CHAPTER VIII.BAD NEWS.
Passing through Kingsloughen routefrom India to Woodbrook, Mr. John Riley was so fortunate as to obtain a good view of the vagabond procession that accompanied Mr. Brady’s effigy to its resting-place; and perhaps that gentleman had never felt so little proud of his countrymen as when—his driver compelled to draw the horse on one side and halt, in order to allow the rabble to pass—he beheld a crowd composed of the very scum of the population marching in irregular fashion to the noise made by several cows’-horns, a fife, a drum, and a fiddle, the latter musical instrument beingplayed by a blind man seated in a rickety cart, to which, with sundry broken leathern straps and stronger pieces of rope, a half-starved donkey was harnessed.
There they came, the lowest of the low, accompanied by women who looked as though they had lost every attribute of their sex, and were indeed only human because of their utter abject misery. On they came, most of them women, ragged, bonnetless, shoeless, and stockingless, clad in dirt as in a garment; their masses of unkempt, uncared-for hair, twisted into loose untidy coils at the back of their heads; a terrible sight to one who had almost forgotten such a sight was to be seen. Nor were the men one whit better, shambling along in old shoes never made for them, with torn coats or jackets, with trousers from which every trace of the original cloth had vanished, with hats and caps of every conceivable form, battered, rimless, napless, or ragged, with tufts of hair in some instances shooting like rank grass through holes in the crown, with faces always wild, reckless, haggard, now lit up with analmost demoniac excitement. On they came, cheering, cursing, singing, shouting, followed pell-mell by all the rosy-cheeked, fair-haired, bare-legged, bare-footed, dirty-faced children in the town, who danced after the procession right merrily. Some there were better clothed than those composing the mass of the crowd: men with sedate faces and unmended coats and sound shoes, who looked as though they gave their presence as a solemn duty, but who were careful to keep on the sidepaths, and allow the unwashed multitude in the roadway as wide a berth as possible.
In the middle of the people, borne on the shoulders of four stalwart ruffians, was the so-called corpse; a door torn from its hinges serving the purpose of a bier, and a piece of sacking answering for a pall.
A hideous spectacle altogether; but then as now there was no particular reason why the innocent diversions of the masses should be interfered with.
“What are they doing—what does it mean—what is it all about?” asked Mr. Riley of his driver.
“Don’t keep your face turned their way,” answered the man in a hurried whisper. “If they even[1]who you are they’ll be wantin’ to chair you. It’s burying Brady’s effigy all this is about. Come, now, keep your distance all of you,” he continued, addressing some irrepressible beggars, who, seeing a stranger, at once appealed to him for help, and with scant ceremony he began using his whip to right and left, and so kept the most importunate at bay till the procession had passed.
1. Guess.
1. Guess.
“What has Mr. Brady been doing now?” asked Mr. Riley with some curiosity, as they drove on once more.
“Nothin’ much fresh, yer honour; but they’ve taken a hathred to him, and wanted to hang him, but the magistrates wouldn’t let them put up a gallows, so now they’re goin’ to bury him on the seashore. He’s away to Dublin to get all the law money can buy against Amos Scott, and that has stirred them up a bit.”
Meantime the crowd surged on to the beach, which the receding tide had left bare, andacross the shore still wet and glistening, through pools of water, over slippery bunches of seaweed, the bearers went, stumbling and staggering, whilst the band playing more lugubrious airs than ever led the way, and the men and the women and the children followed hooting, laughing, screaming.
Arrived at the extremest distance from high-water mark it was possible to reach, a hole was dug and the body tossed in. The most voluble member of the assemblage then mounted the donkey-cart, and with a sheet wrapped round him to imitate a surplice, proceeded to deliver a travesty of the Burial Service over the grave. In language as deficient of ordinary decency as it was full of horrible profanity, he recounted the history of Daniel Brady from his cradle to his grave, and narrated to an admiring audience the way of life chosen by this man whose loss they had to deplore. A few there were among the bystanders possessed of courage enough to cry “Shame!” at passages more than usually ribald and impious, but their voices weredrowned by shrieks of laughter, by cheers and exclamations of appreciation.
