The Widow Rooney has appeared no very inviting personage through these pages, and the reader may wonder that a man of rank could proceed to such desperate lengths upon such slight temptation; but, gentle reader, she was young and attractive when she was married—never to say handsome, but good-looking decidedly, and with that sort of figure which is comprehended in the phrase “a fine girl.”
And has that fine girl altered into the Widow Rooney? Ah! poverty and hardship are sore trials to the body as well as to the mind. Too little is it considered, while we gaze on aristocratic beauty, how much good food, soft lying, warm wrapping, ease of mind, have to do with the attractions which command our admiration. Many a hand moulded by nature to give elegance of form to a kid glove, is “stinted of its fair proportion” by grubbing toil. The foot which might have excited the admiration of a ball-room, peeping under a flounce of lace in a satin shoe, and treading the mazy dance, will grow coarse and broad by tramping in its native state over toilsome miles, bearing perchance to a market town some few eggs, whose whole produce would not purchase the sandal-tie of my lady's slipper; will grow red and rough by standing in wet trenches, and feeling the winter's frost. The neck on which diamonds might have worthily sparkled, will look less tempting when the biting winter has hung icicles there for gems. Cheeks formed as fresh for dimpling blushes, eyes as well to sparkle, and lips to smile, as those which shed their brightness and their witchery in the tapestried saloon, will grow pale with want, and forget their dimples, when smiles are not there to wake them; lips become compressed and drawn with anxious thought, and eyes the brightest are quenched of their fires by many tears.
Of all these trials poor Widow Rooney had enough. Her husband, after living with her a month, in the character of a steward to some great man in a distant part of the country, left her one day for the purpose of transacting business at a fair, which, he said, would require his absence for some time. At the end of a week, a letter was sent to her, stating that the make-believe steward had robbed his master extensively, and had fled to America, whence he promised to write to her, and send her means to follow him, requesting, in the meantime, her silence, in case any inquiry should be made about him. This villanous trick was played off the more readily, from the fact that a steward had absconded at the time, and the difference in the name the cruel profligate accounted for by saying that, as he was hiding at the moment he married her, he had assumed another name.
The poor deserted girl, fully believing this trumped-up tale, obeyed with unflinching fidelity the injunctions of her betrayer; and while reports were flying abroad of the absconded steward, she never breathed a word of, what had been confided to her, and accounted for the absence of “Rooney” in various ways of her own; so that all trace of the profligate was lost, by her remaining inactive in making the smallest inquiry about him, and her very fidelity to her betrayer became the means of her losing all power of procuring his discovery. For months she trusted all was right; but when moon followed moon, and she gave birth to a boy without hearing one word of his father, misgiving came upon her, and the only consolation left her was, that, though she was deserted, and a child left on her hands, still she was an honest woman. That child was the hero of our tale. The neighbours passed some ill-natured remarks about her, when it began to be suspected that her husband would never let her know more about him; for she had been rather a saucy lady, holding up her nose at poor men, and triumphing in her catching of the “steward,” a man well to do in the world; and it may be remembered, that this same spirit existed in her when Andy's rumoured marriage with Matty gave the prospect of her affairs being retrieved, for she displayed her love of pre-eminence to the very first person who gave her the good news. The ill-nature of her neighbours, however, after the birth of her child and the desertion of her husband, inducing her to leave the scene of her unmerited wrongs and annoyances, she suddenly decamped, and, removing to another part of Ireland, the poor woman began a life of hardship, to support herself and rear the offspring of her unfortunate marriage. In this task she was worthily assisted by one of her brothers, who pitied her condition, and joined her in her retreat. He married in course of time, and his wife died in giving birth to Oonah, who was soon deprived of her other parent by typhus fever, that terrible scourge of the poor; so that the praiseworthy desire of the brother to befriend his sister only involved her, as it happened, in the deeper difficulty of supporting two children instead of one. This she did heroically, and the orphan girl rewarded her, by proving a greater comfort than her own child; for Andy had inherited in all its raciness the blood of the Scatterbrains, and his deeds, as recorded in this history, prove he was no unworthy representative of that illustrious title. To return to his father—who had done the grievous wrong to the poor peasant girl: he lived his life of profligacy through, and in a foreign country died at last; but on his death-bed the scourge of conscience rendered every helpless hour an age of woe. Bitterest of all was the thought of the wife deceived, deserted, and unacknowledged. To face his last account with such fearful crime upon his head he dared not, and made all the reparation now in his power, by avowing his marriage in his last will and testament, and giving all the information in his power to trace his wife, if living, or his heir, if such existed. He enjoined, by the most sacred injunctions upon him to whom the charge was committed, that neither cost nor trouble should be spared in the search, leaving a large sum in ready money besides, to establish the right, in case his nephew disputed the will. By his own order, his death was kept secret, and secretly his agent set to work to discover any trace of the heir. This, in consequence of the woman changing her place of abode, became more difficult and it was not until after very minute inquiry that some trace was picked up, and a letter written to the parish priest of the district to which she had removed, making certain general inquiries. It was found, on comparing dates some time after, that it was this very letter to Father Blake which Andy had purloined from the post-office, and the Squire had thrown into the fire; so that our hero was very near, by his blundering, destroying his own fortune. Luckily for him, however, an untiring and intelligent agent was engaged in his cause, and a subsequent inquiry, and finally a personal visit to Father Blake, cleared the matter up satisfactorily, and the widow was enabled to produce such proof of her identity, and that of her son, that Handy Andy was indisputably Lord Scatterbrain; and the whole affair was managed so secretly, that the death of the late lord, and the claim of title and estates in the name of the rightful heir, were announced at the same moment; and the “Honourable Sackville,” instead of coming into possession of the peerage and property, and fighting his adversary at the great advantage of possession, could only commence a suit to drive him out, if he sued at all.
Our limits compel us to this brief sketch of the circumstances through which Handy Andy was entitled to and became possessed of a property and a title, and we must now say something of the effects produced by the intelligence on the parties most concerned.
The Honourable Sackville Scatterbrain, on the advice of high legal authority, did not attempt to dispute a succession of which such satisfactory proofs existed, and, fortunately for himself, had knocked up a watering-place match, while he was yet in the bloom of heirship presumptive to a peerage, with the daughter of an English millionaire.
When the Widow Rooney heard the extraordinary turn affairs had taken, her emotions, after the first few hours of pleasurable surprise, partook of regret rather than satisfaction. She looked upon her past life of suffering, and felt as if Fate had cheated her. She, a peeress, had passed her life in poverty and suffering, with contempt from those over whom she had superior rights; and the few years of the prosperous future before her offered her poor compensation for the pinching past. But after such selfish considerations, the maternal feeling came to her relief, and she rejoiced that her son was a lord. But then came the terrible thought of his marriage to dash her joy and triumph.
This was a source of grief to Oonah as well. “If he wasn't married,” she would say to herself, “I might be Lady Scatterbrain;” and the tears would burst through poor Oonah's fingers as she held them up to her eyes and sobbed heavily, till the poor girl would try to gather consolation from the thought that, maybe, Andy's altered circumstances would make her disregarded. “There would be plenty to have him now,” thought she, “and he wouldn't think of me, maybe—so 't is well as it is.”
When Andy heard that he was a lord—a real lord—and, after the first shock of astonishment, could comprehend that wealth and power were in his possession, he, though the most interested person, never thought, as the two women had done, of the desperate strait in which his marriage placed him, but broke out into short peals of laughter, and exclaimed in the intervals, “that it was mighty quare;” and when, after much questioning, any intelligible desire he had could be understood, the first one he clearly expressed was “to have a goold watch.”
He was made, however, to understand that other things than “goold watches” were of more importance; and the Squire, with his characteristic good nature, endeavoured to open Andy's comprehension to the nature of his altered situation. This, it may be supposed, was rather a complicated piece of work, and too difficult to be set down in black and white; the most intelligible portions to Andy were his immediate removal from servitude, and a ready-made suit of gentlemanly apparel, which made Andy pay several visits to the looking-glass. Good-natured as the Squire was, it would have been equally awkward to him as to Andy for the newly fledged lord, though a lord, to have a seat at his table, neither could he remain in an inferior position in his house; so Dick, who loved fun, volunteered to take Andy under his especial care to London, and let him share his lodgings, as a bachelor may do many things which a man surrounded by his family cannot. Besides, in a place distant from such extraordinary chances and changes as those which befell our hero, the sudden and startling difference of position of the parties not being known renders it possible for a gentleman to do the good-natured thing which Dick undertook, without compromising himself. In Dublin it would not have done for Dick Dawson to allow the man who would have held his horse the day before, to share the same board with him merely because Fortune had played one of her frolics and made Andy a lord; but in London the case was different.