Luttrell Of Arran Part 20

Pouring out a cupful of brandy from his flask, Vyner offered it to him, and this he took with grat.i.tude, his eyes devouring with admiration the little silver goblet that held it.

"Drink Mr. Luttrell's health," said Vyner, pouring out the last of the liquor into the cup; "he was an old friend of mine long ago."

"Here's health to him, and long life, too, if it was any use to him,"

said the man, doggedly.

"There is truth in what you mean; a life such as he leads now can be of little pleasure, or profit either."

"And who brought him to it?" burst in the old man, fiercely, for the spirit had mounted to his brain, maddening and exciting him. "What was it but the ould Luttrell pride that ruined every one of them, and will ruin them yet? He married a decent girl, well brought up, and good-looking; she wasn't a lady, but not a lady in the land had a better heart or a finer temper, but he wouldn't own her for all that. No, not a bit of it; there she lived, now with one brother, now with another, n.o.body darin' to call her Mrs. Luttrell, nor even as much as hint she was married. How we stood it--we never were very patient--I don't know, but we did, and more ill luck to us for doing so!" There was a long pause before he continued: "At last there came that trouble I was telling you of. When Mr. Crowe was shot, and I was tuk with my two sons--as innocent every one of us as that little girl there, but what did that signify?--the Attorney-General said, 'It's eight-and-twenty years I'm coming this circuit, and I never knew a capital felony to be tried without a Malone in it! I wonder,' says he, 'will the time ever come when this will cease?' There was eight of us then banished, some in Botany Bay, and some in America, and, by coorse, it was hard for us to make up money for the 'defence'--the more because we spent so much already on lawyers. Howsomever, we did do it. We got a pound here, and ten s.h.i.+llings there, and at last gathered twenty-two fourteen-six.

I'll never forget it, twenty-two fourteen-six--in fact, I used to go on saying it over to myself, as I sat in my cell, just as if saying it would make it grow. The attorney, Mr. Roach, who was a good friend of ours, towld me in secret that there was two or three ugly things in the case, and that short of ould Mr. Clancy, the King's counsel, there warn't a man could get us off; 'and less than thirty guineas,' says he, 'won't bring him down.' All this time, none of us would ask Sally Luttrell for a farthin'. We all knew she had nothing of her own, and we wouldn't be beholdin' to Mr. Luttrell. At last, my youngest daughter couldn't bear it any longer; she sets off for the house where Sally was stoppin', and what she said, or how she did it, we never knew, but the next morning there came to Mr. Roach's office a note with the money. It was an order on French's Bank, signed with a letter L. When the trial was come on--it was the third day--the Crown lawyers was pus.h.i.+ng hard to make out a charge of conspiracy, and show that half the country was in it, and at last declared that they were ready to prove that an immense sum of money lay in the Bank just to defend all the people that ever broke the law, or did anything wrong, and that in this case they would produce a list of subscribers, each of them down for some trifle, every one of whom had been once at least in that dock with an indictment against him. Sure enough, however he come by it, he had the list.

And such a set of witnesses as he brought up never was seen afore.

'Gentlemen of the jury, I only ask you to look at them,' says he; 'just look at them, and you'll know what sort of a tie binds these people to the prisoners in the dock.' Clancy said nothing till it was all over--he wouldn't cross-question one--but he holds a bit of paper in his hand, and says, 'My Lord,' says he, 'it appears to me, that to be poor and wear ragged clothes in this country is to be outlawed, and that any man whose condition is not as comfortable as my learned friend's, must be declared a rebel to his King and a liar to his Maker. It's very hard,' says he, 'but as it comes from so high an authority as the Attorney-General, it must be good law, and I'll not dispute it.

Fortunately, however, for my unhappy client, his character has not only made friends for him amongst good men and kind men--it is not only by his equals in life that his honest nature is known--poor labourers, humble peasants testify by their hard-earned pittance, freely given, to their love for an old neighbour and friend. But what good is it? They are poor, and must be perjured; they are half-famished, and of course they are infamous. But here, my Lord, is a witness well enough to do to be respected; he eats, drinks, and dresses in the way the law requires; he has an estate, and of course a conscience; he keeps an agent, and therefore he has a sowl to be saved; his sympathies are written down here at the cost of eleven pounds eight s.h.i.+llings, and--though his modesty is satisfied with a mere letter L--his name is John Hamilton Luttrell.'"

As if the strain on his memory to recal the precise words employed, and to bring back the whole scene, had been too much for him, or as though the emotions of the past had surged back to overwhelm him, the old peasant held his hand over his eyes, and sat several minutes without speaking.

"Did Luttrell come on the table, then?" asked Vyner.

