Lord Kilgobbin Part 53

'Gorman, you are a beast,' said the old lady, 'and if you lived here, you would be a Fenian.'

'You're wrong too, aunt,' replied he. 'I'd crush those fellows to-morrow if I was in power here.'

'Mayhap the game is not so easy as you deem it,' interposed Miller.

'Certainly it is not so easy when played as you do it here. You deal with your law-breakers only by the rule of legality: that is to say, you respect all the regulations of the game towards the men who play false. You have your c.u.mbrous details, and your lawyers, and judges, and juries, and you cannot even proclaim a county in a state of siege without a bill in your blessed Parliament, and a basketful of balderdash about the liberty of the subject. Is it any wonder rebellion is a regular trade with you, and that men who don't like work, or business habits, take to it as a livelihood?'

'But have you never heard Curran's saying, young gentleman? "You cannot bring an indictment against a nation,'" said Miller.

'I'd trouble myself little with indictments,' replied Gorman. 'I'd break down the confederacy by spies; I'd seize the fellows I knew to be guilty, and hang them.'

'Without evidence, without trial?'

'Very little of a trial, when I had once satisfied myself of the guilt.'

'Are you so certain that no innocent men might be brought to the scaffold?'

asked the priest mildly.

'No, I am not. I take it, as the world goes, very few of us go through life without some injustice or another. I'd do my best not to hang the fellows who didn't deserve it, but I own I'd be much more concerned about the millions who wanted to live peaceably than the few hundred rapscallions that were bent on troubling them.'

'I must say, sir,' said the priest, 'I am much more gratified to know that you are a Lieutenant of Lancers in Austria than a British Minister in Downing Street.'

'I have little doubt myself,' said the other, laughing, 'that I am more in my place; but of this I am sure, that if we were as mealy-mouthed with our Croats and Slovacks as you are with your Fenians, Austria would soon go to pieces.'

'There is, however, a higher price on that man Donogan's head than Austria ever offered for a traitor,' said Miller.

'I know how you esteem money here,' said Gorman, laughing. 'When all else fails you, you fall back upon it.'

'Why did I know nothing of these sentiments, young man, before I asked you under my roof?' said Miss Betty, in anger.

'You need never to have known them now, aunt, if these gentlemen had not provoked them, nor indeed are they solely mine. I am only telling you what you would hear from any intelligent foreigner, even though he chanced to be a liberal in his own country.'

'Ah, yes,' sighed the priest: 'what the young gentleman says is too true.

The Continent is alarmingly infected with such opinions as these.'

'Have you talked on politics with young Kearney?' asked Miller.

'He has had no opportunity,' interposed Miss O'Shea. 'My nephew will be three weeks here on Thursday next, and neither Mathew nor his son have called on him.'

'Scarcely neighbourlike that, I must say,' cried Miller.

'I suspect the fault lies on my side,' said Gorman boldly. 'When I was little more than a boy, I was never out of that house. The old man treated me like a son. All the more, perhaps, as his own son was seldom at home, and the little girl Kitty certainly regarded me as a brother; and though we had our fights and squabbles, we cried very bitterly at parting, and each of us vowed we should never like any one so much again. And now, after all, here am I three weeks, within two hours' ride of them, and my aunt insists that my dignity requires I should be first called on. Confound such dignity! say I, if it lose me the best and the pleasantest friends I ever had in my life.'

'I scarcely thought of _your_ dignity, Gorman O'Shea,' said the old lady, bridling, 'though I did bestow some consideration on my own.'

'I'm very sorry for it, aunt, and I tell you fairly--and there's no unpoliteness in the confession--that when I asked for my leave, Kilgobbin Castle had its place in my thoughts as well as O'Shea's Barn.'

'Why not say it out, young gentleman, and tell me that the real charm of coming here was to be within twelve miles of the Kearneys.'

'The merits of this house are very independent of contiguity,' said the priest; and as he eyed the claret in his gla.s.s, it was plain that the sentiment was an honest one.

'Fifty-six wine, I should say,' said Miller, as he laid down his gla.s.s.

'Forty-five, if Mr. Barton be a man of his word,' said the old lady reprovingly.

'Ah,' sighed the priest plaintively, 'how rarely one meets these old full-bodied clarets nowadays. The free admission of French wines has corrupted taste and impaired palate. Our cheap Gladstones have come upon us like universal suffrage.'

'The ma.s.ses, however, benefit,' remarked Miller.

'Only in the first moment of acquisition, and in the novelty of the gain,'

continued Father Luke; 'and then they suffer irreparably in the loss of that old guidance, which once directed appreciation when there was something to appreciate.'

'We want the priest again, in fact,' broke in Gorman.

'You must admit they understand wine to perfection, though I would humbly hope, young gentleman,' said the Father modestly, 'to engage your good opinion of them on higher grounds.'

'Give yourself no trouble in the matter, Father Luke,' broke in Miss Betty.

'Gorman's Austrian lessons have placed him beyond _your_ teaching.'

'My dear aunt, you are giving the Imperial Government a credit it never deserved. They taught me as a cadet to groom my horse and pipeclay my uniform, to be respectful to my corporal, and to keep my thumb on the seam of my trousers when the captain's eye was on me; but as to what pa.s.sed inside my mind, if I had a mind at all, or what I thought of Pope, Kaiser, or Cardinal, they no more cared to know it than the name of my sweetheart.'

'What a blessing to that benighted country would be one liberal statesman!'

exclaimed Miller: 'one man of the mind and capacity of our present Premier!'

'Heaven forbid!' cried Gorman. 'We have confusion enough, without the reflection of being governed by what you call here "healing measures."'

'I should like to discuss that point with you,' said Miller.

'Not now, I beg,' interposed Miss O'Shea. 'Gorman, will you decant another bottle?'

'I believe I ought to protest against more wine,' said the priest, in his most insinuating voice; 'but there are occasions where the yielding to temptation conveys a moral lesson.'

'I suspect that I cultivate my nature a good deal in that fas.h.i.+on,' said Gorman, as he opened a fresh bottle.

'This is perfectly delicious,' said Miller, as he sipped his gla.s.s; 'and if I could venture to presume so far, I would ask leave to propose a toast.'

'You have my permission, sir,' said Miss Betty, with stateliness.

'I drink, then,' said he reverently, 'I drink to the long life, the good health, and the unbroken courage of the Holy Father.'

There was something peculiarly sly in the twinkle of the priest's black eye as he filled his b.u.mper, and a twitching motion of the corner of his mouth continued even as he said, 'To the Pope.'

'The Pope,' said Gorman as he eyed his wine--

'"Der Papst lebt herrlich in der Welt."'

'What are you muttering there?' asked his aunt fiercely.

'The line of an old song, aunt, that tells us how his Holiness has a jolly time of it.'