Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 1

Ah, my Lord, your memory was picturing the poor tutor of twenty years before, snubbed and scoffed at for his ungainly ways and ill-made garments, – the man heavy in gait and awkward in address, sulky when forgotten, and shy when spoken to, – this was the Davenport Dunn of your thoughts; there the very door he used to creep through in bashful confusion, yonder the side-table where he dined in a mockery of consideration. Little, indeed, were you prepared for him whose assured voice was already heard outside giving orders to his servant, and who now entered the drawing-room with all the ease of a man of the world.

“Ah, Dunn, most happy to see you here. No accident, I trust, occurred to detain you,” said Lord Glengariff, meeting him with a well-assumed cordiality, and then, not waiting for his reply, went on: “My daughter, Lady Augusta, an old acquaintance – if you have not forgotten her. Miss Kellett you are acquainted with.”

Mr. Dunn bowed twice, and deeply, before Lady Augusta, and then, passing across the room, shook hands warmly with Sybella.

“How did you find the roads, Dunn?” asked his Lordship, still fishing about for some stray word of apology; “rather heavy, I fear, at this season.”

“Capital roads, my Lord, and excellent horses. We came along at a rate which would have astonished the lumbering posts of the Continent.”

“Dinner, my Lord,” said the butler, throwing wide the folding-doors.

“Will you give Lady Augusta your arm, Dunn?” said Lord Glengariff, as he offered his own to Miss Kellett.

“We have changed our dinner-room, Mr. Dunn,” said Lady Augusta, as they walked along; thus by a mere word suggesting “bygones and long ago.”

“And with advantage, I should say,” replied he, easily, as he surveyed the spacious and lofty apartment into which they had just entered. “The old dinner-room was low-ceilinged and gloomy.”

“Do you really remember it?” asked she, with a pleasant smile.

“An over-good memory has accompanied me through life, Lady Augusta,” said he. And then, as he remarked the rising color of her cheek, quickly added, “It is rarely that the faculty treats me to such grateful recollections as the present.”

Lord Glengariffs table was a good specimen of country-house living. All the materials were excellent, and the cookery reasonably good; his wine was exquisite, – the years and epochs connoisseurship loves to dwell upon; but Mr. Dunn ate sparingly and drank little. He had passed forty without gourmand tastes, and no man takes to epicurism after that. His Lordship beheld, not without secret dissatisfaction, his curdiest salmon declined, his wonderful “south-down” sent away scarcely tasted, and, horror of horrors! saw water mixed with his 1815 claret as if it were a “little Bordeaux wine” at a Swiss table d’hôte.

“Mr. Dunn has no appetite for our coarse country fare, Augusta,” said Lord Glengariff; “you must take him over the cliffs, to-morrow, and let him feel the sharp Glengariff air. There’s nothing but hunger for it.”

“Pardon me, my Lord, if I say that I accept with gratitude the proposed remedy, though I don’t acknowledge a just cause for it. I am always a poor eater.”

“Tell him of Beverley, Augusta, tell him of Beverley,” said my Lord.

“Oh, it was simply a case similar to your own,” said she, hesitatingly, “and, in all probability, incurred in the same way. The Duke of Beverley, a very hard-worked man, as you know, always at Downing Street at ten, and never leaving it till night, came here two years ago, to pass a few weeks with us, and although hale and stout, to look at, could eat nothing, – that is, he cared for nothing. It was in vain we put in requisition all our little culinary devices to tempt him; he sat down with us, and, like yourself, would fain persuade us that he dined, but he really touched nothing; and, in utter despair, I determined to try what a course of open air and exercise would do.”

“She means eight hours a day hard walking, Dunn,” chimed in Lord Glengariff; “a good grouse-shooter’s pace, too, and cross country.”

“Well, confess that my remedy succeeded,” said she, triumphantly.

“That it did. The Duke went back to town fifteen years younger. No one knew him; the Queen did not know him. And to this day he says, ‘Whenever I’m hipped or out of sorts, I know what a resource I have in the Glengariff heather.’”

It is possible that Davenport Dunn listened with more of interest to this little incident because the hero of it was a Duke and a Cabinet Minister.

Assuredly the minor ills of life, the petty stomachic miseries, and such like, are borne with a more becoming patience when we know that they are shared by peers and great folk. Not by you, valued reader, nor even by me, – we have no such weaknesses, – but by the Davenport Dunns of this world, one of whom we are now treating. It was pleasant, too, to feel that he not only had a ducal ailment, but that he was to be cured like his Grace! And so he listened eagerly, as Lady Augusta went on to tell of the various localities, strange and unpronounceable, that they used to visit, and how his Grace loved to row across such an arm of the lake, and what delight he took in the ascent of such a mountain. “But you shall judge for yourself, Mr. Dunn,” said she, smiling, “and I now engage you for to-morrow, after breakfast.” And with that she rose, and, accompanied by Sybella, passed into the drawing-room. Dunn was about to follow, when Lord Glengariff called out, “I’m of the old school, Dunn, and must have half an hour with my bottle before I join the ladies.”

We do not stop to explain – perhaps we should not succeed to our wishes if we tried – why it was that Dunn was more genial, better satisfied, and more at his ease than when the dinner began; but so it was that as he filled the one glass of claret be meant to indulge in, he felt that he had been exaggerating to his own mind the disagreeables of this visit, and that everybody was kinder, pleasanter, and more natural than he had expected.

“Jesting apart, Dunn,” said his Lordship, “Augusta is right. What you require is rest, – perfect repose; never to read or write a letter for three weeks, not look at a newspaper, nor receive a telegraphic despatch. Let us try if Glengariff cannot set you up. The fact is, we can’t spare you.”

