Luttrell Of Arran Part 21

"All your scheme for the property was absolute wisdom compared with this!" "How so?"

"Where everything is so absurd one cannot decide what to ridicule.

Suppose you succeed--and it is what I by no means grant--what will you do with her? You'll give her the tastes, the accomplishments, and the habits of a lady--to marry her to your gamekeeper or your gardener.

You'll turn her brain with ten years of luxury--to make the whole of her after life a dreary servitude. You'll excite ambition, whose very least evil will be bitter disappointment; and for what? To gratify a caprice, to paint the moral of a vapid theory about Irish intelligence. No, no, Vyner, don't make such a blunder as this, and a serious blunder too; for, amongst other pleasant contingencies, Paddy MacHackaway is sure to call you to account some fine day: why you dared to do this, or omitted to do that; and with all your respect for his reasoning qualities, he sometimes expresses his sentiments with a bludgeon."

"The thing is done, George, if you were to rail at it for a week. It is done, and cannot be undone, even if I wished it."

"But why not? What is easier than to send for this old rascal who has so over-blarneyed you, and compromise the matter? A couple more of those crisp ten-pounders that I must say you displayed before these creatures with an unpardonable rashness--"

"Be it so," broke in Vyner. "But let me tell you that they saw my pocket-book full of them; they saw on the window-seat, where by chance I had left it, a purse heavy with gold, and yet these poor fellows were proof against the temptations; and it was the gaol-breaker himself who carried my knapsack on my way back, which contained, as he knew, both purse and pocket-book; so that against their honesty I'll not listen to a word."

"Let them have all the virtues under the sun if you will; call them all Arcadians. All I ask is that we should have no dealings with them. Send off O'Rorke; let him bring this old fellow before me, and I'll answer for it that I settle the question at once."

"No, no; my word is pledged, and I'll not break it."

"I don't ask you to break it. What I propose is, that you should be released from a very ill-judged contract, certain to turn out ill to all it includes. Let me at least try if what I suggest is not practicable."

"If the negotiation were to be carried on with men of your own rank and condition, Grenfell, there is not any one to whom I would with, more confidence confide it; but forgive me if I say that you're not the man to deal with these people."

"Why not?"

"For a number of reasons. First of all, you are strongly prejudiced against them; you are disposed to regard them as something little better than savages----"

"Pardon me, there you are wrong--as not one whit better."

"That's enough, then; you shall be no envoy to them from me."

"Well, I'll knock under; I'll agree to your high estimate of them, intellectually and morally, only with that detractive element of poverty which makes even clever men submissive, and occasionally squeezes conscience into a compromise. You tell me they are very amenable to reason; let me see if I agree with you. You a.s.sure me that with all their seeming impulsiveness and headlong rashness they are eminently calculating and forecasting. I want to see this. Bethink you what a grand witness I shall be to the truth of your theory when I am converted. Come, consent to send for this old fellow; make any pretext you please for seeing him, so that I may have a quarter of an hour's talk with him."

"To what end? You could scarcely address to him the arguments you have just used to me----"

"Leave that to my discretion. I suspect, Vyner--mind, it is mere suspicion--but I suspect that your Celtic friend will be far more practical and business-like in his dealings with me than with you; that his shrewdness will show him that I am a common-place man of the world, not caring, nor indeed believing, in any great regeneration for Ireland, and that all our intercourse must take the shape of a bargain."

"I consent," said Vyner; "but, I own, less from choice than necessity, for time presses, and I find by a note I have just received that M'Kinlay, my man of business, has arrived at Westport, and whatever we decide on must be done at once."

"If I'm not very much mistaken, Vyner, my negotiation will not take ten minutes, and perhaps as many pounds, so that you may order whatever it be that is to carry us hence, and I'll guarantee to be ready."

While Vyner hastened to give the necessary orders, Grenfell opened his writing-desk, from which he took some bank-notes and gold, and thrust them together in his pocket.

CHAPTER XIV. A DISCUSSION

"When that old man comes," said Grenfell--"Malone, I think, is the name--let him come in here. I want to speak to him."

"He's outside now, before the door," said O'Rorke, whose prying looks showed how eager he felt to know what might be the subject of their conversation.

"Does he hold any land in this neighbourhood?"

"He's like the rest," replied the other, half sullenly; "he lives where he can, and how he can."

"What you would call a squatter?" said the Englishman, who smiled at his own sharpness in employing the word.

"What I wouldn't call any such thing," replied O'Rorke, firmly. "No more than I'd say it was squatting to sit down on my own hearthstone."

