The Knight Of Gwynne Volume II Part 9

"I concluded," said Heffernan, as he handed back the paper, "that the case was not deemed by you a very doubtful matter."

"Neither doubtful nor important," said Hickman, calmly; "it was an effort, in all probability suggested by some crafty lawyer, to break several leases on the ground of forgery in the signatures. I am sure nothing short of Mr. Darcy's great difficulties would ever have permitted him to approve of such a proceeding."

"The shipwrecked sailor will cling to a hen-coop," said Heffernan. "By the way, where are these Darcys? What has become of them?"

"Living in Wales, or in Scotland, some say."

"Are they utterly ruined?"

"Utterly, irretrievably. A course of extravagance maintained for years at a rate of about double his income, loans obtained at any sacrifice, sales of property effected without regard to loss, have overwhelmed him; and the worst of it is, the little remnant of fortune left is likely to be squandered in vain attempts to recover at law what he has lost by recklessness."

Heffernan walked on for some moments in silence, and, as if pondering over Hickman's words, repeated several times, half aloud: "No doubt of it,--no doubt of it." Then added, in a louder tone: "The whole history of this family, Mr. O'Reilly, is a striking confirmation of a remark I heard made, a few days since, by a distinguished individual,--to _you_ I may say it was Lord Cornwallis. 'Heffernan,' said he, 'this country is in a state of rapid transition; everything progresses but the old gentry of the land; they alone seem rooted to ancient prejudices, and fast confirmed in bygone barbarisms.' I ventured to ask him if he could suggest a remedy for the evil, and I 'll never forget the tone with which he whispered in my ear, 'Yes; supersede them!' And that, sir,"

said Heffernan, laying his hand confidentially on O'Reilly's arm,--"that is and must be the future policy regarding Ireland."

Mr. Heffernan did not permit himself to risk the success of his stroke by a word more, nor did he even dare to cast a look at his companion and watch how his spell was working. As the marksman feels when he has shot his bolt that no after-thought can amend the aim, so did he wait quietly for the result, without a single effort on his part. "The remark is a new one to me," said O'Reilly, at length; "but so completely does it accord with my own sentiments, I feel as if I either had or might have made it myself. The old school you speak of were little calculated to advance the prosperity of the country; the attachment of the people to them was fast wearing out."

"Nay," interposed Heffernan, "it was that very same attachment, that rude remnant of feudalism, made the greatest barrier against improvement. The law of the land was powerless in comparison with the obligations of this clanship. It is time, full time, that the people should become English in feeling, as they are in law and in language; and to make them so, the first step is, to work the reformation in the gentry. Now, at the hazard of a liberty which you may deem an impertinence, I will tell you frankly, Mr. O'Reilly, that you, you yourself, are admirably calculated to lead the van of this great movement. It is all very natural, and perhaps very just, that in a moment of chagrin with a minister or his party, a man should feel indignant, and, although acting under a misconception, throw himself into a direct opposition; yet a little reflection will show that such a line involves a false position. Popularity with the ma.s.ses could never recompense a man like you for the loss of that higher esteem you must sacrifice for it; the _devoirs_ of your station impose a very different cla.s.s of duties from what this false patriotism suggests; besides, if from indignation--a causeless indignation I am ready to prove it--you separate yourself from the Government, you are virtually suffering your own momentary anger to decide the whole question of your son's career.

You are shutting the door of advancement against a young man with every advent.i.tious aid of fortune in his favor; handsome, accomplished, wealthy,-what limit need there be to his ambition? And finally, some fellow, like our friend the Counsellor, without family, friends, or fortune, but with lungs of leather and a ready tongue, will beat you hollow in the race, and secure a wider influence over the ma.s.s of the people than a hundred gentlemen like you. You will deem it, probably, enough to spend ten or fifteen thousand on a contested election, and to give a vote for your party in Parliament; he, on the other hand, will write letters, draw up pet.i.tions, frame societies, meetings, resolutions, and make speeches, every word of which will sink deeply into the hearts of men whose feelings are his own. You, and others in your station, will be little better than tools in his hands; and powerful as you think yourselves to-day, with your broad acres and your cottier freeholders, the time may come when these men will be less at _your_ bidding than _his_, and for this simple reason,--the man of nothing will always be ready to bid higher for mob support than he who has a fortune to lose."

