Equally vigorous, as I have said, was the growth of character. There was room in those spacious days for expansion, and the advantage was not wasted. There was an old lady who lived in West Carbery, and died some fifty years ago, about whom legend has accumulated. She lived in a gaunt grey house, that still exists, and is as suggestive of a cave as anything as high and narrow, and implacably symmetrical, can be. Tall elms enshroud it, and rooks at evening make a black cloud about it. It has now been civilised, but I can remember the awe it inspired in me as a child. She was of distinguished and ancient family (though she was born in such remote ages that one would say there could have been scarcely more than two generations between her and Adam and Eve). She was very rich, and she was a miser of the school of comic opera, showy and dramatic. Her only son, known, not without reason, as “Johnny Wild,” is said, after many failures, to have finally extracted money from her by the ingenious expedient of inveigling her into a shed in which was a wicked bull, and basing a claim for an advance on the probability that the bull would do the same. She lost ten shillings on a rent day, and raised it among her tenants by means of a round-robin. Her costume was that of a scarecrow that has lost all self-respect, yet—a solitary extravagance—when she went in a train she travelled first-class. It is said that on a journey to Dublin she was denounced to the guard as a beggar-woman who had mistaken the carriage. It happened that the denouncer was a lady with a courtesy-title derived from a peerage of recent and dubious origin. The beggar-woman threatened to recite their respective pedigrees on the platform, and the protest was withdrawn. Naturally she fought with most of her neighbours, specially her kinsfolk, and, as a result of a specially sanguinary engagement, announced that she would never again “set foot” in the village sacred to her clan (and it may be noted that the term “to set foot” invariably implies something sacrificial, a rite, but one always more honoured in the breach than in the observance) “until the day when she went into it with four horses and her two feet foremost,” which referred to her final transit to the family burying-ground. On her death-bed, a cousin, not unnaturally anxious as to her future welfare, offered to read to her suitable portions of the Bible, but the offer was declined.

“Faith, my dear, I’ll not trouble ye. I know it all by heart; but I’m obliged to ye, and I wish I had a pound that I might give it ye, but I haven’t so much as a ha’penny.”

She shortly afterwards died, and there was found in her bedroom, in a desk, £500, and a further £20 was discovered rolled up in an old bonnet, a black straw bonnet with bright green ribbons.

CHAPTER V
EARLY WEST CARBERY

I have already commented on the social importance, and value, of the feuds of a century ago. Fights were made, like the wall-papers, the carpets, the furniture, to last. Friendships too, I daresay, but though it was possible to dissolve a friendship, the full-fledged fight, beaked and clawed, was incapable as an eagle of laying down its weapons.

Such a fight there was between two sisters, both long since dead. They were said to have been among “The Beauties of the Court of the Regent”—delightful phrase, bringing visions of ringlets and rouge, and low necks and high play—and both were famed for their wit, their charm, and their affection for each other. Still unmarried, their mother brought them home to Castle Townshend (for reasons not unconnected with the run of the cards), not quite so young as they had been—in those days a young lady’s first youth seems to have been irrevocably lost at about three and twenty—yet none the less dangerous on that account. Most feuds originate in a difference of opinion, but this one, or so it has always been said, was due to a disastrous similarity in taste. Legends hint that a young cousin, my grandfather, then a personable youth fresh from Oxford, was the difficulty. But whatever the cause (and he married the elder sister) peace was not found in sixty years; the combatants died, and the fight outlived the fighters.

In these feebler days the mental attitude of that time is hard to realise. The stories that have come down to us only complicate the effort to reconstitute the people and the period, but they may help—some of them—to explain the French Revolution. A tale is told of one of these ex-beauties, noted, be it remembered, for her charm of manner, her culture, her sense of humour. Near the end of her long life she went to the funeral of a relative, leaning decorously upon the arm of a kinsman. At the churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her and the coffin. She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her squire, and struck the countryman in the face. It is no less characteristic of the time that the countryman’s attitude does not come into the story, but it seems to me probable that he went home and boasted then, and for the rest of his life, that old Madam —— had “bet him a blow in the face.”

There is yet another story, written in a letter to a young cousin, by my father’s cousin, the late Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, a very delightful letter-writer and story-teller, who has taken with her to the next world a collection of anecdotes that may possibly cause her relatives there to share the regret of her friends here that she did not leave them behind her.

“One more link in the chain of events,” she writes,

“Grandmamma’s sister-in-law married her brother, ‘Devil Dick,’ who was violent to madness. His mother alone was not afraid of him. She had a spirit of her own. On one occasion she went over a ship at Cork, intending to make purchases from contraband goods. She set aside chosen ones, but was stopped by the Excisemen. She looked at the basket full, raised her tiny foot (which you and I, dearest A., inherit) and kicked the whole collection overboard into the Sea!