Luttrell Of Arran

“Besides this,” resumed Bodge, with the same decision of tone, “your father might say, if he pleased, ‘You shan’t help Harry Luttrell,’ but he never could say, ‘You mustn’t help Herodotus Dodge.’ No, Sir!”

“At all events,” said Harry, “you’ll let me try my own plan first. If that fail, there will be time enough to consider the other. I’ll start to-night for Liverpool. After I have seen your friends there, I’ll go over and consult my lawyers in Dublin; and I mean to run across and see Arran – the old rock – once more. It shall be my last look at it.”

“It ain’t a beauty, that’s a fact,” said Dodge, who saw nothing of the agitation in the other’s voice or manner. “Give me an hour or two, and I’ll write the letters for you, and I’ll tell Smales that if you want any money – ”

“I shall not want it.”

“Then you’ll be unlike any other man that ever wore shoes, Sir, that’s all!” And Dodge stuffed a formidable piece of tobacco into his mouth, as though to arrest his eloquence and stop the current of his displeasure, while Harry waved him a good-by, and went out.

The same evening he started for Liverpool. The skipper’s friends were most cordial and hospitable to him. They had had long dealings with Dodge, and found him ever honourable and trustworthy, and Harry heard with sincere pleasure the praises of his friend. It was evident, too, that they were taken with young Luttrell, for they brought him about amongst their friends, introducing him everywhere, and extending to him every hospitality of their hospitable city. If Harry was very grateful for all this kindness, his mind continually reverted to the society he had so lately mixed in, and whose charm he appreciated, new as he was to life and the world, with an intense zest – the polished urbanity of Sir Gervais; the thoughtful good nature of Lady Vyner; the gentle gracefulness of Ada; even Miss Courtenay – no favourite of his, nor he of hens – yet even she possessed a winning elegance of manner that was very captivating.

Very unlike all these were the attentions that now surrounded him, and many were the unfavourable comparisons he drew between his present friends and their predecessors. Not that he was in love with Ada; he had asked himself the question more than once, and always had he given the same answer: “If I had been a man of rank and fortune, I’d have deemed my lot perfect to have had such a sister.” And really it was sister-like she had been to him; so candid, so frank, so full of those little cares that other “love” shrinks from, and dares not deal in. She had pressed him eagerly, too, to accept assistance from her father – a step she never could have taken had love been there – and he had refused on grounds which showed he could speak with a frankness love cannot speak.

“I take it,” muttered he to himself one day, after long reflection – “I take it that my Luttrell blood moves too slowly for passionate affection, and that the energy of my nature must seek its exercise in hatred, not love; and if this be so, what a life is before me!”

At last the ship-builders discovered the craft that Dodge was in search of. She was a slaver recently captured off Bahia, and ordered to be sold by the Admiralty. A few lines from Harry described her with all the enthusiasm that her beauty and fine lines could merit, and he smiled to himself as he read over the expressions of admiration, which no loveliness in human form could have wrung from him.

He sailed for Ireland on the night he wrote, but carried his letter with him, to relate what he might have to say of his meeting with his lawyer. A little event that occurred at his landing was also mentioned:

“As I was stepping into the boat that was to take me ashore, we were hailed by a large ship-rigged vessel just getting under weigh, and from which several boats, crowded with people, were just leaving. We rowed towards her, and found that they wanted us to take on shore a young lady whose class evidently prevented her mixing with the vulgar herd that filled the other boats. She was in deep mourning, and so overwhelmed with grief, that she was almost unconscious as they lifted her into the boat. I caught a mere glimpse of her face, and never saw anything so beautiful in my life. Only think! the vessel was a convict-ship, and she had gone there to take a last farewell of some father or brother, perhaps – husband it could scarcely be, she was too young for that. Can you imagine anything more dreadful? One evidently of rank and birth – there were unmistakable signs of both about her – mixing even for an instant with all the pollution of crime and wickedness that crowd the deck of a convict-ship! I asked leave to accompany her to her house or hotel, or wherever she was going, but she made a gesture of refusal; and, though I’d have given more than I dare tell to have known more about her, I thought it would be so unworthy to follow, her, that I left her the moment we landed, and never saw her more.

“I am sure I did what was right and becoming, but if you knew how sorry I am to have been obliged to do it – if you knew how, now that it is all done and passed, I think of her incessantly – ay, and follow every one I see in mourning till I discover that it is not she – you’d wonder what change has come over this thick blood of mine, and set it boiling and bubbling as it never used to do.”

He went on next to tell of his visit to the agents of his father’s property. Messrs. Cane and Carter had been duly apprised by Sir Gervais Vyner that Harry Luttrell was alive, and it scarcely needed the letter which he carried as a credential, to authenticate him, so striking was the resemblance he bore to his father.

“You should have been here yesterday, Mr. Luttrell,” said Cane. “You would have met your cousin. She has left this for Arran this morning.”