When the merriment had reached its height, however, a man came picking his steps over the shore, and making his way a little into the crowd, shouted, “Silence!” in a tone that rang high above the clamour, and seemed to wander out like the dying sound of a clarion’s note over the quiet sea.
“We can’t have any more of this,” he said. “Robert Sweeney take off that rag and get out of the cart. McIlwrath, I am astonished to see a respectable man like you countenancing such disgraceful proceedings. Be off home all of you. I shall not allow you to stay here another minute.”
“You’ll let us cover the poor fellow up snug, or the tide ’ll be taking him a dance?” entreated one man with a squint and short of an arm.
“Be quick about it then,” was the answer, and the sand was shovelled in, and then trodden down by heavy boots, each bystander who wore such articles giving the grave a hearty kick, even the women left the prints of theirfeet on the surface; and then Mr. Sweeney having laconically disposed of both body and soul in a sentence it is unnecessary to transcribe, but which restored thorough good humour amongst the cowed and sullen assemblage,—the people straggled off, leaving the constabulary officer alone.
“It was better to let them finish their work,” he said to himself as he paced slowly by the water’s edge, looking after the retreating rabble, “or we should have had the thing tossing in and out with every tide. After all, Mr. Brady,” he went on, “if straws do show how the wind blows, I should not particularly care to stand in your shoes to-day.”
Of the scene which greeted his arrival in Kingslough, Mr. Riley wrote a vivid description to his old friend Mrs. Hartley; nothing could have pleased that lady better. She felt delighted that his first letter from Woodbrook should be one she could show Miss Moffat.
Handing it over to that young lady, she said, “Here is an Irish sketch drawn by a native. It is certainly not complimentary to yourfavourites. Read the letter, it will amuse you.”
But as Grace read, her face betokened anything rather than amusement; and when she finished, she folded it up and remarked,—
“I think Mr. Riley’s taste in writing that letter open to question.”
“You should try and excuse his want of appreciation, Grace; remember he has laboured under the disadvantage of living many years in another country and amongst other people.”
“It is of very little consequence whether I excuse him or not, I imagine,” replied Miss Moffat. She had not yet seen this man returned from foreign parts. Mrs. Hartley had been visited by him in London, and reported that he was much changed in every respect.
In what way this change exhibited itself, Grace did not care to inquire. That he had not come home to be at her beck and call, she perfectly understood from Mrs. Hartley’s manner of saying,—
“He begged me to give his kind regards to Miss Moffat if she had not quite forgotten an old acquaintance.”
From that day it was a noticeable thing, Miss Moffat never spoke of him as John.
The old familiar name, retained almost unconsciously through years, was laid aside and Mr. Riley took its place. Of course, he could know nothing of what she had done for him and his. How she had offered her money to save Woodbrook. How she had looked forward to seeing him once again with a mingled feeling of pleasure and pain, and it was right, quite right, he should look upon and think of her almost as a stranger.
“A lover never can be a friend,” she thought a little bitterly. “He never is able to forget having been refused,” which is not perhaps so unnatural as Grace seemed inclined to imagine.
And now came this letter; ah! the John she remembered never would have written such an one—never could, she might have conceded.
His proclivities had always of course been towards Toryism, but he was not hard against the people; he knew their faults, but he lovedtheir virtues; and now the first day he returned he could write an account of what he saw, and turn the very sins of the Irish into ridicule.
Further, he never once mentioned Nettie, although it was her husband’s effigy he beheld borne along by the populace, and he said little about Woodbrook and the state in which he found affairs; of Lucy’s marriage the only mention he made was a remark to the effect that, following the traditions of the family, she having no fortune had cast her lot with a husband who had no fortune either.
Altogether Grace felt far from satisfied. Mr. Riley recently returned from India, and John—dear old John of the happy days at Bayview—were two very different persons. On the whole Miss Moffat felt grateful to Lord Ardmorne for arranging the Woodbrook mortgage without any great amount of help from her.
“It might have made it very awkward,” she considered. “He might have fancied it necessary to be civil to me in consequence.”
And this as matters stood, Mr. John Riley evidently did not imagine necessary.
