London with Robert in it was then, as ever, for Robert’s family, a place with a different meaning—a place of theatre tickets, of luncheons, of newspaper news viewed from within, of politics and actors reduced to human personalities. It was a fixed rule that he should meet his female relatives on their arrival at Euston; it is on record that he was once in time, but it is also recorded that on that occasion the train was forty minutes late. The hum of London seasons filled his brain; London may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy bags of woodcock after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation both missed much that lay in the power of each to give.
It was while Robert was living in London that the resignation of Mr. Gladstone took place. Out of the ensuing general election in the spring of 1873 came Isaac Butt and his lieutenants, with a party of sixty Home Rulers behind them; Ireland had sent them instead of the dozen or so of the previous Parliament, and it was said that Ireland had done it in the new-found shelter of the Ballot Act. Robert knew, as anyone brought up as he was must know, that for most of Ireland the Ballot Act could not be a shelter. The Galway election of 1872 had shown to all in whose hands the great power of the franchise lay. One indefensible position had been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical, and only those who knew Robert well, understood how hard it hit him. He shot at Ross occasionally, he visited it now and then, and at every visit his perceptive nature was aware that a new spirit was abroad; in spite of the genuine and traditional feeling of the people for their old allies, in spite of their good breeding, and their anxious desire to conceal the rift. The separation had begun, and only those who have experienced it will understand how strange, how wounding it is.
It was not universal, and theoretical hostility strove always with the soft voice of memory. My father was still to all, “The Masther, the Lord have mercy on him”; the Martins were still “The Family,” who could do no wrong, whose defects, if such were admitted, were revered. “The Martin family hadn’t good sight,” said a tenant, “but sure the people say that was a proof of their nobility.”
There is an incident of one of Robert’s visits to Ross that is not too small to be worth recording. He had given his Gordon setter, Rose, to a friend who lived five miles away from Ross, and she had settled down with resignation to her new life. Trained in the language of the drawing-room, she may have heard it said that Robert was at Ross, or her deep and inscrutable perceptions may have received a wave of warning of his nearness. Whatever it was that prompted her, the old dog made her way alone to Ross, and found her master there.
In 1877 Robert turned his steps again to Dublin, and before the year was out he was living with his grandmother, and was immersed in the life, political, theatrical and social, of Dublin.
My mother’s mother, Mrs. Fox, was, as has been said, a daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and was a notable member of a remarkable band of brothers and sisters. Strongly humorous, strongly affectionate, a doughty politician, original in every idea, and delightful in her prejudices; a black letter authority on Shakespeare and Scott, a keen debater upon Carlyle, upon Miss Rhoda Broughton, upon all that was worth reading. I can see her declaiming “Henry IV” to Robert and his brethren, with irrepressible gestures of her hand, with a big voice for Falstaff, and a small voice for Mine Hostess, and an eye that raked the audience lest it should waver in attentiveness. Even as clearly can I see her, as, at a time of crisis,—it was, I think, after Gladstone’s attack on Trinity College,—she sprang from her chair, and speechlessly wrung the hand of someone who had rushed into her dining-room, crying,
“Gladstone has resigned!”
That was how she and her family took their politics.
She loved Robert with a touching devotion, and I think those days in Herbert Street were deeply woven into his memory. It was a quiet street, with a long strip of grass and hawthorns, instead of houses, forming one side of it, part of the grounds of the convent that stood at the end. There the birds sang, and a little convent bell spelt out the Angelus with a friendly voice; the old red-brick house, with its old furniture and its old china, the convent bell, with its reminder of cloistered calm, all made a suitable setting for the strictly ordered, cultured life of the old lady who bestowed on them their appropriateness.
In the spring of ’78 Robert was in the thick of amateur theatricals. He was never a first-rate actor, but he was a thoroughly reliable one; he always knew his part, though none could say how or when he learned it, he could “gag” with confidence, and dropped on to his cue unerringly, and he had that liking for his audience that is the shortest cut to being on good terms with them. His gift in ready verse was not allowed to remain idle. He wrote prologues, he arranged singing quadrilles; when the Sheridan Club had a guest whom it delighted to honour, it was Robert who wrote and recited the ode for the occasion; an ode that never attempted too much, and just touched the core of the matter.