Lord Kilgobbin

‘I can be after Wednesday next. I ought to go up for my term examination.’

‘Well, do so; but mind, don’t bring down Mr. Atlee with you.’

‘My chum is no favourite of yours?’

‘That’s as it may be,’ said she haughtily. ‘I have only said let us not have the embarrassment, or, if you like it, the pleasure of his company. I’ll give you a list of books to bring down, and my life be on it, but my course of study will surpass what you have been doing at Trinity. Is it agreed?’

‘Give me till to-morrow to think of it, Nina.’

‘That does not sound like a very warm acceptance; but be it so: till to-morrow.’

‘Here are some of Kate’s dogs,’ cried he angrily. ‘Down, Fan, down! I say. I’ll leave you now before she joins us. Mind, not a word of what I told you.’

And, without another word, he sprang over a low fence, and speedily disappeared in the copse beyond it.

‘Wasn’t that Dick I saw making his escape?’ cried Kate, as she came up.

‘Yes, we were taking a walk together, and he left me very abruptly.’

‘I wish I had not spoiled a tête-à-tête,’ said Kate merrily.

‘It is no great mischief: we can always renew it.’

‘Dear Nina,’ said the other caressingly, as she drew her arm around her – ‘dear, dear Nina, do not, do not, I beseech you.’

‘Don’t what, child? – you must not speak in riddles.’

‘Don’t make that poor boy in love with you. You yourself told me you could save him from it if you liked.’

‘And so I shall, Kate, if you don’t dictate or order me. Leave me quite to myself, and I shall be most merciful.’

CHAPTER XVIII

MATHEW KEARNEY’S ‘STUDY’

Had Mathew Kearney but read the second sheet of his correspondent’s letter, it is more than likely that Dick had not taken such a gloomy view of his condition. Mr. McKeown’s epistle continued in this fashion: ‘That ought to do for him, Mathew, or my name ain’t Tom McKeown. It is not that he is any worse or better than other young fellows of his own stamp, but he has the greatest scamp in Christendom for his daily associate. Atlee is deep in all the mischief that goes on in the National press. I believe he is a head-centre of the Fenians, and I know he has a correspondence with the French socialists, and that Rights-of-labour-knot of vagabonds who meet at Geneva. Your boy is not too wise to keep himself out of these scrapes, and he is just, by name and station, of consequence enough to make these fellows make up to and flatter him. Give him a sound fright, then, and when he is thoroughly alarmed about his failure, send him abroad for a short tour, let him go study at Halle or Heidelberg – anything, in short, that will take him away from Ireland, and break off his intimacy with this Atlee and his companions. While he is with you at Kilgobbin, don’t let him make acquaintance with those Radical fellows in the county towns. Keep him down, Mathew, keep him down; and if you find that you cannot do this, make him believe that you’ll be one day lords of Kilgobbin, and the more he has to lose the more reluctant he’ll be to risk it. If he’d take to farming, and marry some decent girl, even a little beneath him in life, it would save you all uneasiness; but he is just that thing now that brings all the misery on us in Ireland. He thinks he’s a gentleman because he can do nothing; and to save himself from the disgrace of incapacity, ‘he’d like to be a rebel.’

If Mr. Tom McKeown’s reasonings were at times somewhat abstruse and hard of comprehension to his friend Kearney, it was not that he did not bestow on them due thought and reflection; and over this private and strictly confidential page he had now meditated for hours.

‘Bad luck to me,’ cried he at last, ‘if I see what he’s at. If I’m to tell the boy he is ruined to-day, and to-morrow to announce to him that he is a lord – if I’m to threaten him now with poverty, and the morning after I’m to send him to Halle, or Hell, or wherever it is – I’ll soon be out of my mind myself through bare confusion. As to having him “down,” he’s low enough; but so shall I be too, if I keep him there. I’m not used to seeing my house uncomfortable, and I cannot bear it.’

Such were some of his reflections, over his agent’s advice; and it may be imagined that the Machiavellian Mr. McKeown had fallen upon a very inapt pupil.

It must be owned that Mathew Kearney was somewhat out of temper with his son even before the arrival of this letter. While the ‘swells,’ as he would persist in calling the two English visitors, were there, Dick took no trouble about them, nor to all seeming made any impression on them. As Mathew said, ‘He let Joe Atlee make all the running, and, signs on it! Joe Atlee was taken off to town as Walpole’s companion, and Dick not so much as thought of. Joe, too, did the honours of the house as if it was his own, and talked to Lockwood about coming down for the partridge-shooting as if he was the head of the family. The fellow was a bad lot, and McKeown was right so far – the less Dick saw of him the better.’

