Luttrell Of Arran
“Head and heart!” muttered she, drearily. “Good-by, my dear old grandady – good-by!” And, not able to control her emotion, she turned her face away.
“You’ll have to call out through that gratin’ before they’ll open the door,” said he, half sulkily. “You’d think we was all sentenced and condimned, the way they lock us up here! But I hear him coming now. You’ll let her in to see me to-morrow, Mr. Meekins, won’t you?” said he, in an imploring tone. “She’s my daughter’s child, and nearly the last of us now.”
“By my conscience, she’s a fine creature!” said the turnkey, as she moved past. “It’s mighty seldom the likes of her is seen in such a place as this!”
When Kate gained the street, the rain was falling heavily, and as she stood uncertain which way to turn, for the town was strange to her, O’Rorke came up.
“Haven’t you as much as an umbrella, Miss Kate,” said he, “or a cloak, in this dreadful weather?”
“I was not thinking of either. Which way do we go towards the inn?”
“I’d advise you to take shelter in a shop here, Miss; the shower is too heavy to last long.”
“I have no time for this; I want to catch the post, and I believe it leaves at six o’clock.”.
“You’ll be drowned with this rain,” muttered he. “But come along. I’ll show you the way.”
As they went, neither spoke; indeed, the noise of the plashing rain, and the sharp gusts of the sweeping wind, would have made it almost impossible to converse, and they plodded onward through the dreary and deserted streets, for even the poorest had now sought shelter. The inn was at the very end of a long straggling street, and, when they reached it, they were completely soaked through with rain.
“You have ordered a room for me here, you said?” asked Elate, as they entered.
“Yes, it’s all ready, and your dinner too, whenever you like to eat it. – This is the young lady, ma’am,” continued he, addressing the landlady, “that’s coming to stop here; she’s wet through, and I hope you’ll take care of her, that she doesn’t catch cold.”
“Will you show me my room?” asked Kate, quietly. But the landlady never moved, but stood scrutinising her with an eye the very reverse of kindly.
“She’s asking you where’s her room,” broke in O’Rorke.
“I hear her, and I think this isn’t the house for her.”
“How do you mean? – what are you saying?” cried he, angrily.
“She’ll be better and more at home at Tom M’Cafferty’s, that’s what I mean,” said she, sturdily.
“But I took a room here.”
“And you’ll not get it,” rejoined she, setting her arms akimbo; “and if you want to know why, maybe you’d hear it, and hear more than you like.”
“Come away – come away; let us find out this other place, wherever it be,” said Kate, hurriedly.
“The other place is down there, where you see the red sign,” said the landlady, half pushing her, as she spoke, into the street.
Shivering with cold, and wet through, Kate reached the little “shebeen,” or carriers’ inn, where, however, they received her with kindness and civility, the woman giving up to her her own room, and doing her very best to wait on her and assist her. As her trunk had been forgotten at the inn, however, Kate had to wait till O’Rorke fetched it, and as Mr. O’Rorke took the opportunity of the visit to enter on a very strong discussion with the landlady for her insolent refusal to admit them, it was nigh an hour before he got back again.
By this time, what with the effects of cold and wet, and what with the intense anxieties of the morning, Kate’s head began to ache violently, and frequent shiverings gave warning of the approach of fever. Her impatience, too, to be in time for the post became extreme. She wanted to write to her uncle; she was confident that, by a frank, open statement of what she had done, and said, and seen, she could deprecate his anger. The few words in which she could describe her old grandfather’s condition, would, she felt certain, move her uncle to thoughts of forgiveness. “Is he coming? – can you see him with my trunk? – why does he delay?” cried she at every instant. “No, no, don’t talk to me of change of clothes; there is something else to be thought of first. What can it be that keeps him so long? Surely it is only a few steps away. At last! – at last!” exclaimed she, as she heard O’Rorke’s voice in the passage. “There – there, do not delay me any longer. Give me that desk; I don’t want the other, it is my desk, my writing-desk, I want. Leave me now, my good woman – leave me now to myself.”
“But your shoes, Miss; let me just take off your shoes. It will kill you to sit that way, dripping and wet through.”
