Tony Butler

“And old Colonel Orde says that he is intriguing to get in for the borough of Coleraine; that he saw him in the garden t’other morning with a list of the electors in his hand.”

“My conjecture is, that he is intolerably bored everywhere, and came down here to try the effect of a new mode of the infliction that he had never experienced before. What else would explain a project I heard him arrange for this morning, – a walk with Beck Graham!”

“Yes, I was in the window when he asked her where she usually went in those wanderings over the fern hills, with that great umbrella; and she told him to visit an old lady – a Mrs. Butler – who had been a dear friend of her mother’s; and then he said, ‘I wish you ‘d take me with you. I have a positive weakness for old ladies;’ and so the bargain was struck, that they were to go to the cottage to-day together.”

“Beck, of course, fancying that it means a distinct avowal of attention to herself.”

“And her sister, Sally, very fully persuaded that Maitland is a suitor for her hand, and cunningly securing Beck’s good offices before he risks a declaration.”

“Sally already believes that Mark is what she calls ‘landed;’ and she gave me some pretty broad hints about the insufferable pretensions of younger sons, to which class she consigns him.”

“And Beck told me yesterday, in confidence, that Tony had been sent away from home by his mother, as the last resource against the consequence of his fatal passion for her.”

“Poor Tony,” sighed the young widow, “he never thought of her.”

“Did he tell you as much, Alice?” said her sister, slyly.

“No, dear; it is the one subject – I mean love in any shape – that we never discussed. The poor boy confessed to me all his grief about his purposeless idle life, his mother’s straitened fortune, and his uncle’s heartless indifference; everything, in short, that lay heavily on his heart.”

“Everything but the heaviest, Alice,” said the other smiling.

“Well, if he had opened that sorrow, I ‘d have heard him without anger; I’d have honestly told him it was a very vain and fruitless pursuit. But still my own heart would have declared to me that a young fellow is all the better for some romance of this kind, – that it elevates motives and dignifies actions, and, not least of all advantages, makes him very uncompanionable for creatures of mere dissipation and excess.”

“But that, of course, you were merely objective the while, – the source from which so many admirable results were to issue, and never so much as disturbed by the breath of his attachment. Is n’t that so?”

“I ‘d have said, ‘You ‘re a very silly boy if you imagine that anything can come of all this. ‘”

“And if he were to ask for the reason, and say, ‘Alice, are you not your own mistress, rich, free to do whatever you incline to do? Why should you call me a fool for loving you?’”

“Take my word for it, Bella, he ‘ll never risk the answer he ‘d be sure to meet to such a speech,” said the other, haughtily; and Isabella, who felt a sort of awe of her sister at certain moments, desisted from the theme. “Look! yonder they go, Maitland and Rebecca, not exactly arm-inarm, but with bent-down heads, and that propinquity that implies close converse.”

“I declare I feel quite jealous, – I mean on your account, Bella,” said Mrs. Trafford.

“Never mind my interests in the matter, Alice,” said she, reddening; “it is a matter of the most complete indifference to me with whom he walks or talks. Mr. Norman Maitland is not to me one whit more of consequence than is Tony Butler to my sister.”

“That’s a confession, Bella, – a confession wrung out of a hasty moment; for Tony certainly likes me, and I know it.”

“Well, then, the cases are not similar, for Mr. Maitland does not care for me; or, if he does, I don’t know it, nor do I want to know it.”

“Come, darling, put on your shawl, and let us have a breezy walk on the cliffs before the day darkens; neither of these gentlemen are worth the slightest estrangement between such sisters as we are. Whether Tony likes me or not, don’t steal him from me, and I ‘ll promise you to be just as loyal with regard to the other. How I ‘d like to know what they are talking of there!”

As it is not impossible the reader may in some slight degree participate in the fair widow’s sentiment, we mean to take up the conversation just as it reached the time in which the remark was applied to it. Miss Becky Graham was giving her companion a sketchy description of all the persons then at the Abbey, not taking any especial care to be epigrammatic or picturesque, but to be literal and truthful.

“Mrs. Maxwell, – an old horror, – tolerated just because she owns Tilney Park, and can leave it to whom she likes; and the Lyles hope it will fall to Mark, or, possibly, to Bella. They stand to win on either.”

“And which is the favorite?” asked Maitland, with a faint smile.

“You ‘d like to think Isabella,” said Miss Becky, with a sharp piercing glance to read his thoughts at an unguarded moment, if he had such, “but she is not. Old Aunt Maxwell – she ‘s as much your aunt as theirs – detests girls, and has, I actually believe, thoughts of marrying again. By the way, you said you wanted money; why not ‘go in’ there? eight thousand a-year in land, real estate, and a fine old house with some great timber around it.”

