Fortunately the latest and rashest surgeon who has experimented on her so far as to cut away the grievance most bitterly complained of, has discovered there may be a tendency to hysteria in the constitution of a nation as well as of a woman, and that it does not follow because a cry is raised, “The pain is here,” that the arm or leg is to be hacked off with impunity. One man has deprived Ireland of that which kings, nor queens, nor parliament, nor statesman, can ever restore to her again. Nevertheless, he may have done both England and Ireland good service, for it will be some time before the former is tempted to try the result of another such surgical operation, let the latter cry for knife and caustic as loud and as long as she will.
CHAPTER VI.
MR. BRADY’S EX-PROJECTS.
When Mr. Brady found the Rileys had by accident or design checkmated him, he was, as a young clerk who chanced to be favoured with many of his inquiries about that period, remarked, “Neither to hold nor to bind.”
To ruin the Rileys, to oust the proud beggars—so he styled them—out of Woodbrook, to bring the old man to his level, and to humble the pride of “that fellow out in India,” had been the dearest desires of his heart for years previously.
In order to compass them he had not spared his time or his trouble; he had not objected to wade through very dirty water, he had not grumbled when asked to eat humble pie in quantity; he had not bemoaned himself when compelled to cringe to people he longed to kick, or be civil to those he hated; and now in a moment all he had saved, toiled, lived for was snatched from his grasp.
When a man first conceives the plot of either a good or a bad project it is, comparatively speaking, a small matter to find another has forestalled him in its execution. Let him, however, have nursed, tended, perfected the scheme, lain with it in his bosom at night, and taken it for his companion by day, he finds it a cruel hardship to have the one thing he fancied his own, the one good he asked in life, claimed by another.
If the punishment of deliberate wrong-doing ever could enlist our sympathies on behalf of the wrong-doer, I think it might be in a case like this, when a man having spent his all to compass his object finds at the last that it eludes his grasp; when having staked everything he possesses on the success of some villanous trick in the game of life, his intended victim, at a moment least expected, says “Checkmate” and leaves him to curse the board whereon his best designs, his longest-matured schemes, have been defeated.
On Mr. Brady the news of his enemy being at the last moment delivered out of his hands, fell with such a shock that at first he could not realize the depth of his own disappointment. Although the interest being paid might have prepared him for the settlement of the principal, he refused to believe his lawyers when they told him the whole amount had by some means been raised.
To incredulity succeeded all the fury of a balked revenge, and in his rage he accused both solicitors and capitalist with having conspired in General Riley’s favour against himself. He declared it was through them the owner of Woodbrook had heard of his own interest in the matter, to which the former replied by ordering him out of their office, and the latter remarked that if Mr. Brady did not put some restraint upon his tongue all transactions must end between them.
“I am willing to make some allowance for you,” he went on, “as I dare say the matter is as great a blow to you as it has proved a surprise to me; but I will not have such language as you used just now addressed to me by any man living; so you can take your choice, either try to be civil, or else I will have done with you and your affairs at once and for ever.”