The Earl's promise

by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

Not having confined to his own bosom the purport of this journey, the Kingslough rabble got hold of it, and decided that an auspicious time for giving public expression to their feelings had arrived.

A meeting therefore was convened to take place on the day of Mr. Brady’s departure, when it was decided that gentleman should be hung in effigy, and a scaffold for this laudable purpose was actually in course of erection, when an extremely strong hint from the magistrates stopped its further progress. Not to be defeated, however, within twenty-four hours Kingslough and its neighbourhood was startled from its propriety by the sight of monster bills, which occupied every available space where it was possible to placard the announcement, stating that the body of Mr. Daniel Brady would be removed from Somerford Street to its place of interment on the following day, at four o’clock P.M., when the attendance of friends would be esteemed a favour.

Now Somerford Street—not an inconsiderable thoroughfare in the early days of Ballylough—had by a not infrequent turn of times’ wheel become one of the lowest, dirtiest, most disreputable lanes in Kingslough—a lane where vice and filth caroused in wretched fashion together; where sin and misery waved their rags in defiance of law and decency; whence respectability fled as from the plague; where shame, remorse, repentance, hope, could not exist for an hour, save it might be—and sometimes God be praised it was—for a few hours in the last extremity.

To condense the whole matter into a sentence, Somerford Street was as bad a street as could have been found even in the Liberties of Dublin, and its inhabitants were as little like men, women, and children, as men, women, and children can ever be. It was a place which, even in its own small way, need not have been afraid to hold up its head with very much more notorious courts and lanes London is sufficiently blessed to reckon within a certain area of Charing Cross at the present day; and it was from this den, inhabited by vice and misery, that Mr. Brady’s obsequies were announced to take place.

What did it mean? Kingslough asked itself in a dull, stupid, inconsequent sort of way.

In a few hours more Kingslough knew, for over the first bills were pasted a second series so scurrilous, so profane, that nowhere out of the Isle of Saints could so scandalous a broadsheet have been produced.

They were not torn down. Decent people did not care to be mixed up in such an affair; the authorities were averse to acting in the matter without advice and consultation, and perhaps feared, as authorities in great cities have since unwisely feared, to make mountains out of molehills by premature interference.

So Kingslough read, and held up its hands, or gravely shook its head, or passed on without sign, or smiled with grim approval of the atrocious bill, or expressed its sympathy in drunken words full of significance, and looks more significant still.

It was the early summer time. Once again the crops were springing and ripening at the Castle Farm. Crops not sown this time by Amos or one belonging to him; and it was light in that northern latitude so soon in the morning, that to get out in the grey dawn almost involved sitting up during the few hours of the short night.

Nevertheless, in the grey dawn some one was astir tearing down those disgraceful placards. Slowly and calmly the sea came rippling in on the shore, closely the blinds were drawn on the Parade and in the houses of Glendare Terrace, in the east there was still not a glimpse of the rising sun, whilst rapidly and nervously the flitting figure did its work.