"Which, perhaps, wouldn't be your own, my good friend, if you were merely a tenant, and not a solvent one."

"You may talk that way up in Leinster, or some of the counties that border on Leinster; but I tell you that you know mighty little of Ireland if you think that what your newspapers call the ''Great name of England' terrifies any one down here. Just try it. It's about fifty miles from this to the Land's End, and I'll give you all that distance to find ten, no, but five men, that you'll frighten by the threat of British law or British vengeance--which is about the same thing."

"I'm sorry to hear it; that is to say, I should be sorry it was true."

"Well, if you mean to deny, why don't you prove it? What's easier than to tell the carman we're not going to Westport, we're going up through Donegal to count the people that's in love with the British rule in Ireland! You shake your head. I don't wonder, indeed; no shame to you, that you wouldn't like the journey. But I'll tell you what you can do instead of it," said he, with a firm and steady voice.

"What's that?"

"Leave sixpence here, in my hands, and it will treat every well-wisher of England from this to the Giant's Causeway! Isn't that a fine investment for you?"

Grenfel's face flashed, his brow darkened, and he tarned to hurl a stern reproof to this insolence; but he saw in the elated look of the other all the delight of one who was gradually drawing an adversary into the lists, and to a combat in which practice had given him a certain dexterity.

Determined, at all events, to foil this design, the Englishman affected indifference, looked at his watch, turned over some papers that lay on the table, and then carelessly said, "Send in Malone here."

With the dogged air of one disappointed and baffled in his designs, O'Rorke left the room, and soon after the old man entered, stroking down his white hair as he came forward, and making his reverences with a strange mixture of servility and defiance.

"Your name is Malone?" said Grenfell.

"Peter Malone, Sir."

"Come nearer, Malone. I have heard a good deal about you from my friend, whom you treated so hospitably up in the mountains, and he has also spoken to me of a sort of plan--I won't call it a very wise one--that he struck out the other night, and which, it appears, you agreed to, about your granddaughter." He paused, hoping that the peasant would speak, but the old man simply bent his two dark and piercing eyes on him, and nodded. Grenfell went on: "I have pointed out to him some, though very far from all, of the inconveniences of the scheme, and I have asked his leave to point them out to you, and from what he has told me of your good sense and clear-headedness, I suspect I shall not have undertaken my task in vain."

"Does he mean that he wants to go back of it?" asked Malone, with a calm and resolute look.

"Listen to me patiently, and you shall hear all." It is not necessary I should weary my reader with a sermon where the text conveys so much. The chief burden of Grenfell's argument was what he had addressed to Vyner; and upon this he expanded freely, laying much stress on the misfortune that must accrue to any young girl raised to a temporary elevation, from which she must come down to meet a life of perhaps privation and hardship. He pictured an existence of luxury on the one hand, and of poverty on the other, and asked what right had any one to expose another to such extremes--what preparation could ease and indulgence be to a life of toil and suffering? "How were the acquirements of the one to be made applicable to the other?--how," he asked, "is the young lady--for she will have become a young lady--to change at once to the condition of the ill-fed, ill-dressed, hard-worked country girl?"

Had the orator only glanced as he spoke at the features of the listener, he would have seen what a lamentable blunder his rhetoric had made. At the mention of the words "young lady," the whole expression of the old man's face altered; his half-sullen obduracy, his rugged sternness, disappeared, his eyes lighted up; his lips parted, his nostrils dilated, and his whole face beamed with a joy that was positively triumphant. "Go on, Sir!--go on!" he cried, as though he yearned for a perfect picture of what imagination had but sketched an outline.

"You cannot mean, my good man," said Grenfell, hastily, "that you would think it any benefit to be placed where you couldn't remain?--to stand at a height where you couldn't balance yourself? It's not enough that people can dress well, and talk well, and look well; they must have, besides, the means to do all these, day after day, without an effort, without as much as a care or a thought about them. Do you understand me?"

"Sure, people wasn't born ladies and gentlemen from the beginnin' of the world?"

"No; great families took their rise in great actions. Some by courage, some by cleverness, some by skill, and some by great industry."

"Just so!" broke in the old man. "There was always some one to begin it, and likely enough too in a mighty small way. Dare I ax your honour a question?"

"Ask freely, my good fellow."

"Though I suppose your honour will have to go back very far, can you tell me what was the first of your own great family?"

From the purpose-like energy of the old peasant's manner, and the steady and penetrating look of his bright eyes, Grenfell felt certain that the man had been prompted to put this insult upon him, and in a voice broken by pa.s.sion, he said: