The Fortunes Of Glencore Part 19

"Be it so; I go not alone to the stake; there is another to partake of the torture," cried Glencore, wildly; and already his flushed cheek and flashing eyes betrayed the approach of a feverish access.

"If I am not to have any influence with you, then," resumed Upton, "I am here to no purpose. If to all that I say--to arguments you cannot answer--you obstinately persist in opposing an insane thirst for revenge, I see not why you should desire my presence. You have resolved to do this great wrong?"

"It is already done, sir," broke in Glencore.

"Wherein, then, can I be of any service to you?"

"I am coming to that. I had come to it before, had you not interrupted me. I want you to be guardian to the boy. I want you to replace me in all that regards authority over him. You know life well, Upton. You know it not alone in its paths of pleasure and success, but you understand thoroughly the rugged footway over which humble men toil wearily to fortune. None can better estimate a man's chances of success, nor more surely point the road by which he is to attain it. The provision which I destine for him will be an humble one, and he will need to rely upon his own efforts. You will not refuse me this service, Upton. I ask it in the name of our old friendship."

"There is but one objection I could possibly have, and yet that seems to be insurmountable."

"And what may it be?" cried Glencore.

"Simply, that in acceding to your request, I make myself an accomplice in your plan, and thus aid and abet the very scheme I am repudiating."

"What avails your repudiation if it will not turn me from my resolve?

That it will not, I 'll swear to you as solemnly as ever an oath was taken. I tell you again, the thing is done. For the consequences which are to follow on it you have no responsibility; these are my concern."

"I should like a little time to think over it," said Upton, with the air of one struggling with irresolution. "Let me have this evening to make up my mind; to-morrow you shall have my answer."

"Be it so, then," said Glencore; and, turning his face away, waved a cold farewell with his hand.

We do not purpose to follow Sir Horace as he retired, nor does our task require that we should pry into the secret recesses of his wily nature; enough if we say that in asking for time, his purpose was rather to afford another opportunity of reflection to Glencore than to give himself more s.p.a.ce for deliberation. He had found, by the experience of his calling, that the delay we often crave for, to resolve a doubt, has sufficed to change the mind of him who originated the difficulty.

"I'll give him some hours, at least," thought he, "to ponder over what I have said. Who knows but the argument may seem better in memory than in action? Such things have happened before now." And having finished this reflection, he turned to peruse the pamphlet of a quack doctor who pledged himself to cure all disorders of the circulation by attending to tidal influences, and made the moon herself enter into the _materia medica_. What Sir Horace believed, or did not believe, in the wild rhapsodies of the charlatan, is known only to himself. Whether his credulity was fed by the hope of obtaining relief, or whether his fancy only was aroused by the speculative images thus suggested, it is impossible to say. It is not altogether improbable that he perused these things as Charles Fox used to read all the trashiest novels of the Minerva Press, and find, in the very distorted and exaggerated pictures, a relief and a relaxation which more correct views of life had failed to impart. Hard-headed men require strange indulgences.

CHAPTER XIV. BILLY TRAYNOR AND THE COLONEL

It was a fine breezy morning as the Colonel set out with Billy Traynor for Belmullet. The bridle-path by which they travelled led through a wild and thinly inhabited tract,--now dipping down between gra.s.sy hills, now tracing its course along the cliffs over the sea. Tall ferns covered the slopes, protected from the west winds, and here and there little copses of stunted oak showed the traces of what once had been forest.

It was, on the whole, a silent and dreary region, so that the travellers felt it even relief as they drew nigh the bright blue sea, and heard the sonorous booming of the waves as they broke along the sh.o.r.e.

"It cheers one to come up out of those dreary dells, and hear the pleasant plash of the sea," said Harcourt; and his bright face showed that he felt the enjoyment.

"So it does, sir," said Billy. "And yet Homer makes his hero go heavy-hearted as he hears the ever-sounding sea."

"What does that signify, Doctor?" said Harcourt, impatiently. "Telling me what a character in a fiction feels affects me no more than telling me what he does. Why, man, the one is as unreal as the other. The fellow that created him fashioned his thoughts as well as his actions."

"To be sure he did; but when the fellow is a janius, what he makes is as much a crayture as either you or myself."

"Come, come, Doctor, no mystification."

"I don't mean any," broke in Billy. "What I want to say is this, that as we read every character to elicit truth,--truth in the working of human motives, truth in pa.s.sion, truth in all the struggles of our poor weak natures,--why would n't a great janius like Homer, or Shakspeare, or Milton, be better able to show us this in some picture drawn by themselves, than you or I be able to find it out for ourselves?"

Harcourt shook his head doubtfully.

"Well, now," said Billy, returning to the charge, "did you ever see a waxwork model of anatomy? Every nerve and siny of a nerve was there,--not a vein nor an artery wanting. The artist that made it all just wanted to show you where everything was; but he never wanted you to believe it was alive, or ever had been. But with janius it's different.