Harry muttered something about their not being known to each other, and Cane continued:

“You’d scarcely guess what brought her here. It was to make over to you, as the rightful owner, the property on the Arran Islands. We explained to her that it was a distinct deed of gift – that your late father bequeathed it to her as a means of support – for she has really nothing else – and that legally her claim was unassailable. She was not to be shaken from her resolution. No matter how we put the case – either as one of law or as one of necessity, for it is a necessity – her invariable reply was, ‘My mind is made up, and on grounds very different from any you have touched on;’ and she left us with full directions to make the requisite conveyances of the estate in your favour. I entreated her to defer her final determination for a week or two, and all I could obtain was a promise that if she should change her mind between that time and the day of signing the papers, she would let me know it. She has also given us directions about taking a passage for her to Australia; she is going out to seek occupation as a governess if she can, as a servant if she must.”

Harry started, and grew pale and red by turns as the other said this. He thought, indeed, there was some want of delicacy in thus talking to him of one so nearly allied to him. His ignorance of life, and the Irish attachment to kindred together, made him feel the speech a harsh one.

“How will it be, Sir,” asked he, curtly, “if I refuse to accept this cession?”

“The law has no means of enforcing it, Sir. There is no statute which compels a man to take an estate against his will. She, however, can no more be bound to retain, than you to receive, this property.”

“We had three hours’ talk,” said Harry, in writing this to Captain Dodge, “and I ascertained that this very property she is now so anxious to be free of, had formed up to this the pride and enjoyment of her life. She had laboured incessantly to improve it, and the condition of the people who lived on it. She had built a schoolhouse and a small hospital, and, strange enough, too, a little inn, for the place was in request with tourists, who now found they could make their visits with comfort and convenience. Cane also showed me the drawing of a monument to my father’s memory, the ‘Last Luttrell of Arran,’ she called him; and I own I was amazed at the simple elegance and taste of the design made by this poor peasant girl. Even if all these had not shown me that our old home has fallen into worthy hands, I feel determined not to be outdone in generosity by this daughter of the people. She shall see that a Luttrell understands his name and his station. I have told Cane to inform her that I distinctly refuse to accept the cession; she may endow her school or her hospital with it; she may partition it out amongst the cottier occupiers; she may leave it – I believe I said so in my warmth – to be worked out in masses for her soul – if she be still a Catholic – if all this while none of her own kith and kin are in want of assistance; and certainly times must have greatly changed with them if it be not so. At all events, I’ll not accept it.

“I own to you I was proud to think of the high-hearted girl, bred up in poverty, and tried by the terrible test of ‘adoption’ to forget her humble origin. It was very fine and very noble of her, and only that I fear if I were to see her the illusion might be destroyed, and some coarse-featured, vulgar creature rout for ever the pleasant image my mind has formed, I’d certainly make her a visit. Cane presses me much to do so, but I will not. I shall go over to the island to see the last resting-place of my poor father, and then leave it for ever. I have made Cane give me his word of honour not to divulge my secret, nor even admit that he has more than seen me, and I intend to-morrow to set but for Arran.

“I asked Cane, when I was leaving him, what she was like, and he laughingly answered, ‘Can’t you imagine it?’ And so I see I was right. They were a wild, fierce, proud set, all these of my mother’s family, with plenty of traditions amongst them of heavy retributions exacted for wrongs, and they were a strong, well-grown, and well-featured race, but, after all, not the stuff of which ladies and gentlemen are made in my country at least. You have told me a different story as regards yours.

“You shall hear from me from the island if I remain there longer than a day, but, if my present mood endure, that event is very unlikely.”

CHAPTER LXIV. ON THE ISLAND

It was late at night when Harry landed on Arran. Dark as it was, however, his sailor’s eye could mark that the little jetty was in trim order, and that steps now led down to the water where formerly it was necessary to clamber over rugged rocks and slippery seaweed. A boatman took his carpet-bag as matter of course, too, as he stepped on shore, and trifling as was the service, it had a certain significance as to the advance of civilisation in that wild spot. More striking, again, than these was the aspect of the comfortable little inn into which he was ushered. Small and unpretending, indeed, but very clean, and not destitute of little ornaments, sketches of the scenery of the island, and specimens of ore, or curious rock, or strange fern, that were to be found there. A few books, too, were scattered about, some of them presents from former visitors, with graceful testimonies of the pleasure they had found in the trip to Arran, and how gratefully they cherished the memory of its simple people.

Harry amused himself turning over these, as he sat at the great turf fire waiting for his supper. Of those who served him there was not one he recognised. Their looks and their language bespoke them as belonging to the mainland, but they spoke of the island with pride, and told how, in the season, about July or August, as many as fifteen or twenty strangers occasionally came over to visit it.