The trouble and distress these reflections, and others like them, cost him would more than have recompensed Dick, had he been hard-hearted enough to desire a vengeance. ‘For a quarter of an hour, or maybe twenty minutes,’ said he, ‘I can be as angry as any man in Europe, and, if it was required of me during that time to do anything desperate – downright wicked – I could be bound to do it; and what’s more, I’d stand to it afterwards if it cost me the gallows. But as for keeping up the same mind, as for being able to say to myself my heart is as hard as ever, I’m just as much bent on cruelty as I was yesterday – that’s clean beyond me; and the reason, God help me, is no great comfort to me after all – for it’s just this: that when I do a hard thing, whether distraining a creature out of his bit of ground, selling a widow’s pig, or fining a fellow for shooting a hare, I lose my appetite and have no heart for my meals; and as sure as I go asleep, I dream of all the misfortunes in life happening to me, and my guardian angel sitting laughing all the while and saying to me, “Didn’t you bring it on yourself, Mathew Kearney? couldn’t you bear a little rub without trying to make a calamity of it? Must somebody be always punished when anything goes wrong in life? Make up your mind to have six troubles every day of your life, and see how jolly you’ll be the day you can only count five, or maybe four.”’

As Mr. Kearney sat brooding in this wise, Peter Gill made his entrance into the study with the formidable monthly lists and accounts, whose examination constituted a veritable doomsday to the unhappy master.

‘Wouldn’t next Saturday do, Peter?’ asked Kearney, in a tone of almost entreaty.

‘I’m afther ye since Tuesday last, and I don’t think I’ll be able to go on much longer.’

Now as Mr. Gill meant by this speech to imply that he was obliged to trust entirely to his memory for all the details which would have been committed to writing by others, and to a notched stick for the manifold dates of a vast variety of events, it was not really a very unfair request he had made for a peremptory hearing.

‘I vow to the Lord,’ sighed out Kearney, ‘I believe I’m the hardest-worked man in the three kingdoms.’

‘Maybe you are,’ muttered Gill, though certainly the concurrence scarcely sounded hearty, while he meanwhile arranged the books.

‘Oh, I know well enough what you mean. If a man doesn’t work with a spade or follow the plough, you won’t believe that he works at all. He must drive, or dig, or drain, or mow. There’s no labour but what strains a man’s back, and makes him weary about the loins; but I’ll tell you, Peter Gill, that it’s here’ – and he touched his forehead with his finger – ‘it’s here is the real workshop. It’s thinking and contriving; setting this against that; doing one thing that another may happen, and guessing what will come if we do this and don’t do that; carrying everything in your brain, and, whether you are sitting over a glass with a friend or taking a nap after dinner, thinking away all the time! What would you call that, Peter Gill – what would you call that?’

‘Madness, begorra, or mighty near it!’

‘No; it’s just work – brain-work. As much above mere manual labour as the intellect, the faculty that raises us above the brutes, is above the – the – ’

‘Yes,’ said Gill, opening the large volume and vaguely passing his hand over a page. ‘It’s somewhere there about the Conacre!’

‘You’re little better than a beast!’ said Kearney angrily.

‘Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. Let us finish this, now that we’re about it.’

And so saying, he deposited his other books and papers on the table, and then drew from his breast-pocket a somewhat thick roll of exceedingly dirty bank-notes, fastened with a leather thong.

‘I’m glad to see some money at last, Peter,’ cried Kearney, as his eye caught sight of the notes.

‘Faix, then, it’s little good they’ll do ye,’ muttered the other gruffly.

‘What d’ye mean by that, sir?’ asked he angrily.

‘Just what I said, my lord, the devil a more nor less, and that the money you see here is no more yours nor it is mine! It belongs to the land it came from. Ay, ay, stamp away, and go red in the face: you must hear the truth, whether you like it or no. The place we’re living in is going to rack and ruin out of sheer bad treatment. There’s not a hedge on the estate; there isn’t a gate that could be called a gate; the holes the people live in isn’t good enough for badgers; there’s no water for the mill at the cross-roads; and the Loch meadows is drowned with wet – we’re dragging for the hay, like seaweed! And you think you’ve a right to these’ – and he actually shook the notes at him – to go and squander them on them “impedint” Englishmen that was laughing at you! Didn’t I hear them myself about the tablecloth that one said was the sail of a boat.’

‘Will you hold your tongue?’ cried Kearney, wild with passion.

‘I will not! I’ll die on the floore but I’ll speak my mind.’

This was not only a favourite phrase of Mr. Gill’s, but it was so far significant that it always indicated he was about to give notice to leave – a menace on his part of no unfrequent occurrence.

‘Ye’s going, are ye?’ asked Kearney jeeringly.

‘I just am; and I’m come to give up the books, and to get my receipts and my charac – ter.’

‘It won’t be hard to give the last, anyway,’ said Kearney, with a grin.

‘So much the better. It will save your honour much writing, with all that you have to do.’

‘Do you want me to kick you out of the office, Peter Gill?’

‘No, my lord, I’m going quiet and peaceable. I’m only asking my rights.’