Mr. Brown strolled over to the beach, and, seating himself upon a granite boulder, smoked on and on, buried in thought. The sea was as still as a sea in a dream, and gray, and mystic, and silent. The hush that Eve whispers as Night lets fall her mantle was coming upon the earth, and the twinkling stars began to throb in the blue-black sky; not a speck was visible on the billowy plain save a solitary fishing-boat, which now loomed out of the darkness like a weird and spectral bark.
In such scenes, and in the awful quiet of such hours, images and thoughts that dare not die are deposited upon the silent shore of memory. The man who sat gazing out to sea with his hands clasping his knees was Sir Everard Noel, the fourth baronet of a good old Yorkshire family, and owner of a fine estate between Otley and Ilkley, in the North Riding of that noble county. He was five-and-twenty, and had been his own master ever since he attained his majority, until which momentous event he had been the victim of a peripatetic guardian and the Court of Chancery, his father having died while he was yet an infant, and his mother when he had reached the age of nineteen. Freed from the yoke of his guardian, who led him a tour of the world, and placed in possession of ninety thousand pounds, the accumulation of his minority, and with an income of ten thousand a year, he plunged into the giddy whirl of London fast life, and for a brief season became the centre of a set composed of the crème de la crème, the aurati juvenes of that modern Babylon. He was liberal to lavishness, was fascinated with Clubland and écarté, losing his money with a superb tranquillity, and addicted to turning night into day. He flattered the fair sex with the “homage of a devotee,” and broke hearts as he would nutshells. Intriguing dowagers fished for him for their “penniless lasses wi’ long pedigrees,” but somehow or other, after four seasons, during which he had had several hairbreadth escapes, he still was single, still healthy and heart-whole, but minus his ninety thousand pounds.
During his minority he had wooed Art, wisely and well, and even while the daze of deviltry was upon him he never totally neglected her. He painted with more than the skill of a mere amateur, and had even the best of it in a tussle with the art critic of the Times upon the genuineness of a Rembrandt which had burst upon the market, to the intense excitement of the cognoscenti. There was a good deal of the artist in his nature, and he was an immense favorite with the bearded Bohemians, knights of the brush, who voted him a good fellow, with the solitary drawback of being unavoidably a “howling swell.”
Four years of wasted life brought on satiety, and he turned from the past with a shudder, from the present with loathing. He wanted to do something, to be interested in something, and to shake off the sickening aimlessness of his every-day life that clung to him like a winding-sheet.
There came a day when the men in the smoking-room of the club asked each other, “Where the doose is Noel?” when wily matrons found their gushing notes of invitation unanswered; when toadies, hangers-on, and sycophants found his apartments in Half-Moon Street, Piccadilly, closed. There came a day when club and matron and toady thought of him no more. The wave of oblivion had passed over him and he was forgotten. Sic itur ad astra. Away from the fatal influences that had, maelstrom-like, sucked him into their whirl, new thoughts, new impulses, new aspirations burst into blossom, and his old love—Art—turned to him with the radiant smile of the bygone time.
There is red red blood in the veins at twenty-five, and white-winged Hope ever beckons onwards with soul-seductive gesture. He determined to seek change of scene and of thought. As Sir Everard Noel, the president of the Four-in-Hand Club; the owner of Katinka, the winner of the Chester Cup; the skipper of the Griselda, that won the queen’s prize at Cowes; the best rider with the Pytchley hounds, every hotel on the Continent, every village in Merrie England, would recognize him, and the old toadying recommence; but as plain Mr. Brown, an obscure artist, with a knapsack on his back, he would be free, free as a bird, and the summer morning this idea flashed across his mind found him once again a bright, happy, and joyous man.
Sir Everard Noel was a gentleman of warm temper and great energy, prone to sudden impulses and unconsidered actions. No sooner had he made up his mind to go upon the tramp than he started; and, considering that he would be less liable to recognition in Connemara than in Wales, made Galway the base of his supplies, and, knapsack on back, containing sketching materials and a change of flannel, a few days’ walking brought him to Monamullin in glorious health, splendid spirits, and prepared to enjoy everybody and everything.
“How much more delightful all this is,” he thought, “than the horrors I have passed through—horrors labelled pleasures! Faugh! I shudder when I think of them. Let me see, it’s ten o’clock; at this hour I would be about half-way through a miserably unwholesome dinner, spiced up in order to meet the requirements of a demoralized appetite, or yawning in an opera-box, with six or seven long, dreary hours before me to kill at any price, especially with brandy and soda. How delicious all this is! How fresh, how pure! What a dinner I ate of those rashers and eggs! And such tea! By Jove! that old lady must have a chest entirely for her own consumption. If my bed is as comfortable as it looks, I shall not awaken till the padre returns from Jyvecote’s. How disagreeable to meet Jyvecote or any of the lot! I never knew any of them but Jasper and the father. What a glorious old gentleman is Father Maurice—simple as a child, with the dignity of a saint. I had better get to bed now, as I shall begin on a Virgin and Child for him to-morrow; or, if his Stations are daubs, I can do him a set, though it will take me a deuce of a time. I must visit the chapel to-morrow; I suppose it’s very dingy.” And with a good stout yawn Mr. Brown—for we shall continue to call him by this name until the proper time comes—turned towards the cottage.
Mrs. Clancy met him at the door.
“I was afraid ye wor lost, sir,” she said as he entered the hall.