He just gives you some traits of a character, he points him out to you pa.s.sing,--just as I would to a man going along the street,--and there he is alive for ever and ever; not like you and me, that will be dead and buried to-morrow or next day, and the most known of us three lines in a parish registhry, but he goes down to posterity an example, an ill.u.s.tration--or a warning, maybe--to thousands and thousands of living men. Don't talk to me about fiction! What _he_ thought and felt is truer than all that you and I and a score like us ever did or ever will do.

The creations of janius are the landmarks of humanity; and well for us is it that we have such to guide us!"

"All this may be very fine," said Harcourt, contemptuously, "but give _me_ the sentiments of a living man, or one that has lived, in preference to all the imaginary characters that have ever adorned a story."

"Just as I suppose that you'd say that a soldier in the Blues, or some big, hulking corporal in the Guards, is a finer model of the human form than ever Praxiteles chiselled."

"I know which I 'd rather have alongside of me in a charge, Doctor,"

said Harcourt, laughing; and then, to change the topic, he pointed to a lone cabin on the sea-sh.o.r.e, miles away, as it seemed, from all other habitations.

"That's Michel Cady's, sir," said Traynor; "he lives by birds,--hunting them saygulls and cormorants through the crevices of the rocks, and stealing the eggs. There isn't a precipice that he won't climb, not a cliff that he won't face."

"Well, if that be his home, the pursuit does not seem a profitable one."

"'Tis as good as breaking stones on the road for four-pence a day, or carrying sea-weed five miles on your back to manure the potatoes," said Billy, mournfully.

"That's exactly the very thing that puzzles me," said Harcourt, "why, in a country so remarkable for fertility, every one should be so miserably poor!"

"And you never heard any explanation of it?"

"Never; at least, never one that satisfied me."

"Nor ever will you," said Billy, sententiously.

"And why so?"

"Because," said he, drawing a long breath, as if preparing for a discourse,--"because there's no man capable of going into the whole subject; for it's not merely an economical question or a social one, but it is metaphysical, and religious, and political, and ethnological, and historical,--ay, and geographical too! You have to consider, first, who and what are the aborigines. A conquered people that never gave in they were conquered. Who are the rulers? A Saxon race that always felt that they were infarior to them they ruled over!"

"By Jove, Doctor, I must stop you there; I never heard any acknowledgment of this inferiority you speak of."

"I'd like to get a goold medal for arguin' it out with you," said Billy.

"And, after all, I don't see how it would resolve the original doubt,"

said Harcourt. "I want to know why the people are so poor, and I don't want to hear of the battle of Clontarf, or the Danes at Dundalk."

"There it is, you'd like to narrow down a great question of race, language, traditions, and laws to a little miserable dispute about labor and wages. O Manchester, Manchester! how ye're in the heart of every Englishman, rich or poor, gentle or simple! You say you never heard of any confession of inferiority. Of course you did n't; but quite the reverse,--a very confident sense of being far better than the poor Irish; and I'll tell you how, and why, just as you, yourself, after a discusshion with me, when you find yourself dead bate, and not a word to reply, you 'll go home to a good dinner and a bottle of wine, dry clothes and a bright fire; and no matter how hard my argument pushed you, you'll remember that _I'm_ in rags, in a dirty cabin, with potatoes to ate and water to drink, and you 'll say, at all events, 'I 'm better off than he is;' and there's your superiority, neither more or less,--there it is! And all the while, _I'm_ saying the same thing to _myself_,--'Sorrow matter for his fine broadcloth, and his white linen, and his very best roast beef that he's atin',--I 'm his master! In all that dignifies the s.p.a.cies in them grand qualities that makes us poets, rhetoricians, and the like, in those elegant attributes that, as the poet says,--

"In all our pursuits Lifts us high above brutes,'"

--in these, I say again, I 'm his master!'"

As Billy finished his growing panegyric upon his country and himself, he burst out in a joyous laugh, and cried, "Did ye ever hear conceit like that? Did ye ever expect to see the day that a ragged poor blackguard like _me_ would dare to say as much to one like _you?_ And, after all, it's the greatest compliment I could pay you."

"How so, Billy? I don't exactly see _that_."

"Why, that if you weren't a gentleman,--a raal gentleman, born and bred,--I could never have ventured to tell you what I said now. It is because, in _your own_ refined feelings, you can pardon all the coa.r.s.eness of _mine_, that I have my safety."

"You're as great a courtier as you are a scholar, Billy," said Harcourt, laughing; "meanwhile, I'm not likely to be enlightened as to the cause of Irish poverty."

"'T is a whole volume I could write on the same subject," said Billy; "for there's so many causes in operation, com-binin', and a.s.sistin', and aggravatin' each other. But if you want the head and front of the mischief in one word, it is this, that no Irishman ever gave his heart and sowl to his own business, but always was mindin' something else that he had nothin' to say to; and so, ye see, the priest does be thinkin' of politics, the parson's thinkin' of the priest, the people are always on the watch for a crack at the agent or the t.i.the-proctor, and the landlord, instead of looking after his property, is up in Dublin dinin'

with the Lord-Leftinint and abusin' his tenants. I don't want to screen myself, nor say I'm better than my neighbors, for though I have a larned profession to live by, I 'd rather be writin' a ballad, and singin' it too, down Thomas Street, than I 'd be lecturin' at the Surgeons' Hall."