The Young Step-Mother Part 56

'I had forgotten that you had not been well,' she said.

'Pshaw!' muttered Ulick; then resumed, 'Aye, Mr. Kendal brought in the doctor upon me--very kind of him--but I do a.s.sure you 'tis nothing but home sickness; I was nearly as bad when I went to St. Columba, but I got over it then, and I will again!'

'It may be so in part,' said Albinia, kindly; 'but let me be impertinent, Ulick, for my sister Winifred told me to look after you; surely you give it every provocation. Such a change of habits is enough to make any one ill. Should you not ask your uncle for a holiday, and go home for a little while?'

'Don't name it, I beg of you,' cried the poor lad in an agitated voice, 'it would only bring it all over again! I've promised my mother to do my part, and with His help I _will_! Let the columns run out to all eternity, and the figures crook themselves as spitefully as they will, I've vowed to myself not to stir till I've got the better of the villains!'

'Ah!' said Albinia, 'they have blackened your eyes like the bruises of material antagonists! Yes, it is a gallant battle, but indeed you must give yourself all the help you can, for it would be doing your mother no good to fall ill.'

'I've no fears,' said Ulick; 'I know very well what is the matter with me, and that if I don't give way, it will go off in time. You've given it a good shove with your kindness, Mrs. Kendal,' he added, with deep emotion in his sensitive voice; 'only you must not talk of my going home, or you'll undo all you have done.'

'Then I won't; we must try to make you a home here. And in the first place, those lodgings of yours; you can never be comfortable in them.'

'Ah! you saw my fire smoking. I never shall learn to make a coal fire burn.'

'Not only that,' said Albinia, 'but you might easily find rooms much better furnished, and fitter for you.'

'I do a.s.sure you,' exclaimed Ulick, 'you scarcely saw it! Why, I don't think there's a room at the big house in better order, or so good!'

'At least,' said Albinia, repressing her deduction as to the big house of Ballymakilty, 'you have no particular love for the locality--the river smell--the stock of good leather, &c.'

'It's all Bayford and town smell together,' said Ulick; 'I never thought one part worse than another, begging your pardon, Mrs. Kendal.'

'And I am sure,' she continued, 'that woman can never make your meals comfortable. Yes, I see I am right, and I a.s.sure you hard head-work needs good living, and you will never be a match for the rogues in black and white without good beef-steaks. Now confess whether she gives you dinners of old shoe-leather.'

'A man can't sit down to dinner by himself,' cried Ulick, impatiently.

'Tea with a book are all that is bearable.'

'And you never go out--never see any one.'

'I dine at my uncle's every Sunday,' said Ulick.

'Is that all the variety you have?'

'Why, my uncle told me he would not have me getting into what he calls idle company. I've dined once at the vicarage, and drunk tea twice with Mr. Hope, but it is no use thinking of it--I couldn't afford it, and that's the truth.'

'Have you any books? What can you find to do all the evening?'

'I have a few that bear reading pretty often, and Mr. Hope as lent me some. I've been trying to keep up my Greek, and then I do believe there's some way of simplifying those accounts by logarithms, if I could but work it out. But my mother told me to walk, and I a.s.sure you I do take a const.i.tutional as soon as I come out at half-past four every day.'

'Well, I have designs, and mind you don't traverse them, or I shall have to report you at home. I have a lodging in my eye for you, away from the river, and a nice clean, tidy Irishwoman to keep you in order, make your fires, and cram you, if you wont eat, and see if she does not make a man of you--'

'Stop, stop, Mrs. Kendal!' cried Ulick, distressed. 'You are very kind, but it can't be.'

'Excuse me, it is economy of the wrong sort to live in a gutter, and catch agues and fevers. Only think, if it was my boy Gilbert, should I not be obliged to any one that would tyrannize over him for his good!

Besides, what I propose is not at all beyond such means as Mr. Kendal tells me are the least Mr. Goldsmith ought to give you. Do you dislike going into particulars with me? You know I am used to think for Gilbert, and I am a sort of cousin.'

'You are kindness itself,' said Ulick; 'and there! I suppose I must go to the bottom of it, and it is no news that pence are not plenty among the O'Mores, though it is no fault of my uncle. See there what my poor dear mother says.'

He drew a letter from his pocket, and gave a page to her.

'I miss you sorely, my boy,' it said; 'I know the more what a support and friend you have been to me now that you are so far away; but all is made up to me in knowing you to be among my own people, and the instrument of reconciliation with my brother, as you well know how great has been the pain of the estrangement caused by my own pride and wilfulness. I cannot tell you how glad I am that he approves of you, and that you are beginning to get used to the work that was my own poor father's for so long. Bred up as you have been, my mountain lad, I scarcely dared to hope that you would be able to sit down quietly to it, with all our hopes of making you a scholar so suddenly frustrated; but I might have put faith in your loving heart and sense of duty to carry you through anything. I feel as if a load were off my mind since you and Bryan are so happily launched. The boy has not once applied for money since he joined; and if you write to him, pray beg him to be careful, for it would well-nigh drive your father mad to be pressed any more--the poor mare has been sold at a dead loss and the Carrick-humbug quarry company pays no dividends, so how we are to meet the Christmas bills I cannot guess. But, as you remember, we have won over worse times, and now Providence has been so good to you and Bryan, what have I to do but be thankful and hope the best.'

