How winning is the method of address! It has in it something of the insidious coquetry of the little dog who skips, in affected artlessness, uninvited, upon your knee.
I have strayed from my text, which was the potency of the net of relationship. Being Irish, I have to acknowledge its spell, and I think it is indisputable that a thread, however slender, of kinship adds a force to friendship.
Martin’s mother and mine were first cousins, granddaughters of Chief Justice Charles Kendal Bushe, and of his wife, Anne Crampton. I have heard my mother assert that she had seventy first cousins, all grandchildren of “The Chief,” but I think there was a touch of fancy about this. There is something sounding and sumptuous about the number seventy, and some remembrance of Ahab and his seventy relatives may have been in it. In her memoir of her brother Robert, Martin has given some suggestion of the remarkable charm and influence of these great-grandparents of ours. The adoration that both of them inspired distils like a perfume from every record of them. They seem to have obliterated all their rival grandfathers and grandmothers. One reflects that each of the seventy first cousins must have possessed four grandparents, yet, in the radiance of this couple, the alternative grandpapas and grandmammas appear to have been, in the regard of their grandchildren, no more than shadows.
They lived in a strangely interesting time, the time of the Union, when there was room in the upper classes for each individual to be known to each, and the proportion of those that governed, and those that were governed, was as the players in an international cricket match to the lookers-on; and it is not too much to boast that, out of a very brilliant team, there was no better innings played than that of Charles Kendal Bushe. When, as in “the ’98,” the lookers-on attempted to join in the game, the result exemplified their incapacity and the advantages of the existing arrangement.
Martin had been given by her mother a boxful of old family letters; one of those pathetic collections of letters that no one either wants, or looks at, or feels justified in burning. I know not for how many years they had been hidden away. We had talked, every now and then, of examining them, but the examination had been postponed for a more convenient season that never came. Now life is emptier, and time seems of less value; I have read them all, and I think that some extracts from them will not come amiss among these memories.
It would require a sounder historian than I, and one who had specialised in Irish affairs of the latter years of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, to deal adequately with these old papers. The Chief Justice and his wife lived intensely, in the very heart of the most intense time, probably, that Ireland has ever known. They knew all the rebel leaders, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the rest of the splendid romantics who fought and died, and lit with the white flame of devotion one page at least of Ireland’s history. The names of Plunket, Grattan, Saurin, later, O’Connell, and others less well known, are found in many of these letters, and there are valentines from “Jemmy Saurin,” apostrophising “the blue eyes of Kitty” (one of the Chief’s daughters, and grandmother of “Martin Ross”); genuine, perhaps, but more probably faked by the young lady’s heartless relatives; anagrams upon the name of Charles Kendal Bushe, and an epigram, written by C. K. B. himself, which has a very charming deftness, and shall be transcribed here.
To Chloe
(To accompany the gift of a watch)
Among our fashionable Bands,
No wonder Time should love to linger,
Allowed to place his two rude hands
Where others dare not lay a finger.
The more I investigate the contents of the old letter box the more fascinating they prove themselves to be.
I must, at all events, endeavour to refrain from irrelevant quotation—(even regretfully omitting “The cure for Ellen P.’s spots. Kate writes me word her face is now as clear as chrystal”)—and will try to deal only with such of the contents of the box as come legitimately within my scope.