Tony Butler Part 98

"Because, if you had, I'd have asked you to fetch me some fresh flowers.

Dolly is coming to dine with us, and she is so fond of seeing flowers on the centre of the table."

"No; I have nothing to do at the Abbey. I 'm off towards Portrash."

"Why not go over to the Burnside and fetch Dolly?" said she, carelessly.

"Perhaps I may,--that is, if I should find myself in that quarter; but I'm first of all bent on a profound piece of thoughtfulness or a good smoke,--pretty much the same thing with me, I believe. So good-bye for a while."

His mother looked after him with loving eyes till the tears dulled them; but there are tears which fall on the affections as the dew falls on flowers, and these were of that number.

"His own father,--his own father!" muttered she, as she followed the stalwart figure till it was lost in the distance.

CHAPTER LXIII. AT THE COTTAGE BESIDE THE CAUSEWAY

I must use more discretion as to Mrs. Butler's correspondence than I have employed respecting Skeff Damer's. What she wrote on that morning is not to be recorded here. It will be enough if I say that her letter was not alone a kind one, but that it thoroughly convinced him who read it that her view was wise and true, and that it would be as useless as ungenerous to press Dolly further, or ask for that love which was not hers to give.

It was a rare event with her to have to write a letter. It was not, either, a very easy task; but if she had not the gift of facile expression, she had another still better for her purpose,--an honest nature steadfastly determined to perform a duty. She knew her subject, too, and treated it with candor, while with delicacy.

While she wrote, Tony strolled along, puffing his cigar or re-lighting it, for it was always going out, and dreaming away in his own misty fashion over things past, present, and future, till really the actual and the ideal became so thoroughly commingled he could not well distinguish one from the other. He thought--he knew, indeed, he ought to be very happy. All his anxieties as to a career and a livelihood ended, he felt that a very enjoyable existence might lie before him; but somehow,--he hoped he was not ungrateful,--but somehow he was not so perfectly happy as he supposed his good fortune should have made him.

"Perhaps it will come later on; perhaps when I am active and employed; perhaps when I shall have learned to interest myself in the things money brings around a man; perhaps, too, when I can forget,--ay, that was the lesson was hardest of all." All these pa.s.sing thoughts, a good deal dashed through each other, scarcely contributed to enlighten his faculties; and he rambled on over rocks and yellow strand, up hillsides, and through fern-clad valleys, not in the least mindful of whither he was going.

At last he suddenly halted, and saw he was in the shrubberies of Lyle Abbey, his steps having out of old habit taken the one same path they had followed for many a year. The place was just as he had seen it last.

Trees make no marvellous progress in the north of Ireland, and a longer absence than Tony's would leave them just as they were before. All was neat, orderly, and well kept; and the heaps of dried leaves and brushwood ready to be wheeled away, stood there as he saw them when he last walked that way with Alice. He was poor then, without a career, or almost a hope of one; and yet it was possible, could it be possible, that he was happier then than he now felt? Was it that love sufficed for all, and that the heart so filled had no room for other thoughts than those of her it worshipped? He certainly had loved her greatly.

She,--she alone made up that world in which he had lived. Her smile, her step, her laugh, her voice,--ay, there they were, all before him. What a dream it was! Only a dream, after all; for she never cared for him.

She had led him on to love her, half in caprice, half in a sort of compa.s.sionate interest for a poor boy,--boy she called him,--to whom a pa.s.sion for one above him was certain to elevate and exalt him in his own esteem. "Very kind, doubtless," muttered he, "but very cruel too.

She might have remembered that this same dream was to have a very rough awaking. I had built nearly every hope upon one, and that one, she well knew, was never to be realized. It might not have been the most gracious way to do it, but I declare it would have been the most merciful, to have treated me as her mother did, who snubbed my pretensions at once.

It was all right that I should recognize her superiority over me in a hundred ways; but perhaps she should not have kept it so continually in mind, as a sort of barrier against a warmer feeling for me. I suppose this is the fine-lady view of the matter. This is the theory that young fellows are to be civilized, as they call it, by a pa.s.sion for a woman who is to amuse herself by their extravagances, and then ask their grat.i.tude for having deceived them.

"I 'll be shot if I _am_ grateful," said he, as he threw his cigar into the pond. "I 'm astonished--amazed--now that it's all over" (here his voice shook a little), "that my stupid vanity could ever have led me to think of her, or that I ever mistook that patronizing way she had towards me for more than good-nature. But, I take it, there are scores of fellows who have had the selfsame experiences. Here's the seat I made for her," muttered he, as he came in front of a rustic bench. For a moment a savage thought crossed him that he would break it in pieces, and throw the fragments into the lake,--a sort of jealous anger lest some day or other she might sit there with "another;" but he restrained himself, and said, "Better not; better let her see that her civilizing process has done something, and that though I have lost my game I can bear my defeat becomingly."

He began to wish that she were there at that moment. Not that he might renew his vows of love, or repledge his affection; but to show her how calm and reasonable--ay, reasonable was her favorite word--he could be, how collectedly he could listen to her, and how composedly reply. He strolled up to the entrance door. It was open. The servants were busy in preparing for the arrival of their masters, who were expected within the week. All were delighted to see Master Tony again, and the words somehow rather grated on his ears. It was another reminder of that same "boyhood" he bore such a grudge against "I am going to have a look out of the small drawing-room window, Mrs. Hayles," said he to the housekeeper, cutting short her congratulations, and hurrying upstairs.

