The Martins Of Cro' Martin, Vol. I (of II)

CHAPTER XIII. “A HOUSEKEEPER’S ROOM”

Cro’ Martin was replete with every comfort and luxury. All its arrangements betokened wealth; not a single appliance of ease or enjoyment but was to be found within its well-ordered walls; and yet there was one want which seemed to mar all, and infuse a sense of almost dreary coldness over everything, and this was – the absence of a numerous family, the assemblage of various ages, which gives to a home its peculiar interest, embodying the hopes and fears and passions and motives of manhood, in every stage of existence, making up that little world within doors which emblematizes the great one without; but, with this singular advantage, of its being bound up in one holy sentiment of mutual love and affection.

This charm is it which gives the whole vitality to home, – this mingling of the temperaments of youth and manhood and deep age, blending hopes of the future with memories of the past, and making of every heart a portion of one human biography, in which many are sharers. To the stranger, who came to see the house and its gorgeous decorations, all seemed suggestive of habitable enjoyment. The vast drawing-rooms appeared as if only waiting for a splendid company; the dark wainscoted dining-room, with its noble fireplace of gigantic dimensions, looked the very scene where hospitable conviviality might be enacted; the library, calm, quiet, and secluded, seemed a spot wherein a student might have passed a life long. Even in the views that presented themselves at the several windows, there was a certain appropriateness to the character of the room, and the same importunate question still arose to one’s mind: Who is there to enjoy all this? What words of glad welcome echo through this vaulted hall, what happy daughter sings through these gilded chambers, where is the social pleasantry that circles the blazing fire of the ample hearth? Alas! all was sombre, splendid, and dreary. No, we are wrong! – not all! There was one corner of this great house where cheerfulness was the very type of comfort. It was a small and not lofty room, whose two windows projected beyond the walls, giving a wide view over the swelling landscape for miles of space. Here the furniture was of the most ordinary kind, but scrupulously neat and well kept. The chairs – there were but four of them – all with arms and deep cushions; the walnut table a perfect mirror of polish; the cloth curtains, that closed the windows and concealed the door, massive and heavy-folded, – all breathed of snugness; while the screen that surrounded the fire had other perfections than those of comfortable seclusion, containing a most strange collection of the caricatures of the time, and the period before the Union. It is but necessary to add that this was Mrs. Broon’s apartment, – the snug chamber where old Catty enjoyed herself, after the fatigues and duties of the day. Here now she sat at tea, beside a cheerful fire, the hissing kettle on the hob harmonizing pleasantly with the happy purring of an enormous cat, who sat winking at the blaze; and while evidently inconvenienced by the heat, lacking energy to retreat from it. Catty had just obtained the newspaper, – as the master had gone to dinner, – and was really about to enjoy a comfortable evening. Far from devoid of social qualities, or a liking for companionship, she still lived almost entirely to herself, the other servants being chiefly English, whose habits and ways were all strange to her, and all whose associations were widely different from her own. Catty Broon had thus obtained a reputation for unsociability which she by no means deserved, but to which, it must be owned, she was totally indifferent. In fact, if they deemed her morose and disagreeable, she, in turn, held them still more cheaply, calling them a set of lazy devils that “were only in each other’s way,” and “half of them not worth their salt.”

Catty had also survived her generation; all her friends of former years had either died or emigrated, and except two or three of the farm-servants, none of the “ould stock,” as she called them, were in existence. This brief explanation will show that Catty’s comparative isolation was not entirely a matter of choice. If a sense of loneliness did now and then cross her mind, she never suffered it to dwell there, but chased away the unpleasant thought by some active duty; or if the season of that were over, by the amusing columns of the “Intelligence,” – a journal which realized to Mrs. Broon’s conceptions the very highest order of literary merit.