"No, Sir; he was seen in court a short time before, but when he was called he couldn't be found; nor from that day out was he ever seen in the streets of Castlebar. It was that sent him away to the island. His pride and his shame together."

"You are less than just to my old friend," said Vyner, warmly. "To know what he felt, to understand all the difficulties that he saw before him.

you should be in _his_ place as he was."

"That's as much as to say that I ought to be a gentleman before I condemned him," said the old fellow, with a look of intense craftiness.

"But the lawyer that defended _me_ didn't want to be a labourin' man to explain what _I_ felt, or what was pa.s.sin' in my heart. No, Sir, there's things in the world that are just the same to the rich man as to the poor one, just as sickness and sorrow is. Get up, Kitty, we're stayin'

too long here; it will be black night before we get home."

"How many miles do you count it?"

"Twenty-one--long miles, too--the last four of them over s.h.i.+ngle, and steep besides."

"Shall I find an inn--well, shall I find shelter for the night?" said he, correcting himself.

"Shelter I could give you myself, but I'd rather you'd look for it anywhere else. I told you already why."

"Well, I'm not afraid of your company, and, if you don't dislike mine, we'll travel together."

The little girl said something with eagerness in Irish, and then turning to Vyner she took his hand, and said, "Yes, come with us." And they set out.

CHAPTER XIII. THE PROJECT

It was on the evening of the second day after Vyner's departure that Grenfell, never much given to anxieties about others, felt a certain uneasiness, and sauntered down the glen, wondering what might have detained him. He had not gone fully a mile, when he saw in the grey twilight a man approaching; he hailed, and was answered in his friend's voice, "All right; it is I."

"I was going to start the hue and cry, or whatever may represent that inst.i.tution here, after you, Vyner. Where have you been all this time?"

"As to the where, my friend, it would require a very different tongue from yours and mine to say; Russian and Polish names are nothing in comparison. As to the how I have been, is easier to answer--never better; though with all due grat.i.tude be it said, I have pa.s.sed my time in rather questionable company."

"At least they recognised the rights of hospitality?"

"Arabs themselves were never more punctilious. My host was the grandfather of our little friend the fairy queen, a man of nigh eighty, who had been tried on two capital charges, and ought, I suspect, to have been convicted on both. His friends, to the number of twenty odd, were all Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, or whatever other name includes lawbreakers of the first magnitude; and one, as handsome and frank-featured a young fellow as ever you saw, who accompanied me to the lake side this evening, had made his escape from Castlebar gaol when under sentence of death, and actually went back to the town to witness the execution of his cousins on the following Sat.u.r.day, it being, as he said, the only mark of affection he was able to show them."

"I make you my compliment, as the French say, on your company. And the women, what were they like?"

"I saw but two: an old hag that was brought down special to give an opinion upon me from external traits, and p.r.o.nounce whether I had the colour of hair or eyes that indicated a tendency to bear witness against my neighbour; the other was a sickly creature, bedridden though in the prime of life, mother of little Katherine."

"But explain how you could have prolonged your stay amongst such people.

What were you doing? what were you saying?"

"Doing? The whole day we walked the mountains. They led me by paths known only to themselves over an immense mountain district, showing me all that was noteworthy, and pointing out effects of scenery and picturesque spots with a feeling and taste that amazed me. They used no cant of art, none of that tricky phraseology, it is true, which we accept as the vernacular of all landscape description; but in their wild imagery and reckless imagination they gave names to the places which showed how deeply objects of terror or beauty had appealed to them. Then at nightfall we gathered close to the turf fire and the potato 'kish,' a wide, open basket, which served as strainer and dish together. There we supped, talked politics, religion, law, and a little literature--at least so far as the Life of Freeny and the story of Moll Flanders enter into biographical letters."

"How I should like to have drawn a cordon of policemen round the party and netted the whole."

"You might like to have planned the campaign, but I'll be sworn if you had been favoured with a look at the company you'd never have led the expedition."

"What a traveller's knack it is to exaggerate the war-paint of one's Indian friends," said Grenfell, superciliously. "But here we are with our supper waiting for us, and even Mr. 'O'Rorke's n.o.ble feast' will contrast favourably with your host's."

The meal ended, they seated themselves on the door-sill, looking out into the still and starry night, and resumed the theme they were discussing.

"I take it that you said you were a mere tourist rambling for pleasure?"

asked Grenfell.