"You have put a very strong case," said O'Reilly; "perhaps I should think it stronger, if I had not heard most of the arguments before, from yourself, and know by this time how their application to me has not sustained your prophecy."

"I am ready to discuss that with you, too," said Heffer-nan. "I know how it all happened: had I been with you the day you dined with Castlereagh, the misunderstanding never could have occurred; but there was a fatality in it all. Come," said he, familiarly, and he slipped his arm, as he spoke, within O'Reilly's, "I am the worst diplomatist in the world, and I fear I never should have risen to high rank in the distinguished corps of engineers if such had been my destination. I can lay down the parallels and the trenches patiently enough, I can even bring up my artillery and my battering-train, but, hang it! somehow, I never can wait for a breach to storm through. The truth is, if it were not for a very strong feeling on the subject I have just spoken of, you never would have seen me here this day. No man is happier or prouder to enjoy your hospitality than I am, but I acknowledge it was a higher sentiment induced me to accept your invitation. When your note reached me, I showed it to Castlereagh.

"'What answer have you sent?' said he.

"'Declined, of course,' said I.

"'You are wrong, Heffernan,' said his Lordship, as he took from me the note which I held ready sealed in my hand; 'in my opinion, Heffernan, you are quite wrong.'

"'I may be so, my Lord; but I confess to you I always act from the first impulse, and if it suggests regret afterwards, it at least saves trouble at the time.'

"'Heffernan,' said the Secretary, as he calmly read over the lines of your letter, 'there are many reasons why you should go: in the first place, O'Reilly has really a fair grudge against us, and this note shows that he has the manliness to forget it. Every line of it bespeaks the gentleman, and I 'll not feel contented with myself until you convey to him my own sorrow for what is past, and the high sense I entertain of his character and conduct.'

"He said a great deal more; enough, if I tell you he induced me to rescind my first intention, and to become your guest; and I may say that I never followed advice the consequences of which have so thoroughly sustained my expectations."

"This is very flattering," said O'Reilly; "it is, indeed, more than I looked for; but, as you have been candid with me, I will be as open with you: I had already made up my mind to retire, for a season at least, from politics. My father, you know, is a very old man, and not without the prejudices that attach to his age; he was always averse to those ambitious views a public career would open, and a degree of coldness had begun to grow up between us in consequence. This estrangement is now happily at an end; and in his consenting to our present mode of life and its expenditure, he is, in reality, paying the recompense of his former opposition. I will not say what changes time may work in my opinion or my line of acting; but I will pledge myself that, if I do resume the path of public life, you are the very first man I will apprise of the intention."

A cordial shake-hands ratified this compact; and Heffer-nan, who now saw that the fortress had capitulated, only stipulating for the honors of war, was about to add something very complimentary, when Beecham O'Reilly galloped up, with his horse splashed and covered with foam.

"Don't you want to hear O'Halloran, Mr. Heffernan?" cried he.

"Yes, by all means."

"Come along, then; don't lose a moment; there's a phaeton ready for you at the door, and if we make haste, we'll be in good time."

O'Reilly whispered a few words in his son's ear, to which the other replied, aloud,--

"Oh! quite safe, perfectly safe. He was obliged to join his regiment, and sail at a moment's notice."

"Young Darcy, I presume?" said Heffernan, with a look of malicious intelligence. But no answer was returned, and O'Reilly continued to converse eagerly in Beecham's ear.

"Here comes the carriage, Mr. Heffernan," said the young man; "so slip in, and let's be off." And, giving his horse to a servant, he took his seat beside Heffernan, and drove off at a rapid pace towards the town.

After a quick drive of some miles, they entered the town, and had no necessity to ask if O'Halloran had begun his address to the jury. The streets which led to the square before the court-house, and the square itself, was actually crammed with country-people, of all s.e.xes and ages; some standing with hats off, or holding their hands close to their ears, but all, in breathless silence, listening to the words of the Counsellor, which were not less audible to those without than within the building.

Nothing short of Beecham O'Reilly's present position in the county, and the fact that the gratification they were then deriving was of his family's procuring for them, could have enabled him to force a pa.s.sage through that dense crowd, which wedged up all the approaches. As it was, he could only advance step by step, the horses and even the pole of the carriage actually forcing the way through the throng.