Catty did not take much interest in politics; she had a vague, dreamy kind of notion that the game of party was a kind of disreputable gambling, and Parliament itself little better than a “Hell,” frequented by very indifferent company. Indeed, she often said it would be “well for us if there was no politics, and maybe then, there would be no taxes either.” The news she liked was the price of farming-stock at fairs and markets, – what Mr. Hynes got for his “top lot” of hoggets, and what Tom Healey paid for the “finest heifers ever seen on the fair-green.” These, and the accidents – a deeply interesting column – were her peculiar tastes; and her memory was stored with every casualty, by sea, fire, and violence, that had graced the “Intelligence” for forty years back; in truth they formed the stations of her chronology, and she would refer to events as having occurred the same year that Joe Ryan was hanged, or “the very Christmas that Hogan fired at Captain Crossley.” An inundation of great extent also figured in these memorabilia, and was constantly referred to, by her saying, “This or that happened the year after the Flood,” suggesting a rather startling impression as to her longevity.

On the evening we now refer to, the newspaper was more than commonly adorned with these incidents. Public news having failed, private calamities were invoked to supply the place. Catty was, therefore, fortunate. There was something, too, not altogether unpleasant in the whistling storm that raged without, and the heavy plashing of the rain as it beat upon the window-panes. Without imputing to her, as would be most unjust, the slightest touch of ill-nature, she felt a heightened sense of her own snugness as she drew closer to the bright hearth, while she read of “a dreadful gale in the Bay of Biscay.”

It was just in the most exciting portion of the description that her door was rudely opened, and the heavy curtain dashed aside with a daring hand; and Catty, startled by the sudden interruption, called angrily out, —

“Who’s there? – who are ye at all?”

“Can’t you guess, Catty?” cried out a pleasant voice. “Don’t you know that there’s only one in this house here who ‘d dare to enter in such a fashion?”

“Oh, Miss Mary, is it you? And, blessed Virgin, what a state ye ‘re in!” cried she, as she gazed at the young girl, who, throwing away her riding-hat, wrung out the rain from her long and silky hair, while she laughed merrily at old Catty’s dismayed countenance.

“Why, where in the world were you – what happened you, darling?” said Catty, as she assisted her to remove the dripping costume.

“I was at the Wood, Catty, and up to the quarries, and round by Cronebawn, and then, seeing a storm gathering, I thought I ‘d turn homeward, but one of Kit Sullivan’s children – my little godchild, you know – detained me to hear him recite some verses he had learned for my birthday; and, what with one thing and another, it was pitch dark when I reached the ‘New Cut,’ and then, to my annoyance, I found the bridge had just been carried away – there, Catty, now for a pair of your own comfortable slippers – and, as I was saying to you, there was no bridge!”

“The bridge gone!” exclaimed Catty, in horror.

“All Tom Healey’s fault. I told him that the arch had not span enough, and that the buttresses would never stand the first heavy fall of rain from the mountains, and there ‘s not a vestige of them now!”

“And what did you do?”

“I rode for the Low Meadows, Catty, with all speed. I knew that the river, not being confined there between narrow banks, and spreading over a wide surface, couldn’t be very deep. Nor was it. It never touched the girths but once, when we got into a hole. But she is such a rare good beast, that little Sorrel; she dashed through everything, and I don’t think I took forty minutes from Kane’s Mill to this door, though I never saw a spot of the road all the while, except when the lightning showed it. There now, like a good old dear, don’t wring your hands and say, ‘Blessed hour!’ but just put some more tea in the teapot, and fetch me your brown loaf!”

“But surely you ‘ll die of cold! – you ‘ll be in a fever!”

“Nonsense, Catty; I have been out in rain before this. I’m more provoked about that bridge than all else. My excellent aunt will have such a laugh at my engineering skill, when she hears of it. Can’t be helped, however. And so there’s a dinner-party upstairs, I hear. Fanny told me there were three strangers.”

“So I hear. There’s a lawyer from Dublin; and a lady from I don’t know where; and young Nelligan, old Dan’s son. I ‘m sure I never thought I ‘d see the day he ‘d be eating his dinner at Cro’ Martin.”

“And why not, Catty? What is there in his manners and conduct that should not make him good company for any one here?”

“Is n’t he the son of a little huckster in Oughterard? Old Dan, that I remember without a shoe to his foot?”

“And is it a reproach to him that he has made a fortune by years of patient industry and toil?”