“I tell you I will not be dictated to!” cried she, wildly, for her face was now crimson with excitement, and her brain burning. “By what right do you come here into my room, and order me to do this or that? Do you know to whom you speak? I am a Luttrell of Arran. Ask him – that man below – if I am not speaking the truth. Is it not honour enough for your poor house that a Luttrell should stop here, but that you must command me, as if I were your servant? There – there, don’t cry; I did not mean to be unkind! Oh! if you but knew how my poor head is aching, and what a heavy, heavy load I am carrying here!” And she pressed her hand to her heart. And, with this, she fell upon her bed, and sobbed long and bitterly. At last she arose, and, assuring the hostess that after she had written a few lines she would do all that she asked her, she persuaded the kind-hearted woman to leave her, and sat down to the table to write. What she wrote, how she wrote, she knew not, but the words followed fast, and page after page lay before her as the clock struck six. “What!” cried she, opening her door, “is it too late for the post? I hear it striking six!”
“I’ll take it over myself to the office,” said O’Rorke, “and by paying a trifle more they’ll take it in.”
“Oh do! Lose no time, and I’ll bless you for it!” said she, as she gave him the letter.
“Come up here and sit with me,” said Kate to the woman of the house; and the honest creature gladly complied. “What a nice little place you have here,” said Kate, speaking with intense rapidity. “It is all so clean and so neat, and you seem so happy in it. Ain’t you very happy?”
“Indeed, Miss, I have no reason to be anything else.” “Yes; I knew it – I knew it!” broke in Kate, rapidly. “It is the striving to be something above their reach makes people unhappy. You never asked nor wished for better than this?”
“Never, Miss. Indeed, it’s better than ever I thought to be. I was the daughter of a poor labourin’ man up at Belmullet, when my husband took me.”
“What a dreary place Belmullet is! I saw it once,” said Kate, half speaking to herself.
“Ah! you don’t know how poor it is, Miss! The like of you could never know what lives the people lead in them poor places, with only the fishin’ to look to, God help them! And when it’s too rough to go to sea, as it often is for weeks long, there they are with nothing but one meal a day of wet potatoes, and nothing but water to drink.”
“And you think I know nothing about all that!” cried Kate, wildly – “nothing of the rain pouring down through the wet thatch – nothing of the turf too wet to burn, and only smouldering and smoking, till it is better to creep under the boat that lies keel uppermost on the beach, than stay in the wretched hovel – nothing of the poor mother, with fever in one corner, and the child with small-pox in the other – nothing of the two or three strong men huddled together under the lee of the house, debating whether it wouldn’t be better to go out to sea at any risk, and meet the worst that could happen, than sit down there to die of starvation?”
“In the name of the blessed Virgin, Miss, who towld you all about that?”
“Oh, that I never knew worse! Oh, that I had never left it!” burst out Kate, as, kneeling down, she buried her head in the bed, and sobbed as if her heart were breaking.
The poor woman did her very best to console and comfort her, but Kate was unconscious of all her kindness, and only continued to mutter unceasingly to herself, till at last, worn out and exhausted, she leaned her head on the other’s shoulder and fell off into a sort of disturbed sleep, broken by incessant starts.
CHAPTER LIV. IN CONCLAVE
When O’Rorke left Kate, it was not the direction of the post-office that he took; he went straight to the head inn of the town, on the doorsteps of which he stationed himself, anxiously watching for the arrival of another traveller. Nor had he long to wait, for as the town clock struck the half-hour, a chaise and pair galloped up to the door, and young Ladarelle cried out from the window, “The last seven miles in forty-six minutes! What do you say to that! Is dinner ready?” asked he, as he descended.
“Everything’s ready, Sir,” said O’Rorke, obsequiously, as, pushing the landlord aside, he assumed the office of showing the way up-stairs himself.
“Tell Morse to unpack some of that sherry,” said Ladarelle; and then laughingly added, “Order your own tap, Master O’Rorke, for I’m not going to throw away Dalradern wine upon you.”
O’Rorke laughed too – perhaps not as genially, but he could afford to relish such a small joke even against himself – not to say that it conveyed an assurance he was well pleased with, that Ladarelle meant him to dine along with himself.
As the dinner was served, Ladarelle talked away about everything. It was his first visit to Ireland, and, though it amused him, he said he hoped his last also. Everything was absurd, laughable, and poverty-stricken to his eyes; that is to say, Pauperism was so apparent on all sides, the whole business of life seemed to be carried on by make-shifts.