As they went thus slowly, the rich tones of the speaker swelled on the air with a clear, distinct, and yet so soft and even musical intonation that they fell deeply into the hearts of the listeners. He was evidently bent as much on appealing to those outside the court as to the jury, for his speech was less addressed to the legal question at issue than to the social condition of the peasantry; the all but absolutism of a landlord,--the serf-like slavery of a tenantry, dependent on the will or the caprice of the owners of the soil! With the consummate art of a rhetorician, he first drew the picture of an estate happily circ.u.mstanced, a benevolent landlord surrounded by a contented tenantry, the blessings of the poor man, "rising like the dews of the earth, and descending again in rain to refresh and fertilize the source it sprang from." Not vaguely nor unskilfully, but with thorough knowledge, of his subject, he descanted on the condition of the peasant, his toils, his struggles against poverty and sickness borne with long-suffering and patience, from the firm trust that, even in this world, his destinies were committed to no cruel or unfeeling taskmaster. Although generally a studied plainness and even homeliness of language pervaded all he said, yet at times some bold figure, some striking and brilliant metaphor, would escape him, and then, far from soaring--as it might be suspected he had--above the comprehension of the hearers, a subdued murmur of delight would follow the words, and swelling louder and louder, burst forth at last into one great roar of applause. If a critical ear might cavil at the incompleteness or inapt.i.tude of his similes, to the warm imagination and excited fancy of the Irish peasant they had no such blemishes.

It was at the close of a brilliant peroration on this theme, that Heffernan and Beecham O'Reilly reached the courthouse, and with difficulty forcing their way, obtained standing-room near the bar.

The orator had paused, and turning round he caught Beecham's eye: the glance exchanged was but of a second's duration, but, brief as it was, it did not escape Heffernan's notice, and with a readiness he knew well how to profit by, he a.s.sumed a quiet smile, as though to say that he, too, had read its meaning. The young man blushed deeply; whatever his secret thoughts were, he felt ashamed that another should seem to know them, and in a hesitating whisper, said,--

"Perhaps my father has told you--"

A short nod from Heffernan--a gesture to imply anything or nothing--was all his reply, and Beecham went on,--

"He's going to do it, now."

Heffernan made no answer, but, leaning forward on the rail, settled himself to listen attentively to the speaker.

"Gentlemen of the jury," said O'Halloran, in a low and deliberate tone, "if the only question I was interested in bringing before you this day was the cause you sit there to try, I would conclude here. a.s.sured as I feel what your verdict will and must be, I would not add a word more, nor weaken the honest merit of your convictions by anything like an appeal to your feelings. But I cannot do this. The law of the land, in the plenitude of its liberty, throws wide the door of justice, that all may enter and seek redress for wrong, and with such evident anxiety that he who believes himself aggrieved should find no obstacle to his right, and that even he who frivolously and maliciously advances a charge against another suffers no heavier penalty for his offence than the costs of the suit. No, my Lords, for the valuable moments lost in a vexatious cause, for the public time consumed, for insult and outrage cast upon the immutable principles of right and wrong, you have nothing more severe to inflict than the costs of the action!--a pecuniary fine, seldom a heavy one, and not unfrequently to be levied upon insolvency!

What encouragement to the spirit of revengeful litigation! How suggestive of injury is the system! How deplorable would it be if the temple could not be opened without the risk of its altar being desecrated! But, happily, there is a remedy--a great and n.o.ble remedy--for an evil like this. The same glorious inst.i.tutions that have built up for our protection the bulwark of the law, have created another barrier against wrong,--grander, more expansive, and more enduring still; one neither founded on the variable basis of nationality or of language, nor propped by the artifices of learned, or the subtleties of crafty men; not following the changeful fortunes of a political condition, or tempered by the tone of the judgment-seat, but of all lands, of every tongue and nation and people, great, enduring, and immutable,--the law of Public Opinion. To the bar of this judgment-seat, one higher and greater than even your Lordships, I would now summon the plaintiff in this action. There is no need that I should detail the charge against him; the accusation he has brought this day is our indictment,--his allegation is his crime."

The reader, by this time, may partake of Mr. Heffernan's prescience, and divine what the secret intelligence between the Counsellor and Beecham portended, and that a long-meditated attack on the Knight of Gwynne, in all the relations of his public and private life, was the chief duty of Mr. O'Halloran in the action. Taking a lesson from the great and ill.u.s.trious chief of a neighboring state, O'Reilly felt that Usurpation can never be successful till Legitimacy becomes odious. The "prestige"

of the "old family" clung too powerfully to every cla.s.s in the county to make his succession respected. His low origin was too recent, his moneyed dealings too notorious, to gain him acceptance, except on the ruins of the Darcys. The new edifice of his own fame must be erected out of the scattered and broken materials of his rival's house. If any one was well calculated to a.s.sist in such an emergency, it was O'Halloran.