“In-dus-try! toil! indeed,” said Catty, sneeringly. “How much in-dus-try or toil there is, weighing out snuff and sugar in a snug shop. Ayeh! he’s an old nig-gar, the same Dan. I know him well.”

“But that is no reason why you should disparage his son, Catty, who is a young gentleman of the highest ability and great promise. I never heard you speak so ungenerously before.”

“Well, well, darling, don’t look angry with your ould Catty, anyway. It isn’t for the like of Dan Nelligan, or his son either, you’d be cross with me!”

“Never, Catty, never, – for anybody or anything,” said the young girl, taking her hand with both her own. “But you have n’t told me who the lady is. How did she arrive, and when?”

“I know nothing of her. Peter came to say that the blue bedroom was wanting to-night, and he wished to torment me into asking who for? – but I wouldn’t, just for that same; and so I gave him the keys without a word.”

“I wonder if this note, that I found on my dressing-table, will explain anything,” said Mary, as she proceeded to break the seal. “Of all the absurd ways of my Lady aunt, she has not a more ridiculous one than this trick of writing little notes, instead of speaking. She sees me every day, and might surely say whatever she wanted to say, without embalming it in a despatch. This, I perceive, is number four hundred and seventy-six, and I presume she ‘s correct in the score. Only think, Catty, – four hundred little epistles like this!”

And with these words she carelessly unfolded the letter and began to read it. All her indifference of manner, however, soon gave way to an expression of considerable eagerness, and she had no sooner finished the epistle than she recommenced and reread it.

“You ‘d never guess what tidings this brings me, Catty,” said she, laying down the paper, and looking with an expression half sad, half comical.

“Maybe I might, then,” said Catty, shaking her head knowingly.

“Come, out with your guess, then, old lady, and I promise to venerate your wisdom ever after if you be right, – that is, if nobody has already given you a hint on the subject.”

“Not one in the world,” said Catty, solemnly; “I pledge you my word and faith I never heard a syllable about it.”

“About it! about what?”

“About what’s in the letter there,” said Catty, stoutly.

“You are therefore quite certain that you know it,” said Mary, smiling, “so now let’s have your interpretation.”

“It ‘s a proposial,” said Catty, with a slight wink.

“A what!”

“A proposial – of marriage, I mean.”

But before the words were out, Mary burst into a fit of laughter, so hearty and with such good-will that poor Catty felt perfectly ashamed of herself.

“My dear Catty,” said she, at length, “you must have been reading fairy tales this morning; nothing short of such bright literature could have filled your mind with these imaginings. The object of the note is, I assure you, of a quite different kind;” and here she ran her eye once more over the epistle. “Yes,” continued she, “it is written in my dear aunt’s own peculiar style, and begins with a ‘declaratory clause,’ as I think Mr. Scanlan would call it, expressive of my lamentably neglected education, and then proceeds to the appropriate remedy, by telling me that I am to have a governess!”

“A what!” cried Catty, in angry amazement.

“A governess, Catty, – not a governor, as you suspected.”

“Ayeh, ayeh!” cried the old woman, wringing her hands; “what’s this for? Don’t you know how to govern yourself by this time? And what can they teach you that you don’t understand already?”

“Ah, my dear Catty,” said the young girl, sadly, “it is a sad subject you would open there, – one that I have wept over many a dreary hour! No one knows – no one even could guess – how deeply I have deplored my illiterate condition. Nor was it,” added she, ardently, “till I had fashioned out a kind of existence of my own – active, useful, and energetic – that I could bury the thought of my utter want of education. Not even you, Catty, could fathom all the tears this theme has cost me, nor with what a sinking of the heart I have thought over my actual unfitness for my station.”

“Arrah, don’t provoke me! don’t drive me mad!” cried the old woman, in real anger. “There never was one yet as fit for the highest place as yourself; and it is n’t me alone that says it, but hundreds of – ”

“Hundreds of dear, kind, loving hearts,” broke in Mary, “that would measure my poor capacity by my will to serve them. But no matter, Catty; I ‘ll not try to undeceive them. They shall think of me with every help their own affection may lend them, and I will not love them less for the overestimate.”