At the end of his letter, he begged to send his kind regards to Miss Moffat. That was all. No sentence about Bayview, no reference to the places both of them knew so well. To Miss Moffat it was rather a new feeling that of being left out in the cold, and she did not like it.
Mr. Riley’s letter, however, supplied her with food for reflection besides that enumerated.
Hitherto Grace had merely known vaguely that Mr. Brady was an undesirable acquaintance, a man fond of driving hard bargains, of overreaching his neighbours if he could; a man of whom his wife stood in dread, of whom the world had nothing to tell which redounded to his credit, but now all these sins and shortcomings were italicized in her mind, and a dread of some great evil befalling Nettie in consequence of the information she had given began to haunt her night and day.
She was totally in the power of this manwhom the people vilified; whose effigy they had carried through the streets, and buried with every act of contumely they could devise. She was, though in her own country, friendless, penniless, helpless.
She had dared much in order to save those who, though her own relatives, formerly discarded her; and this very courage and forgetfulness of wrongs in a great extremity helped to recommend Nettie more tenderly than ever to her old friend.
What could she do to make matters better for her? Even in the solitude of her own chamber, Grace blushed and winced to think all she could offer any one was money; but still believing the day might come when Nettie would need it, she sat down and wrote her a long touching letter, saying how hurt she felt to hear of some recent events just come to her knowledge; how she dreaded lest evil might arise out of past circumstances, to which she need not refer more particularly; how she begged and implored her if evil did arise to come at once to England and the writer. In apostscript Grace added that, lest she should at any time want money on a sudden emergency, she enclosed sufficient to meet whatever exigency might arise.
This letter she enclosed in one to Mr. Hanlon, begging him to give it into the hands of the person to whom it was addressed.
As she did so, Grace could not help smiling, and yet sighing at the memory of her Pharisaism when first Nettie devised this mode of communication.
“Ah! I did not know so much then as I do now,” thought Miss Moffat, speaking mentally, as is the habit of young ladies of small experience and limited worldly knowledge, as if she were about seventy years of age.
To this letter, after some delay, came an answer.
Nettie returned the money. She dared not keep it, she said, or she would have done so. She should never have a moment’s peace were it in the house, lest it might be discovered. Earnestly, though in few words, she thanked Grace for all her kindness; but “do notwrite to me again,” she added, “it is too great a risk to run. If ever you are able to help me, I will let you know. I never can doubt you or forget the pleasant days that may come again no more for ever. If I never see you in this world again, remember Gracie I love you far, far, more at last than I did at the first. I did not think I could cry, no matter what came or went; and yet still as I write good-bye, the words are blotted with tears.”
The days went on, and Mrs. Hartley and Grace were planning an autumn tour, with a half-formed intention of lengthening their foreign travel by going on to Rome and wintering in the Eternal City.
To Grace the idea was very pleasant. To Mrs. Hartley the prospect, much as she valued English luxuries and prized home comforts, not disagreeable.
“I should not go unless you were with me,” she said, however, to her visitor; and Grace pressed her hand in reply.
The two women were exactly suited to each other. Mrs. Hartley’s unvarying cheerfulness;her sound common sense; her abundant worldly knowledge; her stores of information;—these things were very good for a young woman like Grace, who was naturally somewhat dreamy and imaginative, and whose experiences of society, of men and women, and manners and morals, were, notwithstanding her feeling that she had been living and learning through centuries, had hitherto been limited to an extremely small circle.
On the other hand, Grace was the very person with whom to live happily. There were no wills and musts in her nature; she had no ways of her own that she insisted upon other people travelling; she was amiable, generous, frank, and gentle-mannered, and, to crown all her other excellences, she was, as Mrs. Hartley said, as good as a picture to look at.
To women whose day, if they ever had one, is over, who have ceased to compete for those prizes of love and admiration which all women are anxious to secure, even though they may not put themselves forward in the struggle, there is something extremely pleasant in thecontemplation of a pretty face, and Grace’s face was grateful to Mrs. Hartley’s critical eyes.
