Old Ike’s beginning, however, although sufficiently unpromising as regarded steadiness of habits, or the prospect of ever doing well in some settled trade or profession, was not destined to end in so fatal a catastrophe. Moreover, his was one of those characters so often met with, of which it is difficult to reconcile the apparent contradictions. With a tendency amounting to a passion for every pastime that could possibly come under the category of the term “sport,” he was yet the gentlest and most amiable of created beings, where his fellow-man was concerned. Although as a boy he would risk his neck with the greatest delight to get a bird’s nest, and when obtained seemed utterly pitiless of the poor parents’ anxiety for their offspring, the same reckless lad would sit still for hours to rock the cradle of a suffering child, or run any number of miles in the wet and the dark to bring home the medicine for itself or its mother.
Though he could handle a game-fowl with remarkable coolness in the pit, and, what is a far more brutal and debasing amusement, look on with excited interest whilst two faithful and high-couraged dogs tore and worried each other for a five-shilling stake, he could not bear to see a fellow-creature in pain, and would soothe any of the village urchins, with whom he was a prime favourite, under the infliction of a bruised knee and cut finger, as gently and tenderly as a woman. “Ike” was made up of contradictions, both within and without, nor was his moral being less twisted, and toughened, and knotted, than his frame.
Like a good many other persons in a higher sphere, “Ike” was ruined by the agreeable process of having a small fortune left him. This legacy acting on a temperament in which the love of approbation largely predominated, made him for a time an exceedingly conspicuous and remarkably popular individual in his own humble circle. He was not an idle man—far from it; but his habits were desultory—a much more dangerous characteristic. In fact, an idle man seldom does himself great positive harm. Like a vegetable, he may run to seed, or he may be trampled down; but he will not seek misfortune, and that unwelcome visitor is often a long time before she finds a tranquil person out.
Now Isaac must always be doing something; only, unluckily, it was the profitable work that ever seemed to him the most laborious. To set-to with a will, and earn a shilling by six hours’ labour, would have been the most unwelcome proposal you could have made him; yet he would readily have paid you the same money, if he had it, to carry a game-bag for fourteen or fifteen hours, over the roughest country you could choose. You see the game-bag was unproductive, and therefore attracted him irresistibly.
Ike’s fortune was not a large one. It consisted of two hundred pounds, and this he spent in about fourteen months, during which period he constantly treated some of the worst characters in the parish, and lived almost entirely in the open air, undergoing great hardship, both of work and weather, in the pursuit of that sport which to him was certainly synonymous with pleasure.
Just as he arrived at the last five-pound note of his two hundred, an Irish gentleman who was staying at Castle-Cropper, and delighted the whole neighbourhood with the breadth of his brogue, the daring of his horsemanship, and the vivacity of his manners, took a great fancy to Ike, from the masterly way in which he saw the latter fishing a pool below the Mill, and easily persuaded him to accompany him back to Ireland, as a sort of humble sporting companion. There being no profit and nothing definite to do, the situation was exactly suited to our friend; and as he could neither read nor write, it is needless to state that his patron called him his private secretary forthwith.
Most men have some period in their lives—not always the happiest while it was actually present—on which they are continually looking back, and to which they lose no opportunity of reverting, as a sort of Utopian existence, rendering everything else tame and desolate by comparison. Such, it would appear, was Ike’s residence in the county Galway. Whenever the old man’s heart was warmed and his nose reddened by his usual potation, “a little gin-and-cloves,” he would enlarge upon his favourite theme. He was never tired of detailing the glories of Bally-Blazer, the improvidence of the housekeeping, the liberality and general recklessness of “The Master.” The latter, by Ike’s account (although the narrator, it must be admitted, varied a little in his statistics), seems to have kept more young horses and old servants, drank more claret, and betted more freely on the Curragh, than any other gentleman in the West of Ireland. Here Ike acquired his principal knowledge of hunting, and a taste, which rapidly grew into a passion, for that amusement. Mounted by The Master upon what he was pleased to call “the pick of the stable,” Ike, by his own account, distinguished himself for his daring feats of horsemanship as well as by his scientific knowledge of the chase.
It is difficult to make out whether the aborigines of the country believed him to be an English relative of The Master’s, or a foreigner of distinction on a special mission from his Holiness the Pope. Isaac rather leads us to infer that the latter supposition was the favourite theory in and about the demesne. Be this as it may, under the auspices of his patron he soon became, in every sense of the word, a leading characteristic with “The Flamers,” that celebrated hunt, which has so often been immortalised in song and story. “Mr. Isaacs,” as he vows he was always called, drank, talked, and rode with the boldest, the loudest, and the thirstiest of them. He seems to have ridden in and out of the celebrated Pound at Ballinasloe, on an average, once every half-hour, during the two days and nights that well-known horse-fair is supposed to last; and it was here that Ike distinguished himself by the great and crowning exploit of his life.
It was in the old fighting, roistering days. Captain Bounceable quarrelled with Major O’Toole, upon the merits of a “harse,” as each of the belligerents was pleased to term the noble animal that originated their differences. The lie which had been told pretty frequently during the dispute, was at length given with offensive directness; and nothing but “thunder an’ turf:” pistols and coffee, could be the result. The time was hard upon midnight; the next morning was Sunday; the principals, men of the strictest orthodoxy and the soundest Protestantism. The quarrel could not possibly keep till Monday morning. Major O’Toole was impatient for action: Captain Bounceable thirsted for blood. They must have it out then and there, in the inn-garden, without waiting for daylight.
Except at the two ends of a handkerchief, however, even Irishmen cannot conveniently fight a duel in the dark. It was proposed, therefore, and agreed to with considerable cordiality, that each combatant should hold a lighted torch in his left hand, to direct his adversary’s fire; a loaded pistol in his right, to return it. But here arose an unexpected difficulty. Major O’Toole had but one arm; and, although Captain Bounceable had but one eye, the advantage was obviously on the side of the latter, in a case of steady pistol practice.