“I want to pay my old debts, not incur new ones, my dear Miss Graham.”

“I ‘m not your dear Miss Graham, – I ‘m Beck, or Becky, or I ‘m Miss Rebecca Graham, if you want to be respectful. But what do you say to the Maxwell handicap? I could do you a good turn there; she lets me say what I please to her.”

“I’d rather you’d give me that privilege with yourself, charming Rebecca.”

“Don’t, I say; don’t try that tiresome old dodge of mock flattery. I ‘m not charming, any more than you are honest or straightforward. Let us be on the square – do you understand that? Of course you do? Whom shall I trot out next for you? – for the whole lot shall be disposed of without any reserve. Will you have Sir Arthur, with his tiresome Indian stories, enhanced to himself by all the lacs of rupees that are associated with them? Will you have the gay widow, who married for pique, and inherited a great fortune by a blunder? Will you have Isabella, who is angling for a coronet, but would not refuse you if you are rich enough? Will you have that very light dragoon, who thinks ‘ours’ the standard for manners in Europe? – or the two elder brothers, gray-headed, pale-faced, husky-voiced civil servants, working hard to make a fortune in advance of a liver complaint? Say the ‘number’ and the animal shall be led out for inspection.”

“After all, it is scarcely fair in me to ask it, for I don’t come as a buyer.”

“Well, if you have a taste for that sort of thing – are we out of sight of the windows? – if so, let me have a cigarette like that you have there. I have n’t smoked for five months. Oh! is n’t it a pleasure?”

“Tell me about Mrs. Butler, – who is she?”

“She is Mrs. Butler; and her husband, when he was alive, was Colonel Butler, militarily known as Wat Tartar. He was a terrible pipeclay; and her son Tony is the factotum at the Abbey; or rather he was, till Mark told him to shave, a poodle, or singe a pony, or paint a wheelbarrow – I forget; but I know it was something he had done once out of good-humor, and the hussar creature fancied he’d make him do it again through an indignity.”

“And he – I mean Butler – stands upon being a gentleman?”

“I should think he does; is not his birth good?”

“Certainly; the Butlers are of an old stock.”

“They talk of an uncle, Sir Ramrod, – it is n’t Ramrod, but it’s like it, – a tiresome old fellow, who was envoy at Naples, and who married, I believe, a ballet-dancer, and who might leave Tony all his fortune, if he liked, – which he doesn’t.”

“Having no family of his own?” asked Maitland, as he puffed his cigar.

“None; but that doesn’t matter, for he has turned Jesuit, and will leave everything to the sacred something or other in Rome. I ‘ve heard all that from old Widow Butler, who has a perfect passion for talking of her amiable brother-in-law, as she calls him. She hates him, – always did hate him, – and taught Tony to hate him; and with all that it was only yesterday she said to me that perhaps she was not fully justified in sending back unopened two letters he had written to her, – one after the loss of some Canadian bonds of hers, which got rumored abroad in the newspapers; the other was on Tony’s coming of age; and she said, ‘Becky, I begin to suspect that I had no right to carry my own unforgiveness to the extent of an injury to my boy, – tell me what you would do.’”

“And what was your answer?”

“I’d have made it up with the old swell. I’d say, ‘Is not this boy more to you than all those long-petticoated tonsured humbugs, who can always cheat some one or other out of an Inheritance?’ I ‘d say, ‘Look at him, and you’ll fancy it’s Walter telling you that he forgives you.’”

“If he be like most of his order, Miss Becky, he ‘d only smile at your appeal,” said Maitland, coldly.

“Well, I ‘d not let it be laughing matter with him, I can tell you; stupid wills are broken every day of the week, and I don’t think the Jesuits are in such favor in England that a jury would decide for them against an English youth of the kith and kin of the testator.”

“You speak cleverly, Miss Graham, and you show that you know all the value that attaches to popular sympathy in the age we live in.”

“And don’t you agree with me?”

“Ah, there’s a deal to be said on either side.”

“Then, for Heaven’s sake, don’t say it. There – no – more to the left – there, where you see the blue smoke rising over the rocks – there stands the widow’s cottage. I don’t know how she endures the loneliness of it. Could you face such a life?”

“A double solitude – what the French call an egoisme à deux– is not so insupportable. In fact, it all depends upon ‘the partner with whom we share our isolation.’” He threw a tone of half tenderness into the words that made them very significant, and Rebecca gave him one of her quick sudden glances with which she often read a secret motive. This time, however, she failed. There was nothing in that sallow but handsome face that revealed a clew to anything.

“I ‘ll have to ask Mrs. Butler’s leave before I present you,” said she, suddenly.

“Of course, I ‘ll await her permission.”