“Your opinion is too flattering by half, my Lord; but really, any one – I mean any one whose views are honest, and whose intentions are upright – can complete the work I have begun. There is no secret, – no mystery in it.”

“Come, come, this is over-modest. We all know that your head alone could carry on the vast number of these great schemes which are now in operation amongst us. Could you really tell the exact number of companies of which you are Director?”

“I ‘m afraid to say that I could,” said Dunn, smiling.

“Of course you could n’t. It is marvellous, downright marvellous, how you get through it. You rise early, of course?”

“Yes, my Lord, at five, summer and winter; light my own fire, and sit down to the desk till eight; by that time I have finished my correspondence on business topics. I then take a cup of tea and a little dry toast. This is my preparation for questions of politics, which usually occupy me till eleven. From that hour till three I receive deputations, – heads of companies, and such like. I then take my ride, weather permitting, and usually contrive to call at the Lodge, till nigh dinner-hour. If alone, my meal is a frugal one, and soon despatched; and then begins the real work of the day. A short nap of twenty minutes refreshes me, and I address myself with energy to my task. In these quiet hours, undisturbed and uninterrupted, – for I admit none, not one, at such seasons, – my mind is clear and unclouded, and I can work, without a sense of fatigue, till past midnight; it has even happened that morning has broke upon me without my being aware of it.”

“No health, no constitution, could stand that, Dunn,” said Lord Glengariff, with a voice artfully modulated to imply deep interest.

“Men are mere relays on the road of life; when one sinks, wearied or worn out, a fresh one comes forth ready to take his place in the traces.”

“That may be – that may be, in the mass of cases; but there are exceptional men, Dunn, – men who – men, in fact, whose faculties have such an adaptiveness to the age we live in – do you perceive my meaning? – men of the situation, as the French say.” Here his Lordship began to feel that he was getting upon very ticklish ground, and by no means sure how he was to get safely back again, when, with a violent plunge, he said, “That fellow Washington was one of those men, Louis Napoleon is another, and you – I don’t hesitate to say it – you are also an instance of what I mean.”

Dunn’s pale face flushed up as he muttered some broken words of depreciating meaning.

“The circumstances, I am aware, are different. You have not to revolutionize a country, but you have undertaken just as hard a task: to remodel its social state, – to construct out of the ruined materials of a bankrupt people the elements of national wealth and greatness. Let no man tell me, sir, that this is not a bolder effort than the other. Horse, foot, and dragoons, as poor Grattan used to say, won’t aid you here. To your own clear head and your own keen intellect must you trust.”

“My dear Lord,” broke in Dunn, in a voice not devoid of emotion, “you exaggerate both my labor and my capacity. I saw that the holders of Irish property were not the owners, and I determined that they should be so. I saw that the people were improvident, less from choice than necessity, and I gave them banks. I saw land unproductive for want of capital, and I established the principle of loans for drainage and other improvements. I perceived that our soil and our climate favor certain species of cultivation, and as certainly deny some others. I popularized this knowledge.”

“And you call this nothing! Why, sir, where’s the statesman can point to such a list of legislative acts? Peel himself has left no such legacy behind him.”

“Ah, my Lord, this is too flattering, – too flattering by half.” And Dunn sipped his wine and looked down. “By the way, my Lord,” said he, after a pause, “how has my recommendation in the person of Miss Kellett succeeded?”

“A very remarkable young woman, – a singularly gifted person indeed,” said the old Lord, pompously. “Some of her ideas are tinctured, it is true, with that canting philanthropy we are just now infected with, – that tendency to discover all the virtue in rags and all the vice in purple; but, with this abatement to her utility, I must say she possesses a very high order of mind. She comes of a good family, doesn’t she?”

“None better. The Kelletts of Kellett’s Court were equal to any gentry in this county.”

“And left totally destitute?”

“A mere wreck of the property remains, and even that is so cumbered with claims and so involved in law that I scarcely dare to say that they have an acre they can call their own.”

“Poor girl! A hard case, – a very hard case. We like her much, Dunn. My daughter finds her very companionable; her services, in a business point of view, are inestimable. All those reports you have seen are hers, all those drawings made by her hand.”

“I am aware, my Lord, how much zeal and intelligence she has displayed,” said Dunn, who had no desire to let the conversation glide into the great Glengariff scheme, “and I am also aware how gratefully she feels the kindness she has met with under this roof.”

“That is as it should be, Dunn, and I am rejoiced to hear it. It is in no spirit of self-praise I say it, but in simple justice, – we do – my daughter and myself, both of us – do endeavor to make her feel that her position is less that of dependant than – than – companion.”

“I should have expected nothing less from your Lordship nor Lady Augusta,” said Dunn, gravely.

“Yes, yes; you knew Augusta formerly; you can appreciate her high-minded and generous character, though I think she was a mere child when you saw her first.”

“Very young indeed, my Lord,” said Dunn, coloring faintly.

“She is exactly, however, what she then promised to be, – an Arden, a genuine Arden, sir; no deceit, no double; frank, outspoken; too much so, perhaps, for our age of mock courtesy, but a noble-hearted girl, and one fit to adorn any station.”

There was an honest, earnest sincerity in the old Lord’s manner that made Dunn listen with respect to the sentiments be uttered, though in his heart the epithet “girl,” as applied to Lady Augusta, seemed somewhat ill chosen.

“I see you take no wine, so that, if you have no objection, we’ll join the ladies.”

“Your Lordship was good enough to tell me that I was to make myself perfectly at home here; may I begin at once to avail myself of your kindness, and say that for this evening I beg to retire early? I have a number of letters to read, and some to answer.”