Lord Kilgobbin. Lever Charles James
existence.
A kind good-morning when they met, and a few words during the day – some mention of this or that event of the farm or the labourers, and rare enough too – some little incident that happened amongst the tenants, made all the materials of their intercourse, and filled up lives which either would very freely have owned were far from unhappy.
Dick, indeed, when he came home and was weather-bound for a day, did lament his sad destiny, and mutter half-intelligible nonsense of what he would not rather do than descend to such a melancholy existence; but in all his complainings he never made Kate discontented with her lot, or desire anything beyond it.
‘It’s all very well,’ he would say, ‘till you know something better.’
‘But I want no better.’
‘Do you mean you’d like to go through life in this fashion?’
‘I can’t pretend to say what I may feel as I grow older; but if I could be sure to be as I am now, I could ask nothing better.’
‘I must say, it’s a very inglorious life?’ said he, with a sneer.
‘So it is, but how many, may I ask, are there who lead glorious lives? Is there any glory in dining out, in dancing, visiting, and picnicking? Where is the great glory of the billiard-table, or the croquet-lawn? No, no, my dear Dick, the only glory that falls to the share of such humble folks as we are, is to have something to do, and to do it.’
Such were the sort of passages which would now and then occur between them, little contests, be it said, in which she usually came off the conqueror.
If she were to have a wish gratified, it would have been a few more books – something besides those odd volumes of Scott’s novels, Zeluco by Doctor Moore, and Florence McCarthy, which comprised her whole library, and which she read over and over unceasingly. She was now in her usual place – a deep window-seat – intently occupied with Amy Robsart’s sorrows, when her father came to read what he had written in answer to Nina. If it was very brief it was very affectionate. It told her in a few words that she had no need to recall the ties of their relationship; that his heart never ceased to remind him of them; that his home was a very dull one, but that her cousin Kate would try and make it a happy one to her; entreated her to confer with the banker, to whom he remitted forty pounds, in what way she could make the journey, since he was too broken in health himself to go and fetch her. ‘It is a bold step I am counselling you to take. It is no light thing to quit a father’s home, and I have my misgivings how far I am a wise adviser in recommending it. There is, however, a present peril, and I must try, if I can, to save you from it. Perhaps, in my old-world notions, I attach to the thought of the stage ideas that you would only smile at; but none of our race, so far as I know, fell to that condition – nor must you while I have a roof to shelter you. If you would write and say about what time I might expect you, I will try to meet you on your landing in England at Dover. Kate sends you her warmest love, and longs to see you.’
This was the whole of it. But a brief line to the bankers said that any expense they judged needful to her safe convoy across Europe would be gratefully repaid by him.
‘Is it all right, dear? Have I forgotten anything?’ asked he, as Kate read it over.
‘It’s everything, papa – everything. And I do long to see her.’
‘I hope she’s like Matty – if she’s only like her poor mother, it will make my heart young again to look at her.’
CHAPTER III
In that old square of Trinity College, Dublin, one side of which fronts the Park, and in chambers on the ground-floor, an oak door bore the names of ‘Kearney and Atlee.’ Kearney was the son of Lord Kilgobbin; Atlee, his chum, the son of a Presbyterian minister in the north of Ireland, had been four years in the university, but was still in his freshman period, not from any deficiency of scholarlike ability to push on, but that, as the poet of the Seasons lay in bed, because he ‘had no motive for rising,’ Joe Atlee felt that there need be no urgency about taking a degree which, when he had got, he should be sorely puzzled to know what to do with. He was a clever, ready-witted, but capricious fellow, fond of pleasure, and self-indulgent to a degree that ill suited his very smallest of fortunes, for his father was a poor man, with a large family, and had already embarrassed himself heavily by the cost of sending his eldest son to the university. Joe’s changes of purpose – for he had in succession abandoned law for medicine, medicine for theology, and theology for civil engineering, and, finally, gave them all up – had so outraged his father that he declared he would not continue any allowance to him beyond the present year; to which Joe replied by the same post, sending back the twenty pounds inclosed him, and saying: ‘The only amendment I would make to your motion is – as to the date – let it begin from to-day. I suppose I shall have to swim without corks some time. I may as well try now as later on.’
The first experience of his ‘swimming without corks’ was to lie in bed two days and smoke; the next was to rise at daybreak and set out on a long walk into the country, from which he returned late at night, wearied and exhausted, having eaten but once during the day.
Kearney, dressed for an evening party, resplendent with jewellery, essenced and curled, was about to issue forth when Atlee, dusty and wayworn, entered and threw himself into a chair.
‘What lark have you been on, Master Joe?’ he said. ‘I have not seen you for three days, if not four!’
‘No; I’ve begun to train,’ said he gravely. ‘I want to see how long a fellow could hold on to life on three pipes of Cavendish per diem. I take it that the absorbents won’t be more cruel than a man’s creditors, and will not issue a distraint where there are no assets, so that probably by the time I shall have brought myself down to, let us say, seven stone weight, I shall have reached the goal.’
This speech he delivered slowly and calmly, as though enunciating a very grave proposition.
‘What new nonsense is this? Don’t you think health worth something?’
‘Next to life, unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive, and I don’t see how to manage that. Look here, Dick, I have just had a quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher, but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a niggard to him in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one hundred and fifty out of it. That’s the way they neglect arithmetic in our modern schools!’
‘Has he reduced your allowance?’
‘He has done more, he has extinguished it.’
‘Have you provoked him to this?’
‘I have provoked him to it.’
‘But is it not possible to accommodate matters? It should not be very difficult, surely, to show him that once you are launched in life – ’
‘And when will that be, Dick?’ broke in the other. ‘I have been on the stocks these four years, and that launching process you talk of looks just as remote as ever. No, no; let us be fair; he has all the right on his side, all the wrong is on mine. Indeed, so far as conscience goes, I have always felt it so, but one’s conscience, like one’s boots, gets so pliant from wear, that it ceases to give pain. Still, on my honour, I never hip-hurraed to a toast that I did not feel: there goes broken boots to one of the boys, or, worse again, the cost of a cotton dress for one of the sisters. Whenever I took a sherry-cobbler I thought of suicide after it. Self-indulgence and self-reproach got linked in my nature so inseparably, it was hopeless to summon one without the other, till at last I grew to believe it was very heroic in me to deny myself nothing, seeing how sorry I should be for it afterwards. But come, old fellow, don’t lose your evening; we’ll have time enough to talk over these things – where are you going?’
‘To the Clancys’.’
‘To be sure; what a fellow I am to forget it was Letty’s birthday, and I was to have brought her a bouquet! Dick, be a good fellow