Lord Kilgobbin

To this gross insult Kearney never deigned any reply; and now more than two years passed without any tidings of his disreputable relative, when there came one morning a letter with the Roman postmark, and addressed, ‘À Monsieur le Vicomte de Kilgobbin, à son Château de Kilgobbin, en Irlande.’ To the honour of the officials in the Irish post-office, it was forwarded to Kilgobbin with the words, ‘Try Mathew Kearney, Esq.,’ in the corner.

A glance at the writing showed it was not in Kostalergi’s hand, and, after a moment or two of hesitation, Kearney opened it. He turned at once for the writer’s name, and read the words, ‘Nina Kostalergi’ – his sister’s child! ‘Poor Matty,’ was all he could say for some minutes. He remembered the letter in which she told him of her little girl’s birth, and implored his forgiveness for herself and his love for her baby.’ I want both, my dear brother,’ wrote she; ‘for though the bonds we make for ourselves by our passions – ’ And the rest of the sentence was erased – she evidently thinking she had delineated all that could give a clue to a despondent reflection.

The present letter was written in English, but in that quaint, peculiar hand Italians often write. It began by asking forgiveness for daring to write to him, and recalling the details of the relationship between them, as though he could not have remembered it. ‘I am, then, in my right,’ wrote she, ‘when I address you as my dear, dear uncle, of whom I have heard so much, and whose name was in my prayers ere I knew why I knelt to pray.’

Then followed a piteous appeal – it was actually a cry for protection. Her father, she said, had determined to devote her to the stage, and already had taken steps to sell her – she said she used the word advisedly – for so many years to the impresario of the ‘Fenice’ at Venice, her voice and musical skill being such as to give hope of her becoming a prima donna. She had, she said, frequently sung at private parties at Rome, but only knew within the last few days that she had been, not a guest, but a paid performer. Overwhelmed with the shame and indignity of this false position, she implored her mother’s brother to compassionate her. ‘If I could not become a governess, I could be your servant, dearest uncle,’ she wrote. ‘I only ask a roof to shelter me, and a refuge. May I go to you? I would beg my way on foot if I only knew that at the last your heart and your door would be open to me, and as I fell at your feet, knew that I was saved.’

Until a few days ago, she said, she had by her some little trinkets her mother had left her, and on which she counted as a means of escape, but her father had discovered them and taken them from her.

‘If you answer this – and oh! let me not doubt you will – write to me to the care of the Signori Cayani and Battistella, bankers, Rome. Do not delay, but remember that I am friendless, and but for this chance hopeless. – Your niece,

    ‘NINA KOSTALERGI.’

While Kearney gave this letter to his daughter to read, he walked up and down the room with his head bent and his hands deep in his pockets.

‘I think I know the answer you’ll send to this, papa,’ said the girl, looking up at him with a glow of pride and affection in her face. ‘I do not need that you should say it.’

‘It will take fifty – no, not fifty, but five-and-thirty pounds to bring her over here, and how is she to come all alone?’

Kate made no reply; she knew the danger sometimes of interrupting his own solution of a difficulty.

‘She’s a big girl, I suppose, by this – fourteen or fifteen?’

‘Over nineteen, papa.’

‘So she is, I was forgetting. That scoundrel, her father, might come after her; he’d have the right if he wished to enforce it, and what a scandal he’d bring upon us all!’

‘But would he care to do it? Is he not more likely to be glad to be disembarrassed of her charge?’

‘Not if he was going to sell her – not if he could convert her into money.’

‘He has never been in England; he may not know how far the law would give him any power over her.’

‘Don’t trust that, Kate; a blackguard always can find out how much is in his favour everywhere. If he doesn’t know it now, he’d know it the day after he landed.’ He paused an instant, and then said: ‘There will be the devil to pay with old Peter Gill, for he’ll want all the cash I can scrape together for Loughrea fair. He counts on having eighty sheep down there at the long crofts, and a cow or two besides. That’s money’s worth, girl!’

Another silence followed, after which he said, ‘And I think worse of the Greek scoundrel than all the cost.’

‘Somehow, I have no fear that he’ll come here?’

‘You’ll have to talk over Peter, Kitty’ – he always said Kitty when he meant to coax her. ‘He’ll mind you, and at all events, you don’t care about his grumbling. Tell him it’s a sudden call on me for railroad shares, or’ – and here he winked knowingly – ‘say, it’s going to Rome the money is, and for the Pope!’

‘That’s an excellent thought, papa,’ said she, laughing; ‘I’ll certainly tell him the money is going to Rome, and you’ll write soon – you see with what anxiety she expects your answer.’

‘I’ll write to-night when the house is quiet, and there’s no racket nor disturbance about me.’ Now though Kearney said this with a perfect conviction of its truth and reasonableness, it would have been very difficult for any one to say in what that racket he spoke of consisted, or wherein the quietude of even midnight was greater than that which prevailed there at noonday. Never, perhaps, were lives more completely still or monotonous than theirs. People who derive no interests from the outer world, who know nothing of what goes on in life, gradually subside into a condition in which reflection takes the place of conversation, and lose all zest and all necessity for that small talk which serves, like the changes of a game, to while away time, and by the aid of which, if we do no more, we often delude the cares and worries of existence.

