Visions of a crabbed, hard-headed, hard-fact, singularly uninteresting Englishman crossed my mind as I helplessly gazed at my uncle’s epistle—of mornings spent in debating the question of Home Rule versus Imperial legislation; of days engaged in quoting acts of Parliament and compiling statistics; of evenings behind the horror of a white choker, passed in dissecting and arranging these statistics, converting figures into facts, and facts into figures—this dreary drudgery instead of the delectable society of the bright, happy, and joyous Harry Welstone, of mornings on the hillside, of days in the turnip-fields looking for the identical partridge of which my uncle had made honorable mention in his letter, of evenings whirled through in chatting over old times and old associations. What cared I for Mr. Butt or Home Rule, the land question, fixity of tenure, tenant right, and such bother? If my tenants required time to pay the rent, they got it. If they required help toward fencing, draining, top-dressing, or thatching, they got it. If they were twelve months in arrear, they came to my mother to plead for them; if over that period, they invariably waited for the annual visit of my Uncle Jimmy, in order to utilize him as ambassador; and my private opinion is, that upon one occasion, in order to keep up the credit of a family distantly related to his valet, Barney Corcoran, he paid the rent himself. I dare not hint at such a thing, but I feel thoroughly assured that the money came out of his own pocket. In the end, however, things generally came right, and delay in this case did not prove dangerous.
I read my uncle’s epistle twice, confounded him once, and contented myself by showering mild maledictions upon the heads of his English friends with a fervor that bore witness to my feelings of chagrin and disappointment.
The letters were duly written to Mr. and Miss Hawthorne and forwarded to the Shelborne.
“An’ yez are not goin’ to Derravanagh?” asked Ned Clancy, my game-keeper, in tones betraying the deepest dejection—“afther all me thrubble wud the birds, an’ the dogs blue-mowlded for a set. Begorra, I dunno what I’ll do wud the poor bastes. I tould thim we wor aff in the mornin’, an’ now be me song it’s at home they’ll have for to stay an’ set gruel.”
“I’m sorry to say I can’t go, Ned, as I expect an English gentleman and his daughter to visit us”; and, wishing to impress him with their importance, added: “He is a member of Parliament, and is coming over to study the Home-Rule question.”
My addendum failed to produce the desired effect.
“An’ much he’ll larn here,” observed Clancy with a toss of his head. “Av he axes the quollity for information, sorra an information they have for to give him; an’ if he axes the poorer soart, they’ll only cod him, bad cess to him!”
Ned Clancy was even more fatally “sold” than I by the postponement of our visit to Derravanagh; for a certain blue-eyed colleen, the daughter of a “warm” farmer living close to the shooting-lodge, had succeeded in stirring tender emotions in the region lying beneath Mr. Clancy’s waistcoat on the left side, which, while productive of joy, were equally productive of pain, since the sunshine of her presence was unhappily counterbalanced by the very prolonged shadow of her absence. Forty miles lay between him and the object of his admiration; and although there are but seventy thousand four hundred yards in forty miles, still it is a long road for a gentleman to travel, unless he is pretty certain of his welcome, and as yet Ned Clancy had “never told his love.”
“Mebbe yer honor wud like for to show this English gintleman the counthry; an’ shure, in regard to scenery, there’s no batin’ Derrynacushla all the ways be Derravanagh. Sorra a finer sight nor the view from Ballyknocksheelin hill; it flogs Rooshia, Ashia, an’ Africa—so Misther Corcoran, yer uncle’s boy, tould me; an’ shure he ought for to know, be raisin’ av his havin’ travelled all the world, likewise Arabia.”
“I’m afraid it’s a little too far, Ned.”