It was true he went up for a view; but not of the coastline to Fairhead, fine as it was. It was of a full-length portrait of Alice, life-size, by Grant. She was standing beside her horse,--the Arab Tony trained for her. A braid of her hair had fallen, and she was in the act of arranging it, while one hand held up her drooping riding-dress. There was that in the air and att.i.tude that bespoke a certain embarra.s.sment with a sense of humorous enjoyment of the dilemma. A sketch from life, in fact, had given the idea of the picture, and the reality of the incident was unquestionable.

Tony blushed a deep crimson as he looked, and muttered, "The very smile she had on when she said good-bye. I wonder I never knew her till now."

A favorite myrtle of hers stood in the window; he broke off a sprig of it, and placed it in his b.u.t.ton-hole, and then slowly pa.s.sed down the stairs and out into the lawn. With very sombre thoughts and slow steps he retraced his way to the cottage. He went over to himself much of his past life, and saw it, as very young men will often in such retrospects, far less favorably as regarded himself than it really was. He ought to have done--Heaven knows what. He ought to have been--scores of things which he never was, perhaps never could be. At all events, there was one thing he never should have imagined, that Alice Lyle--she was Alice Lyle always to him--in her treatment of him was ever more closely drawn towards him than the others of her family. "It was simply the mingled kindness and caprice of her nature that made, the difference; and if I had n't been a vain fool, I 'd have seen it. I see it now, though; I can read it in the very smile she has in her picture. To be sure I have learned a good deal since I was here last; I have outgrown a good many illusions. I once imagined this dwarfed and stinted scrub to be a wood.

I fancied the Abbey to be like a royal palace; and in Sicily a whole battalion of us have bivouacked in a hall that led to suites of rooms without number. If a mere glimpse of the world could reveal such astounding truths, what might not come of a more lengthened experience?"

"How tired and weary you look, Tony!" said his mother, as he threw himself into a chair; "have you overwalked yourself?"

"I suppose so," said he, with a half smile. "In my poorer days I thought nothing of going to the Abbey and back twice--I have done it even thrice--in one day; but perhaps this weight of gold I carry now is too heavy for me."

"I 'd like to see you look more grateful for your good for time, Tony,"

said she, gravely.

"I'm not ungrateful, mother; but up to this I have not thought much of the matter. I suspect, however, I was never designed for a life of ease and enjoyment Do you remember what Dr. Stewart said one day?--'You may put a weed in a garden, and dig round it and water it, and it will only grow to be a big weed after all.'"

"I hope better from Tony,--far better," said she, sharply. "Have you answered M'Carthy's letter? Have you arranged where you are to meet the lawyers?"

"I have said in Dublin. They couldn't come here, mother; we have no room for them in this crib."

"You must not call it a 'crib' for all that. It sheltered your father once, and he carried a very high head, Tony."

"And for that very reason, dear mother, I'm going to make it our own home henceforth,--without you 'd rather go and live in that old manor-house on the Nore; they tell me it is beautiful."

"It was there your father was born, and I long to see it," said she, with emotion. "Who 's that coming in at the gate, Tony?"

"It is Dolly," said he, rising, and going to the door to meet her.

"My dear Dolly," cried he, as he embraced her, and kissed her on either cheek; "this brings me back to old times at once."

If it was nothing else, the total change in Tony's appearance abashed her; the bronzed and bearded man, looking many years older than he was, seemed little like the Tony she had seen last; and so she half shrank back from his embrace, and, with a flushed cheek and almost constrained manner, muttered some words of recognition.

"How well you are looking," said he, staring at her, as she took off her bonnet, "and the nice glossy hair has all grown again, and I vow it is brighter and silkier than ever."

"What's all this flattery about bright een and silky locks I'm listening to?" said the old lady, coming out laughing into the ball.

"It's Master Tony displaying his foreign graces at my expense, ma'am,"

said Dolly, with a smile.

"Would you have known him again, Dolly? Would you have thought that great hairy creature there was our Tony?"

"I think he is changed,--a good deal changed," said Dolly, without looking at him.

"I did n't quite like it at first; but I'm partly getting used to it now; and though the Colonel never wore a beard on his upper lip, Tony's more like him now than ever." The old lady continued to ramble on about the points of resemblance between the father and son, and where certain traits of manner and voice were held in common; and though neither Tony nor Dolly gave much heed to her words, they were equally grateful to her for talking.

"And where 's the doctor, Dolly? Are we not to see him at dinner?"

"Not to-day, ma'am; he's gone over to M'Laidlaw's to make some arrangements about this scheme of ours,--the banishment, he calls it."

"And is it possible, Dolly, that he can seriously contemplate such a step?" asked Tony, gravely.

"Yes; and very seriously too."

"And you, Dolly; what do you say to it?"

"I say to it what I have often said to a difficulty, what the old Scotch adage says of 'the stout heart to the stey brae.'"

"And you might have found more comforting words, la.s.sie,--how the winds can be tempered to the shorn lamb," said the old lady, almost rebukefully; and Dolly drooped her head in silence.

"I think it's a bad scheme," said Tony, boldly, and as though not hearing his mother's remark. "For a man at the doctor's age to go to the other end of the globe, to live in a new land, and make new friendships at his time of life, is, I 'm sure, a mistake."

"That supposes that we have a choice; but my father thinks we have no choice."

"I cannot see that. I cannot see that what a man has borne for five-and-thirty or forty years--he has been that long at the Burnside--I believe he can endure still longer. I must have a talk with him myself over it." And unconsciously--quite unconsciously--Tony uttered the last words with a high-sounding importance, so certain is it that in a man's worldly wealth there is a store of self-confidence that no mere qualities of head or heart can ever supply; and Dolly almost smiled at the a.s.sured tone and the confident manner of her former playfellow.