Lord Kilgobbin. Charles James Lever
grew up which, in a measure, restored the affection between them. When Kostalergi discovered the source from which his wretched wife now drew her consolation and her courage, he forbade her to write more, and himself addressed a letter to Kearney so insulting and offensive—charging him even with causing the discord of his home, and showing the letter to his wife before sending it—that the poor woman, long failing in health and broken down, sank soon after, and died so destitute, that the very funeral was paid for by a subscription amongst her countrymen. Kostalergi had left her some days before her death, carrying the girl along with him, nor was his whereabouts learned for a considerable time.
When next he emerged into the world it was at Rome, where he gave lessons in music and modern languages, in many in which he was a proficient. His splendid appearance, his captivating address, his thorough familiarity with the modes of society, gave him the entrée to many houses where his talents amply requited the hospitality he received. He possessed, amongst his other gifts, an immense amount of plausibility, and people found it, besides, very difficult to believe ill of that well-bred, somewhat retiring man, who, in circumstances of the very narrowest fortunes, not only looked and dressed like a gentleman, but actually brought up a daughter with a degree of care and an amount of regard to her education that made him appear a model parent.
Nina Kostalergi was then about seventeen, though she looked at least three years older. She was a tall, slight, pale girl, with perfectly regular features—so classic in the mould, and so devoid of any expression, that she recalled the face one sees on a cameo. Her hair was of wondrous beauty—that rich gold colour which has reflets through it, as the light falls full or faint, and of an abundance that taxed her ingenuity to dress it. They gave her the sobriquet of the Titian Girl at Rome whenever she appeared abroad.
In the only letter Kearney had received from his brother-in-law after his sister’s death was an insolent demand for a sum of money, which he alleged that Kearney was unjustly withholding, and which he now threatened to enforce by law. ‘I am well aware,’ wrote he, ‘what measure of honour or honesty I am to expect from a man whose very name and designation are a deceit. But probably prudence will suggest how much better it would be on this occasion to simulate rectitude than risk the shame of an open exposure.’
To this gross insult Kearney never deigned any reply; and now more than two years passed without any tidings of his disreputable relative, when there came one morning a letter with the Roman postmark, and addressed, ‘À Monsieur le Vicomte de Kilgobbin, à son Château de Kilgobbin, en Irlande.’ To the honour of the officials in the Irish post-office, it was forwarded to Kilgobbin with the words, ‘Try Mathew Kearney, Esq.,’ in the corner.
A glance at the writing showed it was not in Kostalergi’s hand, and, after a moment or two of hesitation, Kearney opened it. He turned at once for the writer’s name, and read the words, ‘Nina Kostalergi’—his sister’s child! ‘Poor Matty,’ was all he could say for some minutes. He remembered the letter in which she told him of her little girl’s birth, and implored his forgiveness for herself and his love for her baby.’ I want both, my dear brother,’ wrote she; ‘for though the bonds we make for ourselves by our passions—’ And the rest of the sentence was erased—she evidently thinking she had delineated all that could give a clue to a despondent reflection.
The present letter was written in English, but in that quaint, peculiar hand Italians often write. It began by asking forgiveness for daring to write to him, and recalling the details of the relationship between them, as though he could not have remembered it. ‘I am, then, in my right,’ wrote she, ‘when I address you as my dear, dear uncle, of whom I have heard so much, and whose name was in my prayers ere I knew why I knelt to pray.’
Then followed a piteous appeal—it was actually a cry for protection. Her father, she said, had determined to devote her to the stage, and already had taken steps to sell her—she said she used the word advisedly—for so many years to the impresario of the ‘Fenice’ at Venice, her voice and musical skill being such as to give hope of her becoming a prima donna. She had, she said, frequently sung at private parties at Rome, but only knew within the last few days that she had been, not a guest, but a paid performer. Overwhelmed with the shame and indignity of this false position, she implored her mother’s brother to compassionate her. ‘If I could not become a governess, I could be your servant, dearest uncle,’ she wrote. ‘I only ask a roof to shelter me, and a refuge. May I go to you? I would beg my way on foot if I only knew that at the last your heart and your door would be open to me, and as I fell at your feet, knew that I was saved.’
Until a few days ago, she said, she had by her some little trinkets her mother had left her, and on which she counted as a means of escape, but her father had discovered them and taken them from her.
‘If you answer this—and oh! let me not doubt you will—write to me to the care of the Signori Cayani and Battistella, bankers, Rome. Do not delay, but remember that I am friendless, and but for this chance hopeless.—Your niece,
‘NINA KOSTALERGI.’
While Kearney gave this letter to his daughter to read, he walked up and down the room with his head bent and his hands deep in his pockets.
‘I think I know the answer you’ll send to this, papa,’ said the girl, looking up at him with a glow of pride and affection in her face. ‘I do not need that you should say it.’
‘It will take fifty—no, not fifty, but five-and-thirty pounds to bring her over here, and how is she to come all alone?’
Kate made no reply; she knew the danger sometimes of interrupting his own solution of a difficulty.
‘She’s a big girl, I suppose, by this—fourteen or fifteen?’
‘Over nineteen, papa.’
‘So she is, I was forgetting. That scoundrel, her father, might come after her; he’d have the right if he wished to enforce it, and what a scandal he’d bring upon us all!’
‘But would he care to do it? Is he not more likely to be glad to be disembarrassed of her charge?’
‘Not if he was going to sell her—not if he could convert her into money.’
‘He has never been in England; he may not know how far the law would give him any power over her.’
‘Don’t trust that, Kate; a blackguard always can find out how much is in his favour everywhere. If he doesn’t know it now, he’d know it the day after he landed.’ He paused an instant, and then said: ‘There will be the devil to pay with old Peter Gill, for he’ll want all the cash I can scrape together for Loughrea fair. He counts on having eighty sheep down there at the long crofts, and a cow or two besides. That’s money’s worth, girl!’
Another silence followed, after which he said, ‘And I think worse of the Greek scoundrel than all the cost.’
‘Somehow, I have no fear that he’ll come here?’
‘You’ll have to talk over Peter, Kitty’—he always said Kitty when he meant to coax her. ‘He’ll mind you, and at all events, you don’t care about his grumbling. Tell him it’s a sudden call on me for railroad shares, or’—and here he winked knowingly—‘say, it’s going to Rome the money is, and for the Pope!’
‘That’s an excellent thought, papa,’ said she, laughing; ‘I’ll certainly tell him the money is going to Rome, and you’ll write soon—you see with what anxiety she expects your answer.’
‘I’ll write to-night when the house is quiet, and there’s no racket nor disturbance about me.’ Now though Kearney said this with a perfect conviction of its truth and reasonableness, it would have been very difficult for any one to say in what that racket he spoke of consisted, or wherein the quietude of even midnight was greater than that which prevailed there at noonday. Never, perhaps, were lives more completely still or monotonous than theirs. People who derive no interests from the outer world, who know nothing of what goes on in life, gradually subside into a condition in which reflection takes the place of conversation, and lose all zest and