Tom Durfy had engaged a pretty cottage in the neighbourhood of Clontarf to pass the honeymoon. Tom Loftus knew this, and knew, moreover, that the sitting-room looked out on a small lawn which lay before the house, screened by a hedge from the road, but with a circular sweep leading up to the house, and a gate of ingress and egress at either end of the hedge. In this sitting-room Tom, after lunch, was pressing his lady fair to take a glass of champagne, when the entrance-gate was thrown open, and a hackney jaunting-car with Tom Loftus and a friend or two upon it, driven by a special ragamuffin blowing a tin horn, rolled up the skimping avenue, and as it scoured past the windows of the sitting-room, Tom Loftus and the other passengers kissed hands to the astonished bride and bridegroom, and shouted, “Wish you joy!”
The thing was so sudden that Durfy and the widow, not seeing Loftus, could hardly comprehend what it meant, and both ran to the window; but just as they reached it, up drove another car, freighted with two or three more wild rascals who followed the lead which had been given them; and as a long train of cars were seen in the distance all driving up to the avenue, the widow, with a timid little scream, threw her handkerchief over her face and ran into a corner. Tom did not know whether to laugh or be angry, but, being a good-humoured fellow, he satisfied himself with a few oaths against the incorrigible Loftus, and when the cortège had passed, endeavoured to restore the startled fair one to her serenity.
Squire Egan and party arrived at the appointed hour at their hotel, where Dick was waiting to receive them, and, of course, his inquiries were immediately directed to the extraordinary circumstance of Andy's elevation, the details of which he desired to know. These we shall not give in the expanded form in which Dick heard them, but endeavour to condense, as much as possible, within the limits to which we are prescribed.
The title of Scatterbrain had never been inherited directly from father to son; it had descended in a zigzag fashion, most appropriate to the name, nephews and cousins having come in for the coronet and the property for some generations. The late lord had led a roué bachelor life up to the age of sixty, and then thought it not worth while to marry, though many mammas and daughters spread their nets and arrayed their charms to entrap the sexagenarian.
The truth was, he had quaffed the cup of licentious pleasure all his life, after which he thought matrimony would prove insipid. The mere novelty induces some men, under similar circumstances, to try the holy estate; but matrimony could not offer to Lord Scatterbrain the charms of novelty, for he had been once married, though no one but himself was cognisant of the fact.
The reader will certainly say, “Here's an Irish bull; how could a man be married, without, at least, a woman and a priest being joint possessors of the secret?”
Listen, gentle reader, and you shall hear how none but Lord Scatterbrain knew Lord Scatterbrain was married.
There was nothing at which he ever stopped for the gratification of his passions—no wealth he would not squander, no deceit he would not practise, no disguise he would not assume. Therefore, gold, and falsehood, and masquerading were extensively employed by this reckless roué in the service of Venus, in which service, combined with that of Bacchus, his life was entirely passed.
Often he assumed the guise of a man in humble life, to approximate some object of his desire, whom fine clothes and bribery would have instantly warned and in too many cases his artifices were successful. It was in one of these adventures he cast his eyes upon the woman hitherto known in this story under the name of the Widow Rooney; but all his practices against her virtue were unavailing, and nothing but a marriage could accomplish what he had set his fancy upon but even this would not stop him, for he married her.