As she spoke these words, she buried her face between her hands; but the quick heaving of her chest showed how deep was her emotion. The old woman respected her sorrow too deeply to interrupt her, and for several minutes not a word was spoken on either side. At last Mary raised her head, and throwing back the long, loose hair, which in heavy masses shaded her face, said with a firm and resolute voice, —

“I ‘d have courage to go to school to-morrow, Catty, and begin as a mere child to learn, if I knew that another was ready to take my place here. But who is to look after these poor people, who are accustomed now to see me amongst them, on the mountains, in the fields, at their firesides? – who gain new spirit for labor when I ride down in the midst of them, and look up, cheered, by seeing me, even from a sick-bed. Her Ladyship would say, Mr. Henderson could do all this far better than myself.”

“Mr. Henderson, indeed!” exclaimed Catty, indignantly; “the smooth-tongued old rogue!”

“And perhaps he might, in England,” resumed Mary; “but not here, Catty, – not here! We care less for benefits than the source from which they spring. We Irish cherish the love of motives as well as actions; and, above all, we cherish the links that bind the lowliest in the land with the highest, and make both better by the union.”

She poured out these words with rapid impetuosity, rather talking to herself than addressing her companion; then, suddenly changing her tone, she added, —

“Besides, Catty, they are used to me, and I to them. A new face and a new voice would not bring the same comfort to them.”

“Never, never,” muttered the old woman to herself.

“And I ‘ll not desert them.”

“That you won’t, darling,” said the old woman, kissing her hand passionately, while tears swam in her eyes, and trickled down her cheeks.

“There is but one thought, Catty, that makes me at all faint-hearted about this, and whenever it crosses me I do feel very low and depressed.” She paused, and then murmured the words, “My father!”

“Your father, my darling! What about him?”

“It is thinking, Catty, of his return; an event that ought to be – and would be, too – the very happiest of my life; a day for whose coming I never sleep without a prayer; and yet, even this bright prospect has its dark side, when I recall all my own deficiencies, and how different he will find his daughter from what he had expected her.”

“May the blessed saints grant me patience!” cried Catty, breaking in. “Isn’t it too bad to hear you talking this way? Sure, don’t I know Master Barry well? Didn’t I nurse him, and wasn’t I all as one as his own mother to him, and don’t I know that you are his own born image? ‘Tis himself and no other ye are every minute of the day.”

“And even that, Catty,” said Mary, smiling, “might fail to satisfy him. It is something very different indeed he might have imagined his daughter. I’m sure nobody can be more ignorant than I am, of what a person in my station ought to know. I cannot hide this from myself in my sad moments. I do not try to do so, but I have always relied upon the consolation that, to an existence such as mine is like to be, these deficiencies do not bring the same sense of shame, the same painful consciousness of inferiority, as if I were to mingle with the world of my equals. But if he were to come back, – he, who has seen society in every shape and fashion, – and find me the poor, unlettered, unread, untaught thing I am, unable to follow his very descriptions of far-away lands without confusion and mistake; unable to benefit by his reflections from very want of previous knowledge, – oh, Catty dearest, what a miserable thing is self-love after all, when it should thus thrust itself into the foreground, where very different affections alone should have the place.”

“He ‘d love you like his own heart,” said Catty. “Nobody knows him like me; and if there was ever one made for him to dote on, it’s your own self.”

“Do you indeed think so?” cried Mary, eagerly.

“Do I know it – could I swear it?” said Catty. “He was never much given to study himself, except it was books of travel like ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and the like; and then, after reading one of them books he ‘d be off for days together, and we ‘d be looking for him over the whole country, and maybe find him in the middle of Kyle’s Wood up a tree; or once, indeed, it was in the island of Lettermullen we got him. He built a mud-house, and was living there with a goat and two rabbits that he reared himself, and if he was n’t miserable when they brought him away home! I remember his words well, – ‘Maybe,’ says he, ‘the time will come that I ‘ll go where you can’t come after me;’ and ye see that’s what he’s done, for nobody knows where he wasn’t wandering these last eight or nine years.”

