Roland Cashel, Volume II (of II)

“As these in all likelihood may be the last lines I shall eyer write – ”

Never, in all the gaudy glare of his prosperity, had he occupied more of public attention. The metaphysical penny-a-liners speculated upon the influence his old buccaneer habits might have exercised upon a mind so imperfectly trained to civilization; and amused themselves with guesses as to how far some Indian “cross” in blood might not have contributed to his tragic vengeance. Less scrupulous scribes invented deeds of violence: in a word, there seemed a kind of impulse abroad to prove him guilty; and it would have been taken as a piece of casuistry, or a mawkish sympathy with crime, to assume the opposite. Not, indeed, that any undertook so ungracious a task; the tide of accusation ran uninterrupted and unbroken. The very friendless desolation in which he stood was quoted and commented on to this end. One alone of all his former friends made an effort in his favor, and ventured to insinuate that his guilt was far from certain. This was Lord Charles Frobisher, who, seeing in the one-sidedness of public opinion the impossibility of obtaining a bet, tried thus to “get up” an “innocent party,” in the hope of a profitable wager.

But what became of Linton all this time? His game was a difficult one; and to enable him to play it successfully he needed reflection. To this end he affected to be so shocked by the terrible event as to be incapable of mixing in society. He retired, therefore, to his cottage near Dublin, and for some weeks lived a life of perfect seclusion. Mr. Phillis accompanied him; for Linton would not trust him out of his sight till – as he muttered in his own phrase – “all was over.”

This was, indeed, the most eventful period of Linton’s life; and with consummate skill he saw that any move on his part would be an error. It is true that, through channels with whose workings he was long conversant, he contributed the various paragraphs to the papers by which Cashel’s guilt was foreshadowed; his knowledge of Roland suggesting many a circumstance well calculated to substantiate the charge of crime. If he never ventured abroad into the world, he made himself master of all its secret whisperings; and heard how he was himself commended for delicacy and good feeling, with the satisfaction of a man who glories in a cheat. And how many are there who play false in life, less from the gain than the gratification of vanity! – a kind of diabolical pride in outwitting and overreaching those whose good faith has made them weak! The polite world does not take the same interest in deeds of terror as do their more humble brethren; they take their “horrors” as they do their one glass of Tokay at dessert, – a something, of which a little more would be nauseating. The less polished classes were, therefore, those who took the greatest pleasure in following up every clew and tracing each circumstance that pointed to Roland’s guilt; and so, at last, his name was rarely mentioned among those with whom so lately he had lived in daily, almost hourly, companionship.

When Linton, then, deemed the time expired which his feelings of grief and shame had demanded for retirement, he reappeared in the world pretty much as men had always seen him. A very close observer, if he would have suffered any one to be such, might have perhaps detected the expression of care in certain wrinkles round his mouth, and in the extra blackness of his whiskers, where gray hairs had dared to show themselves; but to the world at large these signs were inappreciable. To them he was the same even-tempered, easy-mannered man they ever saw him. Nor was this accomplished without an effort; for, however Linton saw the hour of his vengeance draw nigh, he also perceived that all his personal plans of fortune and aggrandizement had utterly failed. The hopes he had so often cherished were all fled. His title to the cottage, his prospect of a seat in Parliament, the very sums he had won at play, and which to a large amount remained in Cashel’s hands, he now perceived were all forfeited to revenge. The price was, indeed, a heavy one! and already he began to feel it so. Many of his creditors had abstained from pressing him so long as his intimacy with Cashel gave promise of future solvency. That illusion was now dispelled, and each post brought him dunning epistles, and threatening notices of various kinds. Exposures menaced him from men whose vindictiveness he was well aware of; but far more perilous than all these were his relations with Tom Keane, who continued to address letter after letter to him, craving advice and pecuniary assistance, in a tone where menace was even more palpable than entreaty. To leave these unreplied to might have been dangerous in the extreme; to answer them even more perilous. No other course was, then, open than to return to Tubbermore, and endeavor, in secret, to confer with this man face to face. There was not any time to lose. Cashel’s trial was to take place at the ensuing assizes, which now were close at hand. Keane was to figure there as an important witness. It was absolutely necessary to see him, and caution him as to the nature of the evidence he should give, nor suffer him in the exuberance of his zeal to prove “too much.”

Under pretence, therefore, of a hurried trip to London, he left his house one evening, and went on board the packet at Kingstown, dismissing his carriage as if about to depart; then, suddenly affecting to discover that his luggage had been carried away by mistake, he landed, and set out with post-horses across country towards the western road. Before midnight he was safe in the mail, on his way to Limerick; and by daybreak on the following morning he was standing in the wood of Tubbermore, and gazing with a thoughtful head upon the house, whose shuttered windows and barred doors told of its altered destiny.

