The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly

“Kelson is a man of station and character, and if he undertakes your cause it is in itself a strong guarantee of its goodness.”

“Why, these men take all that is offered them. They no more refuse a bad suit than a doctor rejects a hopeless patient.”

“And so will a doctor, if he happen to be an honest man,” said Longworth, half peevishly. “Just as he would also refuse to treat one who would persist in following his own caprices in defiance of all advice.”

“Which touches me. Is not it so?” said the other, laughing. “Well, I think I ought to have stayed quietly here, and not shown myself in public. All the more, since it has cost me this,” and he pointed to his leg as he spoke. “But I can’t help confessing it, Philip, the sight of those fellows in their gay scarlet, caracoling over the sward, and popping over the walls and hedges, provoked me. It was exactly like a challenge; so I felt it, at least. It was as though they said, ‘What if you come here to pit your claims against ours, and you are still not gentleman enough to meet us in a fair field and face the same perils that we do.’ And this, be it remembered, to one who had served in a cavalry regiment, and made campaigns with the Chasseurs d’Afrique. I could n’t stand it, and after the second day I mounted, and – ” a motion of his hand finished the sentence.

“All that sort of reasoning is so totally different from an Englishman’s that I am unable even to discuss it. I do not pretend to understand the refined sensibility that resents provocations which were never offered.”

“I know you don’t, and I know your countrymen do not either. You are such a practical people that your very policemen never interfere with a criminal till he has fully committed himself.”

“In plain words, we do not content ourselves with inferences. But tell me, did any of these people call to see you, or ask after you?”

“Yes, they sent the day after my disaster, and they also told the doctor to say how happy they should be if they could be of service to me. And a young naval commander, – his card is yonder, – came, I think, three times, and would have come up if I had wished to receive him; but Kelson’s letter, so angry about my great indiscretion, as he called it, made me decline the visit, and confine my acknowledgment to thanks.”

“I wonder what my old gatekeeper thought when he saw them, or their liveries in this avenue?” said Longworth, with a peculiar bitterness in his tone.

“Why, what should he think, – was there any feud between the families?”

“How could there be? These people have not been many months in Ireland. What I meant was with reference to the feud that is six centuries old, the old open ulcer, that makes all rule in this country a struggle, and all resistance to it a patriotism. Don’t you know,” asked he, almost sternly, “that I am a Papist?” “Yes, you told me so.”

“And don’t you know that my religion is not a mere barrier to my advancement in many careers of life, but is a social disqualification – that it is, like the trace of black blood in a créole, a ban excluding him from intercourse with his better-born neighbors – that I belong to a class just as much shut out from all the relations of society as were the Jews in the fifteenth century?”

“I remember that you told me so once, but I own I never fully comprehended it, nor understood how the question of a man’s faith was to decide his standing in this world, and that, being the equal of those about you in birth and condition, your religion should stamp you with inferiority.”

“But I did not tell you I was their equal,” said Longworth, with a slow and painful distinctness. “We are novi homines here; a couple of generations back we were peasants – as poor as anything you could see out of that window. By hard work and some good luck – of course there was luck in it – we emerged, and got enough together to live upon, and I was sent to a costly school, and then to college, that I might start in life the equal of my fellows. But what avails it all? To hold a station in life, to mix with the world, to associate with men educated and brought up like myself, I must quit my own country and live abroad. I know, I see, you can make nothing of this. It is out and out incomprehensible. You made a clean sweep of these things with your great Revolution of ‘93. Ours is yet to come.”

“Per Dio! I ‘d not stand it,” cried the other, passionately.

“You could n’t help it. You must stand it; at least, till such time as a good many others, equally aggrieved as yourself, resolve to risk something to change it; and this is remote enough, for there is nothing that men – I mean educated and cultivated men – are more averse to, than any open confession of feeling a social disqualification. I may tell it to you here, as we sit over the fire, but I ‘ll not go out and proclaim it, I promise you. These are confessions one keeps for the fireside.”