When Catty got upon this theme she could not be brought to quit it, – nor, indeed, did Mary try, – for though she had heard these stories of her father’s boyish days over and over again, she never wearied of them; they had all the fascination of romance for her, with the stronger interest that grew out of her love for one who, she was told, had so loved herself. Besides this, she felt in her own heart the same promptings to a life of action and adventure. All the incidents and accidents of an eventful existence were the very things to delight her, and one of her happiest daydreams was to fancy herself her father’s companion in his wanderings by flood and field.

And thus they sat till a late hour of the night talking and listening, old Catty answering each inquiry of the young girl by some anecdote or trait of him she still persisted in calling “Master Barry,” till, in the ardor of listening, Mary herself caught up the phrase, and so designated her own father.

“How unlike my uncle in everything!” exclaimed Mary, as she reflected over some traits the old woman had just recorded. “And were they not very fond of each other?”

“That they were: at least I can answer for Master Barry’s love; and to be sure, if having a reason was worth anything, your uncle ought to love him more than one man ever did another.” Old Catty uttered these words with a slow and almost muttering accent; they seemed as if the expression of a thought delivered involuntarily – almost unconsciously.

Mary was attracted by the unwonted solemnity of her accent, but still more by an expression of intense meaning which gathered over the old woman’s brows and forehead. “Ay, ay,” muttered she, still to herself, “there’s few brothers would do it. Maybe there’s not another living but himself would have done it.”

“And what was it, Catty?” asked Mary, boldly.

“Eh! – what was I saying, darling?” said Catty, rousing herself to full consciousness.

“You were telling of my father, and some great proof of affection he gave my uncle.”

“To be sure he did,” said the old woman, hastily. “They were always fond of each other, as brothers ought to be.”

“But this one particular instance of love, – what was it, Catty?”

The old woman started, and looked eagerly around the room, as though to assure herself that they were alone; then, drawing her chair close to Mary’s, she said, in a low voice: “Don’t ask me any more about them things, darling. ‘T is past and gone many a year now, and I ‘d rather never think of it more, for I ‘ve a heavy heart after it.”

“So, then, it is a secret, Catty?” said Mary, half proudly.

“A secret, indeed,” said Catty, shaking her head mournfully.

“Then you need only to have said so, and I’d not have importuned you to tell it; for, to say truth, Catty, I never knew you had any secrets from me.”

“Nor have I another, except this, darling,” said Catty; and she buried her face within her hands. And now both sat in silence for some minutes, – a most painful silence to each. At last Mary arose, and, although evidently trying to overcome it, a feeling of constraint was marked in her features.

“You’d never guess how late it is, Catty,” said she, trying to change the current of her thoughts. “You ‘d not believe it is past three o’clock; how pleasantly we must have talked, to forget time in this way!”

But the old woman made no reply, and it was clear that she had never heard the words, so deeply was she sunk in her own reflections.

“This poor hat of mine will scarcely do another day’s service,” said Mary, as she looked at it half laughingly. “Nor is my habit the fresher of its bath in the ‘Red River;’ and the worst of it is, Catty, I have overdrawn my quarter’s allowance, and must live on, in rags, till Easter. I see, old lady, you have no sympathies to waste on me and my calamities this evening,” added she, gayly, “and so I’ll just go to bed and, if I can, dream pleasantly.”

“Rags, indeed,” said Catty. “It’s well it becomes you to wear rags!” and her eyes sparkled with indignant passion. “Faith, if it comes to that,” – here she suddenly paused, and a pale hue spread over her features like a qualm of faintish sickness, – “may the Holy Mother give me help and advice; for sometimes I’m nigh forgetting myself!”

“My dear old Catty,” said Mary, fondly, “don’t fret about me and my foolish speech. I only said it in jest. I have everything, – far more than I want; a thousand times more than I desire. And my excellent aunt never said a truer thing in her life than when she declared that ‘everybody spoiled me.’ Now, good-night.” And kissing the old woman affectionately, Mary gathered up the stray fragments of her riding-gear, and hurried away, her merry voice heard cheerfully as she wended her way up many a stair and gallery to her own chamber.