It was by--to use his own expression--"weeding the country of such men"

that the field would be opened for that new cla.s.s of politicians who were to issue their edicts in newspapers, and hold their parliaments in public meetings. Against exclusive or exaggerated loyalty the struggle would be violent, but not difficult; while against moderation, sound sense and character, the Counsellor well knew the victory was not so easy of attainment. He himself, therefore, had a direct personal object in this attack on the Knight of Gwynne, and gladly accepted the special retainer that secured his services.

By a series of artful devices, he so arranged his case that the Knight of Gwynne did not appear as an injured individual seeking redress against the collusive guilt of his agent and his tenantry, but as a ruined gambler, endeavoring to break the leases he had himself granted and guaranteed, and, by an act of perfidy, involve hundreds of innocent families in hopeless beggary. To the succor of these unprotected people Mr. Hickman O'Reilly was represented as coming forward, this n.o.ble act of devotion being the first pledge he had offered of what might be expected from him as the future leader of a great county.

He sketched with a masterly but diabolical ingenuity the whole career of the Knight, representing him at every stage of life as the pampered voluptuary seeking means for fresh enjoyment without a thought of the consequences; he exhibited him dispensing, not the graceful duties of hospitality, but the reckless waste of a tasteless household, to counterbalance by profusion the insolent hauteur of his wife, "that same Lady Eleanor who would not deign to a.s.sociate with the wives and daughters of his neighbors!" "I know not," cried the orator, "whether you were more crushed by _his_ gold or by _her_ insolence: it was time that you should weary of both. You took the wealth on trust, and the rank on guess,--what now remains of either?"

He drew a frightful picture of a suffering and poverty-enslaved tenantry, sinking fast into barbarism from hopelessness,--unhappily, no Irishman need depend upon his imagination for the sketch. He contrasted the hours of toil and sickness with the wanton spendthrift in his pleasures,--the gambler setting the fate of families on the die, reserving for his last hope the consolation that he might still betray those whom he had ruined, land that when he had dissipated the last shilling of his fortune, he still had the resource of putting his honor up to auction! "And who is there will deny that he did this?" cried O'Halloran. "Is there any man in the kingdom has not heard of his conduct in Parliament--that foul act of treachery which the justice of Heaven stigmatized by his ruin! How on the very night of the debate he was actually on his way to inflict the last wound upon his country, when the news came of his own overwhelming destruction! And, like as you have seen sometime in our unhappy land the hired informer transferred from the witness-table to the dock, this man stands now forth to answer for his own offences!

"It was full time that the rotten edifice of this feudalist gentry should fall; honor to you on whom the duty devolves to roll away the first stone!"

A slight movement in the crowd behind the bar disturbed the silence in which the Court listened to the speaker, and a murmur of disapprobation was heard, when a hand, stretched forth, threw a little slip of paper on the table before O'Halloran. It was addressed to him; and believing it came from the attorney in the cause, he paused to read it. Suddenly his features became of an ashy paleness, his lip trembled convulsively, and in a voice scarcely audible from emotion, he addressed the bench,--

"My Lords, I ask the protection of this Court. I implore your Lordships to see that an advocate, in the discharge of his duty, is not the mark of an a.s.sa.s.sin. I have just received this note--" He attempted to read it, but after a pause of a second or two, unable to utter a word, he handed the paper to the bench.

The judge perused the paper, and immediately whispered an order that the writer, or at least the bearer, of the note should be taken into custody.

"You may rest a.s.sured, sir," said the senior judge, addressing O'Halloran, "that we will punish the offender, if he be discovered, with the utmost penalty the law permits. Mr. Sheriff, let the court be searched."

The sub-sheriff was already, with the aid of a strong police force, engaged in the effort to discover the individual who had thus dared to interfere with the administration of justice; but all in vain. The court and the galleries were searched without eliciting anything that could lead to detection; and although several were taken up on suspicion, they were immediately afterwards liberated on being recognized as persons well known and in repute. Meanwhile the business of the trial stood still, and O'Halloran, with his arms folded, and his brows bent in a sullen frown, sat without speaking, or noticing any one around him.