The patriot O’Rorke had need of much forbearance as he listened to the unfeeling comments and ignorant inferences of the “Saxon.” He heard him, however, without one word of disclaimer, and with a little grin on his face, that if Ladarelle had been an Irishman, and had one drop of Irish blood in his body, he would not have accepted as any evidence of pleasure or satisfaction.
“Order whatever you mean to have,” said Ladarelle, as the meal was concluded, “and don’t let us have that fellow coming into the room every moment.”
O’Rorke made his provision accordingly, and having secured a kettle, in case it should be his caprice to make punch, he bolted the door and resumed his place.
“There’s your letter!” said Ladarelle, throwing a coarse-looking scrawl, sealed with green wax, on the table; “and I’ll be shot if I understand one line of it!”
“And why not?” asked the other, angrily. “Is it the writing’s so bad?”
“No; the writing can be made out. I don’t complain of that. It’s your blessed style that floors me! Now, for instance, what does this mean? ‘Impelled by the exuberant indignation that in the Celtic heart rises to the height of the grandest sacrifices, whether on the altars – ‘”
O’Rorke snatched the letter from his hand, crushed it into a ball, and threw it into the fire. “You’ll not have it to laugh at another time,” cried he, sternly, and with a stare so full of defiance that Ladarelle looked at him for some seconds in amazement, without speaking.
“My good friend,” said he, at last, with a calm, measured voice, “it is something new to me to meet conduct like this.”
“Not a bit newer or stranger than for me to be laughed at. Bigger and stronger fellows than you never tried that game with me.”
“I certainly never suspected you would take it so ill. I thought if any one knew what a joke meant, it was an Irishman.”
“And so he does; none better. The mistake was, you thought an Englishman knew how to make one.”
“Let there be an end of this,” said Ladarelle, haughtily. “If I had kept you in your proper place, you would never have forgotten yourself!” And as he spoke, he flung his cigar into the fire, and arose and walked up and down the room.
O’Rorke hung his head for a moment, and then, in a tone of almost abject contrition, said, “I ask your pardon, Sir. It was just as you say; my head was turned by good treatment.”
If Ladarelle had been a physiognomist, he would not have liked the expression of the other’s face, the hue of utter sickness in the cheek, while the eyes flashed with a fiery energy; but he noted none of these, and merely said, as he resumed his place:
“Don’t let it happen again, that’s all. Tell me now what occurred when you got back to Westport, for the only thing I know is that you met her there the morning you arrived.”
“I’ll tell it in three words: She was on the quay, just come after a severe night at sea, when I was trying to make a bargain with a fisherman to take me over to the island. I didn’t see her till her hand was on my arm and her lips close to my ear, as she whispered:
“‘What news have you for me?”
“‘Bad news,’ says I; ‘the sorrow worse.’
“She staggered back, and sat down on the stock of an anchor that was there, and drew the tail of her cloak oyer her face, and that’s the way she remained for about a quarter of an hour.
“‘Tell it to me now, Mr. O’Rorke,’ said she; ‘and as you hope to see Glory, tell me the truth, and nothing more.’
“‘It’s little I have to tell,’ says I, sitting down beside her. ‘The ould man was out on a terrace when I gave him your letter. He took it this way, turning it all round, and then looking up at me, he says: “I know this handwriting,” says he, “and I think I know what’s inside of it, but you may tell her it’s too late.” He then muttered something about a sea-bathing place abroad that I couldn’t catch, and he went on: “She didn’t know when she was well – ”’
“‘No, no, that he never said!’ says she, bursting in – ‘that he never said!’
“‘Not in them words,’ says I, ‘certainly not, but it came to the same, for he said she used to be as happy here as the days was long!’
“‘True; it was all true,’ said she to herself. ‘Go on.’
“‘” Go back,” says he, “and say, that sorry as I was at first, I’m getting over it now, and it wouldn’t be better for either of us to hold any more correspondence.” And with that he gave me the letter back, sealed as it was.’”
“What made you say that?” cried Ladarelle.
“Because I knew she’d never ask for it; or if she did, I’d say, ‘I had it in my trunk at home.’ The first thing was to get her to believe me, at any cost.”
“Is that her way?” asked the other, thoughtfully.