Ulick watched her face, and gave her another note, saying mournfully, 'You see they all, but my mother, think, that if I am dragging our family honour through the mire, I've got something by it. Poor Bryan, he knows no better--he's younger than me by two years.'

The young ensign made a piteous confession of the first debt he had been able to contract, for twenty pounds, with a promise that if his brother would help him out of this one sc.r.a.pe, he would never run into another.

'I am very sorry for you, Ulick,' said Albinia, 'and I hate to advise you to be selfish, but it really is quite impossible for you to be paymaster for all your brothers' debts.'

'If it were Connel, I know it would be of no use,' said Ulick. 'But Bryan--you see he has got a start--they gave him a commission, and he is the finest fellow of us all, and knows what his word is, and keeps it!

Maybe, if I get on, I may be able to save, and help him to his next step, and then if Redmond could get to college, my mother would be a happy woman, and all thanks to my uncle.'

'Then it is this twenty pounds that is pinching you now? Is that it?'

'You see my uncle said he would give me enough to keep me as a gentleman and his nephew, but not enough to keep all the family, as he said. After my Christmas quarter I shall be up in the world again, and then there will be time to think of the woman you spoke of--a Connaught woman, did you say?'

When Albinia reported this dialogue to her husband, he was much moved by this simple self-abnegation.

'There is nothing for it,' he said, 'but to bring him here till Christmas, and by that time we will take care that the new lodgings are cheap enough for him. He must not be left to the mercy of old Goldsmith and his sister!'

Even Albinia was astonished, but Mr. Kendal carried out his intentions, and went in quest of his new friend; while no one thought of objecting except grandmamma.

'I suppose, my dear,' she said, 'that you know what Mr. Goldsmith means to do for this young man.'

'I am sure I don't,' said Albinia.

'Really! Ah! well, I'm an old woman, and I may be wrong, but my poor dear Mr. Meadows would never encourage a banker's clerk about the house unless he knew what were his expectations. Irish too! If there was a thing Mr. Meadows disliked more than another, it was an Irishman! He said they were all adventurers.'

However, Ulick's first evening at Willow Lawn was on what he called 'a headache day.' He could not have taken a better measure for overcoming grandmamma's objections. Poor dear Mr. Meadows' worldly wisdom was not sufficiently native to her to withstand the sight of anything so pale and suffering, especially as he did not rebel against answering her close examination, which concluded in her p.r.o.nouncing these intermitting attacks to be agueish, and prescribing quinine. To take medicines is an effectual way of gaining an old lady's love. Ulick was soon established in her mind as 'a very pretty behaved young gentleman.'

In the evenings, when Mr. Kendal read aloud, Ulick listened, and enjoyed it from the corner where he sheltered his eyes from the light. He was told that he ought to go to bed quickly, but after the ladies were in their rooms, a long buzzing murmur was heard in the pa.s.sage, and judicious peeping revealed the two gentlemen, each, candle in hand, the one with his back against the wall at the top of the stairs, the other leaning upon the bal.u.s.ters three steps below, and there they stayed, till the clock struck one, and Ulick's candle burnt out.

'What could you be talking about?' asked the aggrieved Albinia.

'Prometheus Vinctus,' composedly returned Mr. Kendal.

Ulick's eagerness in collecting every crumb of scholarship was a great bond of union; but there was still more in the bright, open, demonstrative nature of the youth, which had a great attraction for the reserved, serious Mr. Kendal, and scarcely a day had pa.s.sed before they were on terms of intimacy, almost like an elder and younger brother.

Admitted into the family as a connexion, Ulick at once viewed the girls as cousins, and treated them with the same easy grace of good-natured familiarity as if they had been any of the nineteen Miss O'Mores around Ballymakilty.

'How is your head now?' asked Mr. Kendal. 'You are late this evening.'

'Yes,' said Ulick, entering the drawing-room, which was ruddy with firelight, and fragrant with the breath of the conservatory, and leaning over an arm-chair, as he tried to rub the aching out of his brow; 'there were some accounts to finish up and my additions came out different every time.'

'A sure sign that you ought to have left off.'

'I was just going to have told my uncle I was good for nothing to-day, when I heard old Johns mumbling something to him about Mr. More being unwell, and looking up, I saw that cold grey eye twinkling at me, as much as to say he was proud to see how soon an Irishman could be beaten.

So what could I do but give him look for look, and go on with eight and seven, and five and two, as unconcerned as he was.'