“I wonder what John would think of her now,” she often asked herself. “Would he fear to make a second attempt to win her, or dare I hope all may come right in the end. She is the wife for him, he is the husband for her, if they both can only be induced to think so. I must contrive to get him to join us somehow abroad,” which was indeed the secret reason for Mrs. Hartley’s advocacy of the foreign tour and her hesitation on the subject of Rome.
“Rome is a long way off,” she argued, “but we shall see what we shall see; time enough to settle about where we shall winter when the autumn comes.”
Things as regards Grace were in this tranquil state, when one afternoon, while Mrs. Hartley was out on a visiting expedition, from which her guest had begged to be excused, Miss Moffat, seated in a low chair by the window of her own especial sanctum, a small morning room which had been fittedup for and appropriated to her use, took the ‘Times’ that chanced to be lying close to her hand.
It was a warm day, one of those glorious summer afternoons so frequent in England, which are trying nevertheless to those born and bred in a colder climate, and Grace, tired and languid, let her eyes wander over the sheet, reading nothing in particular, but culling a paragraph here and another there with a sort of lazy and unexcited interest.
Suddenly, however, something met her sight which riveted her attention; she grasped the paper more firmly, she sat upright instead of leaning back; she pushed her hair away from her face as though it oppressed her, and then read the passage which had caught her notice once again more carefully. This was what it contained,—
“A shocking murder is reported as having taken place in the north of Ireland, hitherto comparatively free from the charge of agrarian outrage. The victim is a Mr. Brady, a gentleman of some property, and connected bymarriage with several families of ancient lineage and high standing. The unfortunate gentleman was discovered about a mile from his own house quite dead, though still warm. A dispute about some land is supposed to have urged on his murderer. A man named Scott has been taken into custody; a stick with which the fatal blow was dealt, and known to have belonged to Scott, having been found near the spot. The unfortunate gentleman had not yet reached the prime of life. He leaves a widow and several children to deplore his untimely fate.”
There are truths so terrible that the mind at first absolutely refuses to accept them, and like one in a dream with a stunned surprise, Grace Moffat read and re-read the paragraph, unable to realize its meaning.
Then suddenly the full horror of its statement broke upon her. It had come, then, this trouble, the prevision of which she now understood she had felt that morning when she and Mr. Hanlon walked over to the Castle Farm. It had come at a moment when she was leastprepared for it, when her thoughts were far distant from Ireland; when, much as she loved her own country, she was becoming reconciled to the ways and manners of another country; when she was learning to like English people, and beginning, as the young always can do, to find an interest in the hopes, fears, and projects of those with whom she was thrown.
How the next half-hour was passed Grace never precisely knew. The servants, glad in that orderly household of an excitement of any kind, prepared and retailed many versions of how Marrables—Mrs. Hartley’s highly respectable butler, who had a presence like a bishop and a face solemn and important as that of a parish clerk—hearing the bell ring violently hurried to the morning room, where he found Miss Moffat standing in the middle of the apartment looking like death itself; how surprised out of his dignified deportment for once, he said before he was spoken to,—
“Gracious! Miss, what has happened, and what is the matter?”
To which she replied,—“Get me something;I have had a great shock.” He fetched her wine and the housemaid water, and the lady’s maid smelling-salts and eau-de-cologne and a fan; whilst the butler suggested the propriety of sending at once for a doctor.
“No,” said Miss Moffat authoritatively, “I shall be better soon;” and she sat down and leaned back and shut her eyes, the trio regarding her with interest, not unmixed with awe the while.
Then almost directly she opened her eyes, and looking at them one after the other, remarked,—
“It is not true, is it?”
“No, Miss,” answered Marrables promptly; his acquaintance with illness was slight, but he had always heard sick people ought to be humoured.
“Ah! I forgot,” said Miss Moffat wearily. “Pour me out some wine and water, Marrables, I will take it now; and Taylor,” turning to Mrs. Hartley’s maid, “I wish you would pack up some dresses and linen for me; I must go to Ireland to-night.”
“Yes, Miss.”
“And directly Mrs. Hartley returns let me know.”