“That’s her way. She’s not given to have suspicions, you can see that. If you talk to her straight ahead, and never break down in what you say, she’ll look at you openly, and believe it all; but if ever she sees you stop, or look confused, or if she catches you taking a sly look at her under the eyes, you’re done – done entirely! The devil a lawyer from this to Dublin would put you through such a cross-examination; and I defy the cleverest fellow that ever sat in the witness-box to baffle her. And she begins quite regular – quiet, soft, and smooth as a cat.”
“What do I care for all this? She may be as shrewd as she pleases this day fortnight, Master O’Rorke. Let us only have the balls our own, and we’ll win the game before she gets a hazard.”
This illustration from the billiard-table was not fully intelligible to O’Rorke, but he saw its drift, and he assented.
“Where was I? Oh, I remember. ‘He gave me the letter back,’ says I, ‘and told the servants to see I had my supper, and everything I wanted.
“‘He did this with his hand, as much as to say, “You may go away;” but I made as if I didn’t understand him, and I waited till the servant left the place, and then I drew near him, and said:
“‘I think,’ says I, ‘it would be better your honour read the letter, anyhow. Maybe there’s something in it that you don’t suspect.’
“‘"Who are you,” says he, “that’s teaching me manners?”’
“I didn’t say them was his words, but something that meant the same.
“‘"I know every line that’s in it. I know far better than you – ay, or than she suspects – the game she would play.”’
“She gave a little cry, as if something stung her. Andeed, I asked her, What was it hurt her? But she never answered me, but stood up straight, and, with a hand up this way, she said something to herself, as if she was making a vow or taking an oath. After that, it wasn’t much she minded one word I said, and lucky for me it was, for I was coming to the hard part of my story – about your honour; how you heard from the servants that I was in the house, and sent for me to your own room, and asked me hundreds of questions about her. Where she was, and who with, and what she wrote about, and then how angry you grew with your uncle – I called him your uncle, I don’t know why – and how you said he was an unfeeling old savage, that it was the same way he treated yourself, pampering you one day, turning you out of doors the next. ‘And at last,’ says I – ‘I couldn’t keep it in any longer – I up and told him what I came about, and that your letter was asking a trifle of money to defend your grandfather for his life.’
“Sorrow matter what I said, she never listened to me. I told her you swore that her grandfather should have the first lawyer in the land, and that you’d come over yourself to the Assizes. I told her how you put twenty pounds into my hand, and said, ‘Tim’ – no, not Tim – ‘Mr. O’Rorke, there’s a few pounds to begin. Go back and tell Miss Kate she has a better and truer friend than the one she lost; one that never forgot the first evening he seen her, and would give his heart’s blood to save her.’
“She gave a little smile – it was almost a laugh once – and I thought she was pleased at what I was telling her. Not a bit of it. It was something about the ould man was in her mind, and something that didn’t mean any good to him either, for she said, ‘He shall rue it yet.’ And after that, though I talked for an hour, she never minded me no more than them fireirons! At last she clutched my arm in her fingers, and said, “‘Do you know that my uncle declares I am never to go back again? I came away against his will, and he swore that if I crossed the threshold to come here, I should never re-cross it again. Do you know,’ says she, ‘I have no home nor friend now in the whole world, and I don’t know what’s to become of me.’
“I tried to comfort her, and say that your honour would never see her in any distress; but she wasn’t minding me, and only went on saying something about being back again; but whether it meant at the Castle, or over in Arran, or, as I once thought, back as a child, when she used to play in the caves along the sea-shore, I couldn’t say, but she cried bitterly, and for the whole day never tasted bit or sup. We stopped at a small house outside the town, and I told them it was a young creature that lost her mother; and the next day she looked so ill and wasted, I was getting afraid she was going to have a fever; but she said she was strong enough, and asked me to bring her on here to the gaol, for she wanted to see her grandfather.
“It was only this morning, however, I got the order from the sub-sheriff; and indeed he wouldn’t have given it but that he seen her out of the window, for in all her distress, and with her clothes wet and draggled, she’s as beautiful a creature as ever walked.”
“Why not marry her yourself, O’Rorke? By Jove! you’re head and ears in love already. I’ll make you a handsome settlement, on my oath I will.”
“There’s two small objections, Sir. First, there’s another Mrs. O’Rorke, though I’m not quite sure where at the present setting; and even if there wasn’t, she wouldn’t have me.”