From thence he wandered onward towards the cottage – some strange, inexplicable interest over him – to see once more the spot he had so often fancied to be his own, and where, with a fervor not altogether unreal, he had sworn to pass his days in tranquil solitude. Brief as had been the interval since last he stood there, the changes were considerable. The flower-plots were trampled and trodden down, the palings smashed, the ornamental trees and shrubs were injured and broken by the cattle; traces of reckless haste and carelessness were seen in the broken gates and torn gate-posts; while fragments of packing-cases, straw, and paper littered the walks and the turf around.

Looking through the windows, broken in many places, he could see the cottage was perfectly dismantled. Everything was gone: not a trace remained of those who for so many years had called it home! The desolation was complete; nor was it without its depressing influence upon him who stood there to mark it; for, strange enough, there are little spots in the minds of those, where evil actions are oftenest cradled, that form the refuge of many a tender thought! Linton remembered the cottage as he saw it bright in the morning sun; or, more cheerful still, as the closed curtains and the blazing fire gave a look of homelike comfort to which the veriest wanderer is not insensible; and now it was cold and dark. He had no self-accusings as to the cause. It was, to him, one of those sad mutations which the course of fortune is ever effecting. He even went further, and fancied how different had been their fate if they had not rejected his own alliance.

“In this world of ours,” muttered he, “the cards we are dealt by Fortune would nearly always suffice to win, had we but skill. These people had a noble game before them, but, forsooth, they did not fancy their partner! And see what is come of it – ruin on every side!”

Gloomy thoughts over his own opportunities neglected – over eventful moments left to slip by unprofitably – stole over him. Many of his late speculations had been unsuccessful; he had had heavy losses on the “turf” and the “‘Change.” He had failed in promises by which menacing dangers had been long averted. His enemies would soon be upon him, and he was ill provided for the encounter. Vengeance alone, of all his aspirations, seemed to prosper; and he tried to revel in that thought as a compensation for every failure.

Nor was this unmixed with fear. What if Cashel should enter upon a defence by exposing the events of that last night at Tubbermore? What if he should produce the forged deed in open court? Who was to say that Enrique himself might not be forthcoming to prove his falsehood? Again: how far could he trust Tom Keane? might not the fellow’s avarice suggest a tyranny impossible to endure? Weighty considerations were these, and full of their own peril. Linton paused beside the lake to ruminate, and for some time was deep buried in thought A light rustling sound at last aroused him; he looked up, and perceived, directly in front of him, the very man of whom he was thinking – Tom Keane himself.

Both stood still, each fixedly regarding the other without speaking. It seemed a game in which he who made the first move should lose. So, certainly, did Linton feel; but not so Tom Keane, who, with an easy composure that all the other’s “breeding” could not compass, said, —

“Well, sir, I hope you like your work?”

“My work! my work! How can you call it mine, my good friend?” replied Linton, with a great effort to appear as much at ease as the other.

“Just as ould Con Corrigan built the little pier we’re standin’ on this minit, though his own hands did n’t lay a stone of it.”

“There’s no similarity between the cases whatever,” said Linton, with a well-feigned laugh. “Here there was a plan – an employer – hired laborers engaged to perform a certain task.”

“Well, well,” broke in Keane, impatiently; “sure we’re not in ‘Coort,’ that you need make a speech. ‘T was your own doing: deny it if you like, but don’t drive me to prove it.”

The tone of menace in which these words were uttered was increased by the fact, now for the first time apparent to Linton, that Tom Keane had been drinking freely that morning, and was still under the strong excitement of liquor.

Linton passed his arm familiarly within the other’s, and in a voice of deep meaning, said: “Were you only as cautious as you are courageous, Tom, there’s not a man in Europe I ‘d rather take as my partner in a dangerous enterprise. You are a glorious fellow in the hour of peril, but you are a child, a mere child, when it’s over.”

Keane did not speak, but a leer of inveterate cunning seemed to answer this speech.

“I say this, Tom,” said Linton, coaxingly, “because I see the risk to which your natural frankness will expose you. There are fellows prowling about on every side to scrape up information about this affair; and as, in some unguarded moment, when a glass too much has made the tongue run freely, any man may say things, to explain which away afterwards he is often led to go too far – You understand me, Tom?”

“I do, sir,” said the other, nodding shortly.

“It was on that account I came down here to-day, Tom. The trial is fixed for the 15th: now, the time is so short between this and that, you can surely keep a strict watch over yourself till ‘all is over’?”

“And what then, sir?” asked Tom, with a cunning glance beneath his brows.