“There was a day,” said the man, “in the late Mr. Luttrell’s time, when nobody dare come here; he’d as soon see ould Nick as a stranger; and if a boat was to put in out of bad weather, or the like, the first moment the wind would drop ever so little, down would come a message to tell them to be off.”

Harry shook his head; an unconscious protest of dissent it was, but the other, interpreting the sign as condemnation, went on:

“Ay, he was a hard man! But they tell me it wasn’t his fault; the world went wrong with him, and he turned against it.”

“He had a son, hadn’t he?” asked Harry.

“He had, Sir. I never saw him, but they tell me he was a fine boy, and when he was only ten years old, got a broken arm fighting with a seal in one of the caves on the shore; and, what’s more, he didn’t like to own it, because the seal got away from him.”

“What became of him?”

“He was lost at sea, Sir. I believe he turned pirate or slaver himself, and it was no great matter what became of him. They were all unlucky men and women. No one ever heard of a Luttrell coming to good yet.”

“That’s a hard sentence.”

“You’d not think so, Sir, if you knew them; at least, so the men tell me about here. They liked the man that was here last well enough, but they said that nothing he could do would ever prosper.”

“And who owns it now?”

“Kitty O’Hara that was – Neal O’Hara’s daughter – he that was transported long ago – she’s now the mistress of the whole island, and her name – she took it by his will – is Luttrell – Luttrell of Arran!”

“Do the people like her?”

“Why wouldn’t they like her? Isn’t she working and slaving for them all day long, nursing them at the hospital, visiting them in their cabins, teaching them in the school, getting them seed potatoes from Belmullet, and hasn’t she set up a store there on the shore, where they can buy pitch, and hemp, and sailcloth, and all kinds of cordage, for less than half what it costs at Castlebar?” “How has she money to do all this?”

“Just because she lives like the rest of us. Sorrow bit better dinner or supper she has, and it’s a red cloak she wears, like Molly Ryan, and she makes her own shoes, and purtier ones you never looked at.” “And who taught her to manage all this so cleverly?” “She taught herself ont of books; she reads all night through. Come here, now, Sir! Do you see that light there? That’s her window, and there she’ll be till, maybe, nigh five o’clock, stodyin’ hard. Molly says there’s nights she never goes to bed at all.” “That light comes from the tower.”

“So it does, Sir, however you knew it,” said the man; “but it was the favourite room of him that’s gone, and she always sits there.” “And are strangers permitted to see the Abbey?” asked Harry. “Yes, Sir. All they’ve to do is to write their names in this book and send up a message that they want to see the place, and they’d see every bit of it but the two little rooms Mr. Luttrell that was used to keep for himself.”

“And if one wished to see these also?”

“He couldn’t do it, that’s all; at least, I’d not be the man that axed her leave!”

“Take my name up there in the morning,” said Harry, as he wrote “H. Hamilton” in the book, that being a second name by which he was called after his father, though he had long ceased to use it.

The supper made its appearance at this moment, and little other conversation passed between them. As the man came and went, however, he continued to speak of Miss Luttrell, and all she had done for the people in terms of warmest praise, winding up all with the remark, “That no one who had not lived the life of hardship and struggle of a poor person could ever be able to know what were the wants that press hardest – what the privations that cut deepest into the nature of the poor. And that’s the reason,” he said, “that she’ll never let any one be cruel to the children, for it was as a child herself she knew sorrow!”

Long after the man had left him, Harry sat at the fire thinking over all he had heard. Nor was it, let us own, without a certain irritation that he thought of the contrast the man drew between his father and this girl – his father, the man of mind and intellect, the scholar, the orator, the man whose early career had been a blaze of success, and yet all his acquirements and all his knowledge paled beside the active energy of a mere peasant. The reflection pained him; it chafed him sorely to admit, even to his own heart, that birth and blood were not always the superiors, and he causistically suspected that much of the praise he had heard bestowed upon this girl was little other than the reflex of that selfish esteem the people felt for qualities like their own.

And out of these confused and conflicting thoughts he set to work to paint her to his mind and imagine what she most be. He pictured her a coarse, masculine, determined woman; active, courageous, and full of expedients, with some ability, but far more of self-confidence, the great quality of those who have been their own teachers. From what Mr. Cane had told him, she was one who could take a proud view of life and its duties. That very resolve to cede the property, when she heard that there was yet a Luttrell alive to inherit it, showed that there was stuff of no mean order in her nature. “And yet,” he thought, “all this could consist with vulgar looks and vulgar manners, and a coarseness of feeling that would be repugnant.” With these imaginings he went to bed, and dreamed the whole night through of this girl.

“Have you taken my message up to the Abbey?” asked he, as he sat at breakfast.

“Yes, Sir; and Miss Luttrell says you are to go where you like. She’s off to the far part of the island this morning to see a woman in fever, and won’t be back till night.”

“Then perhaps I may be able to see those two rooms you spoke of?”