"No, I told them I had come down to see the country, with some intentions to make a purchase. It was not so easy to explain that I was more eager to acquire a very beautiful and picturesque tract than a very remunerative one, but they believed me at last--that is, they gave credit to my sincerity at the cost of my shrewdness." Grenfell nodded, as though he agreed with them, and Vyner went on: "We were a full house when I made my declaration--there were, I should say, six or seven-and-twenty present--and they concurred in applauding the frankness with which I spoke to them. A very old man, a venerable figure, whose high forehead and white beard would have impressed me, perhaps, more reverentially if I had not been told that he had been flogged by John Beresford, in the year '98, for some cruel outrage he had committed--this apart--he, however, complimented me highly on my straightforwardness, and said that if others would do like me there would be fewer disturbances about land; and the ill.u.s.tration he used was this: 'If you go into a fair to buy a horse, and you see a splendid animal, strong-boned, well-ribbed, and powerful, with every promise of speed and strength;--you are as well satisfied with his price as with his perfections, but do your inquiries stop there?--not a bit of it. You know well that he may be a capital hunter and a n.o.ble roadster, but you want to learn what his temper is. All his fine qualities depend upon this, for if he be unruly and unmanageable, to what purpose is his power or his activity? It is precisely the same with a property: you may have wood and water, arable land and lay, mines and meadows, and, with all these, there may be a "temper" that renders them worthless. Landlords won't believe this; buyers won't listen to it. They say, "Make out my t.i.tle clear and clean, and leave me to deal with it." Men with money in the bank, and who, because they can live anywhere, are chained to nowhere, cannot understand the love of a poor labouring man to some mud-hovel or some shealing, to a brook where he has paddled in boyhood, to the mountain that he has seen from his earliest infancy.

They do not, cannot, conceive why poverty should sharpen any susceptibilities--poverty, that can blunt so many--and they say, "Turn him out. I'll find a place for him elsewhere." But that's a mistake; you might as well say you'd replace the child he has followed to the churchyard. The man, in the very proportion of his dest.i.tution, has bound up his heart with some half-dozen little objects that have, from time and long usage, grown to be part of him. The monotony that wearies the rich man is the luxury of the poor. To live where their fathers lived, to see an unchanged world around them, to have few contrasts of the present with the past, is their paradise------'"

"Where did you get all this?" broke in Grenfell. "From your friend of the cat-o'-nine-tails?"

"Exactly. The words of wisdom were all his own, and, unlike the fate of most wisdom, it was listened to. He showed me, in fact, that though the Law might give possession, it would not ensure me one of the rights of property: I might own, but not enjoy; I might have and hold, but neither sow nor reap; I might walk over and shoot over, but with no privilege to keep any other from doing the same, and that before I thought of preserving the game, I should take some measures about preserving myself. The man who enunciated these principles--for they were principles--declared them calmly and dispa.s.sionately, not as sentiments that conveyed anger or pa.s.sion; far from it--he felt all the dignity of a sage instructing ignorance. He was a great Saquem delivering the laws of his tribe, and showing what had been their guides and directors for centuries. I did, indeed, once, only once, venture upon a mild remonstrance, that there were some things which a landlord possessed for the betterment of those under him; that he might a.s.sist them in many ways, and be the means of their advancement and prosperity; but he demurred to this, and so did his followers. Their experience, they said, did not confirm this: as a cla.s.s, they had found landlords narrow-minded and selfish, very ignorant of the people, and very indifferent to them.

They opined that, as an inst.i.tution, landlordism had not succeeded, and half hinted that it was a Saxon innovation that was brought over in days of violence and oppression, and did not suit the conditions of the country at present."

"And you listened to these rascals coolly propounding such doctrines?"

"Yes; and so would you have done too, had you been in my place, my dear George! A minority is never very truculent when the majority could pitch it over a cliff without the slightest risk of being called to account for it."

"It would have pushed my patience hard, though." "It would have been your prudence, and not your patience, that you'd have consulted."

"Well, I'll not quarrel with the rogues if they have disabused you as to the pleasures of Irish proprietors.h.i.+p; they've done you a good service, but, I must say, I think their case a more hopeless one, now that I see lawlessness is a system."

"I don't think you would if you talked with them! They were too argumentative not to be open to conviction; too logical, with all their prejudices, not to be approachable by reason. I was, all the time we were talking, so impressed with this, that I could not help imagining what a race so quick-sighted and intelligent might become when educated and instructed. Take my word for it, George, Hodge will have no chance against Paddy if he ever get book-learning." A mocking laugh was Grenfell's answer.

"So satisfied am I of the truth of what I say, that I'm going to give a proof of it."

"What, going to set up a school in the wilds of Donegal!" "No. I'm going to carry away that pretty child, and educate her with Ada."

"You'll not do anything so foolish, I trust!" "It is all settled, the conditions arranged, the terms agreed to. I have given her grandfather ten pounds for her outfit, some few things she needed, and as much more to pay their journey over to Wales, for the old fellow, with a caution that was creditable to him, wished to see the ladies to whom his child was to be confided, and confer a little with them besides."