The last letter which my father received was as urgent as it was brief.
“Honored Masther Owen” (it began, without any of the usual preamble of good wishes),
“The owld masther is very sick. You’d do well to cum home. Ther is them that sayes he’s askin’ for you, and God knows maybe ’tis the change for deth that’s on him. The family is very poor this while back. The big house do be mostly shut up; only owld Peggy Hourihane within in the house and her daughter mindin’ the child. Me father and mother is ded. I will gos ’list for a sojer. God help us; these are bad times.
“Your faithful servant,
“Patrick Roche.”
On getting this letter, my father started at once for Ireland. I was at this time about a year old, a very ugly and stubborn little baby, so Aunt Jane has often told me; and when my mother held me high above the sunflowers at the gate, to kiss my hand to my father as he drove away, I only beat her upon the head and screamed for the pussy.
That was the last chance I ever had of seeing my father. He wrote to my mother from New York, and again from Queenstown—short dispirited letters; the latter saying that he had caught a bad cold, and felt the change from a Californian to an Irish winter very severely. A week afterwards came another letter in a strange handwriting. It was from my Uncle Dominick, and it told my mother, not unkindly, the news that she never quite recovered from. The cold which my father had spoken of had turned to pleurisy, and he had died in a hotel in Queenstown the day after he landed. The writer said that, owing to the unfortunate relations that existed between him and his brother, he had not been aware of his marriage till letters that he had found in his possession informed him of the fact. He now forwarded them to her, with his brother’s few personal effects, and remained, hers faithfully, D. Sarsfield.
The next mail brought a second letter from my Uncle Dominick. Since he last wrote, my grandfather had died; and by the terms of his will, in consequence of my father having predeceased him, the property and house of Durrus passed to the second son, the writer himself. “Had my father known that my brother had married,” wrote my uncle, he might possibly have made an alteration in the terms of the will; but as Owen had never seen fit to make any communication on the subject, no such provision was made. “The property has suffered much during the recent famine, but, as I feel sure that it would have been in accordance with my father’s wishes, I have ventured to place a small sum to your credit at the Bank of Ireland, with directions to forward it to your order.”
My mother never allowed the correspondence thus begun with my Uncle Dominick to drop altogether, and once or twice a year she would devote a couple of mornings to the toilful compilation of a letter to the brother-in-law whom she had never seen. Looking back now, I think there was something very touching in the confident way in which she relied on his interest in those annals of my childhood which filled her letters. I came upon them long afterwards, and read them with a strange mingling of feeling, very different from the wonder and longing with which I, in those childish days, saw them despatched on the first stage of their long journey, and wished that I could accompany them into the post-bag’s grimy recesses, and go to Durrus too.
I had a very happy childhood. Either my mother or Uncle James could single-handed have spoiled the best of children, and their joint efforts being devoted to giving me everything I wished for, I should, had it not been for Aunt Jane, have lived a life of lawless enjoyment. The result of their long years of subjugation was a secret exultation in the undaunted front which I bore towards my aunt, and at a very early age I had learnt to recognize the fact that we three were confederates against a common despot. Uncle James was my most daring ally, and at his instigation I committed some of my most signal and spirited misdemeanours. By the time I was sixteen, I had become, under his supervision, a young lady of varied, if unusual, attainments. I could catch and saddle my own horse; I could guide a steam-plough; I could make some attempt at Latin verse; I knew a little about the rotation of crops, and a good deal of Shakespeare and Walter Scott. Aunt Jane herself took charge of my music, and I spent a daily hour of suffering at a piano as upright and unsympathetic as she was, learning from the frayed, discoloured pages of her music-books, the old-fashioned marches, and “Scotch airs with variations,” that had formed the taste of two generations of Farquharsons.
I think my mother would have been satisfied to let me grow up as I was then doing, knowing nothing of the usual more elegant accomplishments of young ladies; and it was owing to Aunt Jane’s abhorrence of my “tom-boy tricks” that the first great change in my life was made. The climax came one early summer morning, when, possessing myself of Uncle James’s gun, I crept out to try and slay one of the big “jack-rabbits” that abounded on the ranch.