“After that,” rejoined Linton, affecting to mistake the meaning of the question – “after that, the law takes its course, and you trouble yourself no more on the matter.”

“And is that all, Mr. Linton? – is that all?” asked the man, as, freeing himself from the other’s arm, he drew himself up to his full height, and stood directly in front of him.

“I must own, Tom, that I don’t understand your question.”

“I’ll make it plain and azy for you, then,” said Keane, with a hardened determination in his manner. “‘T was you yourself put me up to this business. ‘T was you that left the pistol in my possession. ‘T was you that towld me how it was to be done, and where to do it; and” – here his voice became deep, thick, and guttural with passion – “and, by the ‘mortal God! if I ‘m to hang for it, so will you too.”

“Hang!” exclaimed Linton. “Who talks of hanging? or what possible danger do you run – except, indeed, what your own indiscreet tongue may bring upon you?”

“Is n’t it as good to die on the gallows as on the roadside?” asked the other, fiercely. “What betther am I for what I done, tell me that?”

“I have told you before, and I tell you again, that when ‘all is over’ you shall be amply provided for.”

“And why not before?” said he, almost insolently.

“If you must know the reason,” said Linton, affecting a smile, “you shall hear it. Your incaution would make you at once the object of suspicion, were you to be seen with money at command as freely as you will have it hereafter.”

“Will you give me that in writin’? – will you give it to me undher your hand?” asked Keane, boldly.

“Of course I will,” said Linton, who was too subtle a tactician to hesitate about a pledge which could not be exacted on the instant.

“That’s what I call talkin fair,” said Keane; “an’, by my sowl, it’s the best of your play to trate me well.”

“There is only one thing in the world could induce me to do otherwise.”

“An’ what’s that, sir?”

“Your daring to use a threat to me!” said Linton, sternly. “There never was the man that tried that game – and there have been some just as clever fellows as Tom Keane who did try it – who did n’t find that they met their match.”

“I only ax what’s right and fair,” said the other, abashed by the daring effrontery of Linton’s air.

“And you shall have it, and more. You shall either have enough to settle in America, or, if you prefer it, to live abroad.”

“And why not stay at home here?” said Tom, doggedly.

“To blurt out your secret in some drunken moment, and be hanged at last!” said Linton, with a cutting irony.

“An’, maybe, tell how one Misther Linton put the wickedness first in my head,” added Tom, as if finishing the sentence.

Linton bit his lip, and turned angrily away to conceal the mortification the speech had caused him. “My good friend,” said he, in a deliberate voice, “you think that whenever you upset the boat you will drown me; and I have half a mind to dare you to it, just to show you the shortness of your calculation. Trust me” – there was a terrible distinctness in his utterance of these words – “trust me, that in all my dealings with the world, I have left very little at the discretion of what are called men of honor. I leave nothing, absolutely nothing, in the power of such as you.”

At last did Linton strike the right chord of the fellow’s nature; and in his subdued and crestfallen countenance might be read the signs of his prostration.

“Hear me now attentively, Keane, and let my words rest well in your memory. The trial comes on on the 15th; your evidence will be the most important of all; but give it with the reluctance of a man who shrinks from bringing his landlord to the scaffold. You understand me? Let everything you say show the desire to screen Mr. Cashel. Another point: affect not to know anything save what you actually saw. You never can repeat too often the words, ‘I did n’t see it.’ This scrupulous reliance on eyesight imposes well upon a jury. These are the only cautions I have to give you. Your own natural intelligence will supply the rest. When all is finished you will come up to Dublin, and call at a certain address which will be given you hereafter. And now we part. It is your own fault if you lose a friend who never deserted the man that stood by him.”

“An’ are you going back to Dublin now, sir?” asked Keane, over whose mind Linton’s influence had become dominant, and who actually dreaded to be left alone, and without his guidance.

Linton nodded an assent.

“But you ‘ll be down here at the trial, sir?” asked Tom, eagerly.

“I suspect not,” said Linton. “If not summoned as a witness, I’ll assuredly not come.”

“Oh, murther!” exclaimed Tom. “I thought I ‘d have you in the ‘Coort,’ just to look up at you from time to time, to give me courage and make me feel bowld; for it does give me courage when I see you so calm and so azy, without as much as a tremble in your voice.”

“It is not likely that I shall be there,” rejoined Linton; “but mind, if I be, that you do not direct your eyes towards me. Remember, that every look you give, every gesture you make, will be watched and noted.”

“I wondher how I’ll get through it!” exclaimed the other, sorrowfully.

“You’ll get through it admirably, man, if you’ll only think that you are not the person in peril. It is your conscience alone can bring you into any danger.”