“I don’t see that; and if it be only the bigamy you’re afraid of, go off to Australia or America, and your first wife will never trace you.”
O’Rorke shook his head, and, to strengthen his determination perhaps, he mixed himself a strong tumbler of punch.
“And where are we now?” asked Ladarelle.
O’Rorke, perhaps, did not fully understand the question, for he looked at him inquiringly.
“I ask you, where are we now? Don’t you understand me?”
“We’re pretty much where we were yesterday; that is, we’re waiting to know what’s to be done for the ould man in the gaol, and what your honour intends to do about” – he hesitated and stammered, and at last said – “about the other business.”
“Well, it’s the other business, as you neatly call it, Mr. O’Rorke, that interests me at present. Sir Within has written twice to Mr. Luttrell since you left the Castle. One of his letters I stopped before it reached the office, the other I suppose has come to hand.”
“No fanlt of mine if it has, Sir,” broke in O’Rorke, hastily, for he saw the displeasure in the other’s look. “I was twice at the office at Westport, and there wasn’t a line there for Mr. Luttrell. Did you read the other letter, Sir?” added he, eagerly, after a moment’s silence. “I know what’s in it,” muttered Ladarelle, in confusion, for he was not quite inured to the baseness he had sunk to. “And what is it, Sir?”
“Just what I expected; that besotted old fool wants to marry her. He tells Mr. Luttrell, and tells it fairly enough, how the estate is settled, and he offers the largest settlement the entail will permit of; but he forgets to add that the same day he takes out his license to marry, we’ll move for a commission of lunacy. I have been eight weeks there lately, and not idle, I promise you. I have got plenty of evidence against him. How he goes into the room she occupied at the Castle, and has all her rings and bracelets laid out on the toilet-table, and candles lighted, as if she was coming to dress for dinner, and makes her maid wait there, telling her Madame is out on horseback, or she is in the garden, she’ll be in presently. One day, too, he made us wait dinner for her till eight o’clock; and when at last the real state of the case broke on him, he had to get up and go to his room, and Holmes, his man, told me that he sobbed the whole night through, like a child.”
“And do you think that all them will prove him mad?” asked O’Rorke, with a jeering laugh.
“Why not? If a man cannot understand that a person who has not been under his roof for six or eight months, and is some hundred miles away, may want candles in her dressing-room, and may come down any minute to dinner in that very house – ”
“Oddity – eccentricity – want of memory – nothing more! There’s never a jury in England would call a man mad for all that.”
“You are a great lawyer, Mr. O’Rorke, but it is right to say you differ here from the Attorney-General.”
“No great harm in that same – when he’s in the wrong!”
“I might possibly be rash enough to question your knowledge of law, but certainly I’ll never dispute your modesty.”
“My modesty is like any other part of me, and I didn’t make myself; but I’ll stick to this – that ould man is not mad, and nobody could make him out mad.”
“Mr. Grenfell will not agree with you in that. He was over at the Castle the night I came away, and he saw the gardener carrying up three immense nosegays of flowers, for it was her birthday it seemed, however any one knew it, and Sir Within had ordered the band from Wrexham to play under her window at nightfall; and as Mr. Grenfell said, ‘That old gent’s brain seems about as soft as his heart!’ Not bad, was it? – his brain as soft as his heart!”
“He’s no more mad than I am, and I don’t care who says the contrary.”
“Perhaps you speculate on being called as a witness to his sanity?” said Ladarelle, with a sneer.
“I do not, Sir; but if I was, I’d be a mighty troublesome one to the other side.”
“What the deuce led us into this foolish discussion! As if it signified one rush to me whether he was to be thought the wisest sage or the greatest fool in Christendom. What I want, and what I am determined on, is that we are not to be dragged into Chancery, and made town talk of, because a cunning minx has turned an old rake’s head. I’d be hunted by a set of hungry rascals of creditors to-morrow if the old man were to marry. There’s not one of them wouldn’t believe that my chance of the estate was all ‘up.’”
“There’s sense in that; there is reason in what you say now,” said O’Rorke.
“And that’s not the worst of it, either,” continued Ladarelle, who, like all weak men, accepted any flattery, even at the expense of the object he sought; “but my governor would soon know how deep I am, and he’d cast me adrift. Not a pleasant prospect, Master O’Rorke, to a fellow who ought to succeed to about twelve thousand a year.”