“Mrs. Hartley is here now,” exclaimed Marrables, and went out to meet his mistress, followed reluctantly by his fellow-servants.
Into the room came Mrs. Hartley dressed in all her bravery, with a face expressive of the utmost anxiety.
“What is all this, Grace, that Marrables has been frightening me with? Why, child, what has happened? You look as if you had seen a ghost.”
For answer, Grace picked up the ‘Times’ and handed it to her friend, pointing out the paragraph she wished her to read. Marrables saw her do it, and it was not long before he had read the passage also.
“What are you thinking of doing?” asked Mrs. Hartley, drawing her out into the open air, and holding a parasol over her.
“I shall go to Ireland to-night,” Grace answered.
“For what purpose?”
“Chiefly to be with Nettie, partly to see if anything can be done for Amos.”
“You think he is guilty.”
“I do not see that there can be any doubt of that. He must have been mad; but I suppose whether mad or not he will have to suffer for it all the same.”
Mrs. Hartley paused. She took in the position at once; she knew Grace’s temperament, and she felt certain she would never rest content to remain inactive at such a juncture.
“Money can do a great deal,” she remarked at last, “and influence more; and in any case I know it will be a comfort hereafter for you to think both were brought to bear on this case. Yes, my love, I will not say a word to dissuade you from your intention; I would offer to go with you myself if I thought I could be of any real assistance. Marrables shall accompany you as far as Dublin—there Mr. Nicholson can see to you. And, Grace, do not fret about the matter more than you can possibly avoid. A loophole may be found for Scott to creep through, and as for Nettie, Ifancy she will be far happier as a widow than ever she was as a wife.”
“Oh! do not say that,” Grace entreated. “It was almost the first idea which occurred to me, and I hated myself for it.”
“Well, we will not say anything about it then,” agreed Mrs. Hartley, “although if he has left her comfortably off—” but here Miss Moffat stopped her ears and refused to listen. She was recovering from the first effect of the blow, but she could not bear to hear the tragedy discussed in this matter-of-fact, cool, business-like style.
Young people are occasionally somewhat unreasonable. It jarred against Grace’s sensibilities to hear some two hours later the dinner-bell ring just as though Mr. Brady were not lying at Maryville stiff and cold, and Amos Scott not in Kilcurragh Gaol charged with his murder. Perhaps Mrs. Hartley guessed something of this, for she said,—
“Now, Grace, unless you eat I shall not allow you to go. Fasting may be all verywell in its way, and I dare say it is, but it is not well when a young lady has a long journey before her, and the prospect of a considerable amount of work to follow.”
Hearing which remark Mr. Marrables, who waited upon the ladies with his accustomed dignity, took especial care to fortify his system with a thorough good meal, and to provide against any casualties in the way of starvation by packing up a goodly supply of edibles, and laying the cellar likewise under contribution to a moderate though judicious extent.
After all, if the English are unimpulsive, they are useful; if they are undemonstrative, they are not heartless. Grace was forced to admit both these facts when she discovered everything she could possibly require packed up without a question being asked on the subject; when she found her travelling-dress laid out for her to don before dinner that she might not be obliged to hurry from table; when she saw the carriage brought round to a second, and beheld Marrables, after he had shut her and Mrs.Hartley within, mount on the box beside the coachman with no more fuss than if he were merely going to attend his mistress to the station; when she heard Mrs. Hartley, who, as a rule, did not like shortening her meals, remark,—
“Now, my dear, I think it is time we were putting on our bonnets,” and go off to prepare for a twelve miles’ drive as if it were in the ordinary course of things for an elderly lady to consider her own ease so little.
These things all impressed Grace sensibly, as did one other little trifle. At the last moment it was discovered that by some oversight Miss Moffat’s warm shawl had been left behind.
“Fetch my cloak out of the brougham,” said Mrs. Hartley immediately, and, spite of her guest’s remonstrances, she insisted on Grace taking it with her.
“Such magnificence!” exclaimed Miss Moffat, looking at the fur lining and the satin outside.
“Nonsense; it is old and worn, and shabby, but it will keep you warm. Good-bye now, my child—come back to me safe and sound—God bless you!” And the train was off.