“Well, I hope so! with the help of – ” The fellow stopped short, and a red flush of shame spread itself over features which in a whole life long had never felt a blush.

“I ‘d like to be able to give you something better than this, Tom,” said Linton, as he placed a handful of loose silver in the other’s palm, “but it is safer for the present that you should not be seen with much money.”

“I owe more than this at Mark Shea’s ‘public,’” said Tom, looking discontentedly at the money.

“And why should you owe it?” said Linton, bitterly. “What is there in your circumstances to warrant debts of this kind?”

“Did n’t I earn it – tell me that?” asked the ruffian, with a savage earnestness.

“I see that you are hopeless,” said Linton, turning away in disgust. “Take your own course, and see where it will lead you.”

“No – you mean where it will lead us,” said the fellow, insolently.

“What! do you dare to threaten me? Now, once for all, let this have an end. I have hitherto treated you with candor and with kindness. If you fancy that my hate can be more profitable than my friendship, say so, and before one hour passes over your head I ‘ll have you committed to prison as an accessory to the murder.”

“I ax your pardon humbly – I did n’t mean to anger yer Honer,” said the other, in a servile tone. “I’ll do everything you bid me – and sure you know best what ought to be done.”

“Then let us part good friends,” said Linton, holding out his hand towards him. “I see a boat coming over the lake which will drop me at Killaloe; we must not be seen together – so good-bye, Tom, good-bye.”

“Good-bye, and a safe journey to yer Honer,” said Tom, as, touching his hat respectfully, he retired into the wood.

The boat which Linton descried was still above a mile from the shore, and he sat down upon a stone to await its coming. Beautiful as that placid lake was, with its background of bold mountains, its scattered islands, and its jutting promontories, he had no eye for these, but followed with a peering glance the direction in which Tom Keane had departed.

“There are occasions,” muttered he to himself, “when the boldest courses are the safest. Is this one of these? Dare I trust that fellow, or would this be better?” And, as if mechanically, he drew forth a double-barrelled pistol from his breast, and looked fixedly at it.

He arose from his seat, and sat down again – his mind seemed beset with hesitation and doubt; but the conflict did not last long, for he replaced the weapon, and walking down to the lake, dipped his fingers in the water and bathed his temples, saying to himself, —

“Better as it is: over-caution is as great an error as foolhardiness.”

With a dexterity acquired by long practice, he now disguised his features so perfectly that none could have recognized him; and by the addition of a wig and whiskers of bushy red hair, totally changed the character of his appearance. This he did, that at any future period he might not be recognized by the boatmen, who, in answer to his signal, now pulled vigorously towards the shore.

He soon bargained with them to leave him at Killaloe, and as they rowed along engaged them to talk about the country, in which he affected to be a tourist. Of course the late murder was the theme uppermost in every mind, and Linton marked with satisfaction how decisively the current of popular belief ran in attributing the guilt to Cashel.

With a perversity peculiar to the peasant, the agent whom they had so often inveighed against for cruelty in his lifetime, they now discovered to have been the type of all that was kind-hearted and benevolent; and had no hesitation in attributing his unhappy fate to an altercation in which he, with too rash a zeal, was the “poor man’s advocate.”

The last words he was heard to utter on leaving Tub-bermore were quoted, as implying a condemnation on Cashel’s wasteful extravagance, at a time when the poor around were “perishing of hunger.” Even to Linton, whose mind was but too conversant with the sad truths of the story, these narratives assumed the strongest form of consistency and likelihood; and he saw how effectually circumstantial evidence can convict a man in public estimation, long before a jury are sworn to try him.

Crimes of this nature, now, had not been unfrequent in that district; and the country people felt a species of savage vengeance in urging their accusations against a “gentleman,” who had not what they reckoned as the extenuating circumstances to diminish or explain away his guilt.

“He was n’t turned out of his little place to die on the roadside,” muttered one. “He wasn’t threatened, like poor Tom Keane, to be ‘starminated,’” cried another.

“And who is Tom Keane?” asked Linton.

“The gatekeeper up at the big house yonder, sir; one that’s lived man and boy nigh fifty years there; and Mr. Cashel swore he ‘d root him out, for all that!”

“Ay!” chimed in another, in a moralizing whine, “an’ see where he is himself, now!”

“I wondher now if they’d hang him, sir?” asked one.

“Why not,” asked Linton, “if he should be found guilty?”

“They say, sir, the gentlemen can always pay for another man to be hanged instead of them. Musha, maybe ‘tis n’t true,” added he, diffidently, as he saw the smile on Linton’s face.

“I think you ‘ll find that the right man will suffer in this case,” said Linton; and a gleam of malignant passion shot from his dark eyes as he spoke.