism, so openly expressed, had its influence on the rest of the household, or that really they grew to believe that the boy thus selected for peculiar honor was the heir, it would be very difficult now to say. Each cause may have contributed its share; all we know is, that when sent to Dr. Harley's school, at Oughterard, Godfrey was called the elder, and distinguished as such by a bit of red ribbon in his button-hole. And thus they grew up to youth and manhood,—the one flattered, indulged, and caressed; the other equally depreciated and undervalued. Men are, in a great measure, what others make them. Godfrey became proud, indolent, and overbearing; Barry, reckless and a spendthrift Darcy Martin died, and Godfrey succeeded him as matter of course; while Barry, disposing of the small property bequeathed to him, set out to seek adventures in the Spanish Main.
“I am not able to tell, had you even the patience to hear, of what befell him there; the very strangest, wildest incidents are recorded of his life, but they have no bearing on what we are now engaged in. He came back, however, with a wife, to find his brother also married. This is a period of his life of which little is known. The brothers did not live well together. There were serious differences between them; and Lady Dorothea's conduct towards her sister-in-law, needlessly cruel and offensive, as I have heard, imbittered the relations between them. At last Barry's wife died, it was said, of a broken heart, and Barry arrived at Cro' Martin to deposit his infant child with his brother, and take leave of home and country forever.
“Some incident of more than usual importance, and with circumstances of no common pain, must now have occurred; for one night Barry left the castle, vowing nevermore to enter it. Godfrey followed, and tried to detain him. A scene ensued of entreaty on one side, and passionate vehemence on the other, which brought some of the servants to the spot. Godfrey imperiously ordered them away; they all obeyed but Catty. Catty Broon followed Barry, and never quitted him that night, which he spent walking up and down the long avenue of the demesne, watching and waiting for daybreak. We can only conjecture what, in the violence of her grief and indignation, this old attached follower of the house might have revealed. Barry had always been her favorite of the two boys; she knew his rights; she had never forgotten them. She could not tell by what subtleties of law they had been transferred to another, but she felt in her heart assured that in the sight of God they were sacred. How far, then, she revealed this to him, or only hinted it, we have no means of knowing. We can only say that, armed with a certain fact, Barry demanded the next day a formal meeting with his brother and his sister-in-law. Of what passed then and there, no record remains, save, possibly, in that sealed packet; for it bears the date of that eventful morning. I, however, am in a position to prove that Barry declared he would not disturb the possession Godfrey was then enjoying. 'Make that poor child,' said he, alluding to his little girl, your own daughter, and it matters little what becomes of me.' Godfrey has more than once adverted to this distressing scene to me. He told me how Lady Dorothea's passion was such that she alternately inveighed against himself for having betrayed her into a marriage beneath her, and abjectly implored Barry not to expose them to the shame and disgrace of the whole world by the assertion of his claim. From this she would burst out into fits of open defiance of him, daring him as an impostor; in fact, Martin said, 'That morning has darkened my life forever; the shadow of it will be over me to the last hour I live!' And so it was! Self-reproach never left him: at one time, for his usurpation of what never was his; at another, for the neglect of poor Mary, who was suffered to grow up without any care of her education, or, indeed, of any attention whatever bestowed upon her.
“I believe that, in spite of herself, Lady Dorothea visited the dislike she bore Barry on his daughter. It was a sense of hate from the consciousness of a wrong,—one of the bitterest sources of enmity! At all events, she showed her little affection,—no tenderness. Poor Godfrey did all that his weak and yielding nature would permit to repair this injustice; his consciousness that to that girl's father he owed position, fortune, station, everything, was ever rising up in his mind, and urging him to some generous effort in her behalf. But you knew him; you knew how a fatal indolence, a shrinking horror of whatever demanded action or energy overcame all his better nature, and made him as useless to all the exigencies of life as one whose heart was eaten up by selfishness.
“The remainder of this sad story is told in very few words. Barry Martin, from whom for several years before no tidings had been received, came suddenly back to England. At first it had not been his intention to revisit Ireland. There was something of magnanimity in the resolve to stay away. He would not come back to impose upon his brother a renewal of that lease of gratitude he derived from him; he would rather spare him the inevitable conflict of feeling which the contrast of his own affluence with the humble condition of an exile would evoke. Besides, he was one of those men whom, whatever Nature may have disposed them to be, the world has so crushed and hardened that they live rather to indulge strong resentments and stern duties than to gratify warm affections. Something he had accidentally heard in a coffee-room—the chance mention by a traveller recently returned from Ireland—about a young lady of rank and fortune whom he had met hunting her own harriers alone in the wildest glen of Connemara, decided him to go over there, and, under the name of Mr. Barry, to visit the scenes of his youth.
“I have but to tell you that it was in that dreary month of November, when plague and famine came together upon us, that he saw this country; the people dying on every side, the land until led, the very crops in some places uncut, terror and dismay on every side, and they who alone could have inspired confidence, or afforded aid, gone! Even Cro' Martin was deserted,—worse than deserted; for one was left to struggle alone against difficulties that the boldest and the bravest might have shrunk from. Had Barry Martin been like any other man, he would at once have placed himself at her side. It was a glorious occasion to have shown her that she was not the lone and friendless orphan, but the loved and cherished child of a doting father. But the hard, stern nature of the man had other and very different impulses; and though he tracked her from cottage to cottage, followed her in her lonely rambles, and watched her in her daily duties, no impulse of affection ever moved him to call her his daughter and bring her home to his heart. I know not whether it was to afford him these occasions of meeting her, or really in a spirit of benevolence, but he dispensed large sums in acts of charity among the people, and Mary herself recounted to me, with tears of delight in her eyes, the splendid generosity of this unknown stranger. I must hasten on. An accident, the mere circumstance of a note-book dropped by some strange chance in Barry's room, revealed to him the whole story of Captain Martin's spendthrift life; he saw that this young man had squandered away not only immense sums obtained by loans, but actually bartered his own reversionary right to the entire estate for money already lost at the gaming-table.
“Barry at once set out for Dublin to call upon me and declare himself; but I was, unfortunately, absent at the assizes. He endeavored next to see Scanlan. Scanlan was in London; he followed him there. To Scanlan he represented himself as a money-lender, who, having come to the knowledge of Merl's dealings with young Martin, and the perilous condition of the property in consequence, offered his aid to re-purchase the reversion while it was yet time. To effect this bargain, Scanlan hastened over to Baden, accompanied by Barry, who, however, for secrecy' sake, remained at a town in the neighborhood. Scanlan, it seems, resolved to profit by an emergency so full of moment, and exacted from Lady Dorothea—for Martin was then too ill to be consulted—the most advantageous terms for himself. I need not mention one of the conditions,—a formal consent to his marriage with Miss Martin! and this, remember, when that young lady had not the slightest, vaguest suspicion that such an indignity could be offered her, far less concurred in by her nearest relatives! In the exuberance of his triumph, Scanlan showed the formal letter of assent from Lady Dorothea to Barry. It was from this latter I had the account, and I can give you no details, for all he said was, 'As I crushed it in my hand, I clenched my fist to fell him to the ground! but I refrained. I muttered a word or two, and got out into the street. I know very little more.'
“That night he set out for Baden; but of his journey I know nothing. The only hint of it he ever dropped was when, giving me this key, he said, 'I saw Godfrey.'