“And will not these people visit you?”

“Nothing less likely.”

“Nor you call upon them?”

“Certainly not.”

“And will you continue to live within an hour’s drive of each other without acquaintance or recognition?”

“Probably – at least we may salute when we meet.”

“Then I say the guillotine has done more for civilization than the schoolmaster,” cried the other. “And all this because you are a Papist?”

“Just so. I belong to a faith so deeply associated with a bygone inferiority that I am not to be permitted to emerge from it – there’s the secret of it all.”

“I ‘d rebel. I ‘d descend into the streets!”

“And you’d get hanged for your pains.”

A shrug of the shoulders was all the reply, and Longworth went on: —

“Some one once said, ‘It was better economy in a state to teach people not to steal than to build jails for the thieves;’ and so I would say to our rulers it would be cheaper to give us some of the things we ask for than to enact all the expensive measures that are taken to repress us.”

“What chance have I, then, of justice in such a country?” cried the foreigner, passionately.

“Better than in any land of Europe. Indeed I will go further, and say it is the one land in Europe where corruption is impossible on the seat of judgment. If you make out your claim, as fully as you detailed it to me, if evidence will sustain your allegations, your flag will as certainly wave over that high tower yonder as that decanter stands there.”

“Here’s to la bonne chance,” said the other, filling a bumper and drinking it off.

“You will need to be very prudent, very circumspect: two things which I suspect will cost you some trouble,” said Longworth. “The very name you will have to go by will be a difficulty. To call yourself Bramleigh will be an open declaration of war; to write yourself Pracontal is an admission that you have no claim to the other appellation.”

“It was my mother’s name. She was of a Provençal family, and the Pracontals were people of good blood.”

“But your father was always called Bramleigh?”

“My father, mon cher, had fifty aliases; he was Louis Lagrange under the Empire, Victor Cassagnac at the Restoration, Carlo Salvi when sentenced to the galleys at Naples, Niccolo Baldassare when he shot the Austrian colonel at Capua, and I believe when he was last heard of, the captain of a slaver, he was called, for shortness’ sake, ‘Brutto,’ for he was not personally attractive.”

“Then when and where was he known as Bramieigh?”

“Whenever he wrote to England. Whenever he asked for money, which, on the whole, was pretty often, he was Montagu Bramieigh.”

“To whom were these letters addressed?”

“To his father, Montagu Bramieigh, Portland Place, London. I have it all in my note-book.”

“And these appeals were responded to?”

“Not so satisfactorily as one might wish. The replies were flat refusals to give money, and rather unpleasant menaces as to police measures if the insistence were continued.

“You have some of these letters?”

“The lawyer has, I think, four of them. The last contained a bank order for five hundred francs, payable to Giacomo Lami, or order.”

“Who was Lami?”

“Lami was the name of my grandmother; her father was Giacomo. He was the old fresco-painter who came over from Rome to paint the walls of that great house yonder, and it was his daughter that Bramleigh married.”

“Which Bramleigh was the father of the present possessor of Castello?”

“Precisely. Montagu Bramleigh married my grandmother here in Ireland, and when the troubles broke out, either to save her father from the laws or to get rid of him, managed to smuggle him out of the country over to Holland – the last supposition, and the more likely, is that he sent his wife off with her father.”

“What evidence is there of this marriage?”

“It was registered in some parish authority; at least so old Giacomo’s journal records, for we have the journal, and without it we might never have known of our claim; but besides that, there are two letters of Montagu Bramleigh’s to my grandmother, written when he had occasion to leave her about ten days after their marriage, and they begin, ‘My dearest wife.’ and are signed, ‘Your affectionate husband, M. Bramleigh.’ The lawyer has all these.”

“How did it come about that a rich London banker, as Bramleigh was, should ally himself with the daughter of a working Italian tradesman?”