A kind good-morning when they met, and a few words during the day – some mention of this or that event of the farm or the labourers, and rare enough too – some little incident that happened amongst the tenants, made all the materials of their intercourse, and filled up lives which either would very freely have owned were far from unhappy.

Dick, indeed, when he came home and was weather-bound for a day, did lament his sad destiny, and mutter half-intelligible nonsense of what he would not rather do than descend to such a melancholy existence; but in all his complainings he never made Kate discontented with her lot, or desire anything beyond it.

‘It’s all very well,’ he would say, ‘till you know something better.’

‘But I want no better.’

‘Do you mean you’d like to go through life in this fashion?’

‘I can’t pretend to say what I may feel as I grow older; but if I could be sure to be as I am now, I could ask nothing better.’

‘I must say, it’s a very inglorious life?’ said he, with a sneer.

‘So it is, but how many, may I ask, are there who lead glorious lives? Is there any glory in dining out, in dancing, visiting, and picnicking? Where is the great glory of the billiard-table, or the croquet-lawn? No, no, my dear Dick, the only glory that falls to the share of such humble folks as we are, is to have something to do, and to do it.’

Such were the sort of passages which would now and then occur between them, little contests, be it said, in which she usually came off the conqueror.

If she were to have a wish gratified, it would have been a few more books – something besides those odd volumes of Scott’s novels, Zeluco by Doctor Moore, and Florence McCarthy, which comprised her whole library, and which she read over and over unceasingly. She was now in her usual place – a deep window-seat – intently occupied with Amy Robsart’s sorrows, when her father came to read what he had written in answer to Nina. If it was very brief it was very affectionate. It told her in a few words that she had no need to recall the ties of their relationship; that his heart never ceased to remind him of them; that his home was a very dull one, but that her cousin Kate would try and make it a happy one to her; entreated her to confer with the banker, to whom he remitted forty pounds, in what way she could make the journey, since he was too broken in health himself to go and fetch her. ‘It is a bold step I am counselling you to take. It is no light thing to quit a father’s home, and I have my misgivings how far I am a wise adviser in recommending it. There is, however, a present peril, and I must try, if I can, to save you from it. Perhaps, in my old-world notions, I attach to the thought of the stage ideas that you would only smile at; but none of our race, so far as I know, fell to that condition – nor must you while I have a roof to shelter you. If you would write and say about what time I might expect you, I will try to meet you on your landing in England at Dover. Kate sends you her warmest love, and longs to see you.’

This was the whole of it. But a brief line to the bankers said that any expense they judged needful to her safe convoy across Europe would be gratefully repaid by him.

‘Is it all right, dear? Have I forgotten anything?’ asked he, as Kate read it over.

‘It’s everything, papa – everything. And I do long to see her.’

‘I hope she’s like Matty – if she’s only like her poor mother, it will make my heart young again to look at her.’

CHAPTER III

THE CHUMS

In that old square of Trinity College, Dublin, one side of which fronts the Park, and in chambers on the ground-floor, an oak door bore the names of ‘Kearney and Atlee.’ Kearney was the son of Lord Kilgobbin; Atlee, his chum, the son of a Presbyterian minister in the north of Ireland, had been four years in the university, but was still in his freshman period, not from any deficiency of scholarlike ability to push on, but that, as the poet of the Seasons lay in bed, because he ‘had no motive for rising,’ Joe Atlee felt that there need be no urgency about taking a degree which, when he had got, he should be sorely puzzled to know what to do with. He was a clever, ready-witted, but capricious fellow, fond of pleasure, and self-indulgent to a degree that ill suited his very smallest of fortunes, for his father was a poor man, with a large family, and had already embarrassed himself heavily by the cost of sending his eldest son to the university. Joe’s changes of purpose – for he had in succession abandoned law for medicine, medicine for theology, and theology for civil engineering, and, finally, gave them all up – had so outraged his father that he declared he would not continue any allowance to him beyond the present year; to which Joe replied by the same post, sending back the twenty pounds inclosed him, and saying: ‘The only amendment I would make to your motion is – as to the date – let it begin from to-day. I suppose I shall have to swim without corks some time. I may as well try now as later on.’

The first experience of his ‘swimming without corks’ was to lie in bed two days and smoke; the next was to rise at daybreak and set out on a long walk into the country, from which he returned late at night, wearied and exhausted, having eaten but once during the day.

Kearney, dressed for an evening party, resplendent with jewellery, essenced and curled, was about to issue forth when Atlee, dusty and wayworn, entered and threw himself into a chair.

‘What lark have you been on, Master Joe?’ he said. ‘I have not seen you for three days, if not four!’

‘No; I’ve begun to train,’ said he gravely. ‘I want to see how long a fellow could hold on to life on three pipes of Cavendish per diem. I take it that the absorbents won’t be more cruel than a man’s creditors, and will not issue a distraint where there are no assets, so that probably by the time I shall have brought myself down to, let us say, seven stone weight, I shall have reached the goal.’

This speech he delivered slowly and calmly, as though enunciating a very grave proposition.

‘What new nonsense is this? Don’t you think health worth something?’

‘Next to life, unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive, and I don’t see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher, but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one hundred and fifty out of it. That’s the way they neglect arithmetic in our modern schools!’

‘Has he reduced your allowance?’

‘He has done more, he has extinguished it.’

‘Have you provoked him to this?’