Castle Richmond Part 61

"'Deed an' there is, Mr. Herbert; Sir Thomas is--"

"My father is not dead!" exclaimed Herbert.

"Oh no, Mr. Herbert; it's not so bad as that; but he is very failing,--very failing. My lady is with him now."

Herbert ran into the house, and at the bottom of the chief stairs he met one of his sisters who had heard the steps of his horse. "Oh, Herbert, I am so glad you have come!" said she. Her eyes and cheeks were red with tears, and her hand, as her brother took it, was cold and numbed.

"What is it, Mary? is he worse?"

"Oh, so much worse. Mamma and Emmeline are there. He has asked for you three or four times, and always says that he is dying. I had better go up and say that you are here."

"And what does my mother think of it?"

"She has never left him, and therefore I cannot tell; but I know from her face that she thinks that he is--dying. Shall I go up, Herbert?"

and so she went, and Herbert, following softly on his toes, stood in the corridor outside the bedroom-door, waiting till his arrival should have been announced. It was but a minute, and then his sister, returning to the door, summoned him to enter.

The room had been nearly darkened, but as there were no curtains to the bed, Herbert could see his mother's face as she knelt on a stool at the bedside. His father was turned away from him, and lay with his hand inside his wife's, and Emmeline was sitting on the foot of the bed, with her face between her hands, striving to stifle her sobs.

"Here is Herbert now, dearest," said Lady Fitzgerald, with a low, soft voice, almost a whisper, yet clear enough to cause no effort in the hearing. "I knew that he would not be long." And Herbert, obeying the signal of his mother's eye, pa.s.sed round to the other side of the bed.

"Father," said he, "are you not so well to-day?"

"My poor boy, my poor ruined boy!" said the dying man, hardly articulating the words as he dropped his wife's hand and took that of his son. Herbert found that it was wet, and clammy, and cold, and almost powerless in its feeble grasp.

"Dearest father, you are wrong if you let that trouble you; all that will never trouble me. Is it not well that a man should earn his own bread? Is it not the lot of all good men?" But still the old man murmured with his broken voice, "My poor boy, my poor boy!"

The hopes and aspirations of his eldest son are as the breath of his nostrils to an Englishman who has been born to land and fortune.

What had not this poor man endured in order that his son might be Sir Herbert Fitzgerald of Castle Richmond? But this was no longer possible; and from the moment that this had been brought home to him, the father had felt that for him there was nothing left but to die.

"My poor boy," he muttered, "tell me that you have forgiven me."

And then they all knelt round the bed and prayed with him; and afterwards they tried to comfort him, telling him how good he had been to them; and his wife whispered in his ear that if there had been fault, the fault was hers, but that her conscience told her that such fault had been forgiven; and while she said this she motioned the children away from him, and strove to make him understand that human misery could never kill the soul, and should never utterly depress the spirit. "Dearest love," she said, still whispering to him in her low, sweet voice--so dear to him, but utterly inaudible beyond--"if you would cease to accuse yourself so bitterly, you might yet be better, and remain with us to comfort us."

But the slender, half-knit man, whose arms are without muscles and whose back is without pith, will strive in vain to lift the weight which the brawny vigour of another tosses from the ground almost without an effort. It is with the mind and the spirit as with the body; only this, that the muscles of the body can be measured, but not so those of the spirit. Lady Fitzgerald was made of other stuff than Sir Thomas; and that which to her had cost an effort, but with an effort had been done surely, was to him as impossible as the labour of Hercules. "My poor boy, my poor ruined boy!" he still muttered, as she strove to comfort him.

"Mamma has sent for Mr. Townsend," Emmeline whispered to her brother, as they stood together in the bow of the window.

"And do you really think he is so bad as that?"

"I am sure that mamma does. I believe he had some sort of a fit before you came. At any rate, he did not speak for two hours."

"And was not Finucane here?" Finucane was the Mallow doctor.

"Yes; but he had left before papa became so much worse. Mamma has sent for him also."

But I do not know that it boots to dally longer in a dying chamber.

It is an axiom of old that the stage curtain should be drawn before the inexorable one enters in upon his final work. Doctor Finucane did come, but his coming was all in vain. Sir Thomas had known that it was in vain, and so also had his patient wife. There was that mind diseased, towards the cure of which no Doctor Finucane could make any possible approach. And Mr. Townsend came also, let us hope not in vain; though the cure which he fain would have perfected can hardly be effected in such moments as those. Let us hope that it had been already effected. The only crying sin which we can lay to the charge of the dying man is that of which we have spoken; he had endeavoured by pensioning falsehood and fraud to preserve for his wife her name, and for his son that son's inheritance. Even over this, deep as it was, the recording angel may have dropped some cleansing tears of pity.

That night the poor man died, and the Fitzgeralds who sat in the chambers of Castle Richmond were no longer the owners of the mansion.

There was no speech of Sir Herbert among the servants as there would have been had these tidings not have reached them. Dr. Finucane had remained in the house, and even he, in speaking of the son, had shown that he knew the story. They were strangers there now, as they all knew--intruders, as they would soon be considered in the house of their cousin Owen; or rather not their cousin. In that he was above them by right of his blood, they had no right to claim him as their relation.

It may be said that at such a moment all this should not have been thought of; but those who say so know little, as I imagine, of the true effect of sorrow. No wife and no children ever grieved more heartily for a father; but their grief was blacker and more gloomy in that they knew that they were outcasts in the world.

And during that long night as Herbert and his sisters sat up cowering round the fire, he told them of all that had been said at Hap House.

"And can it not be as he says?" Mary had asked.

"And that Herbert should give up his wife!" said Emmeline.

"No; but that other thing."

"Do not dream of it," said Herbert. "It is all, all impossible. The house that we are now in belongs to Sir Owen Fitzgerald."

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

THE FIRST MONTH.

And now I will beg my readers to suppose a month to have pa.s.sed by since Sir Thomas Fitzgerald died. It was a busy month in Ireland.

It may probably be said that so large a sum of money had never been circulated in the country in any one month since money had been known there; and yet it may also be said that so frightful a mortality had never occurred there from the want of that which money brings. It was well understood by all men now that the customary food of the country had disappeared. There was no longer any difference of opinion between rich and poor, between Protestant and Roman Catholic; as to that, no man dared now to say that the poor, if left to themselves, could feed themselves, or to allege that the sufferings of the country arose from the machinations of money-making speculators. The famine was an established fact, and all men knew that it was G.o.d's doing,--all men knew this, though few could recognize as yet with how much mercy G.o.d's hand was stretched out over the country.

Or may it not perhaps be truer to say that in such matters there is no such thing as mercy--no special mercies--no other mercy than that fatherly, forbearing, all-seeing, perfect goodness by which the Creator is ever adapting this world to the wants of His creatures, and rectifying the evils arising from their faults and follies? _Sed quo Musa tendis?_ Such discourses of the G.o.ds as these are not to be fitly handled in such small measures.

At any rate, there was the famine, undoubted now by any one; and death, who in visiting Castle Richmond may be said to have knocked at the towers of a king, was busy enough also among the cabins of the poor. And now the great fault of those who were the most affected was becoming one which would not have been at first sight expected. One would think that starving men would become violent, taking food by open theft--feeling, and perhaps not without some truth, that the agony of their want robbed such robberies of its sin. But such was by no means the case. I only remember one instance in which the bakers'

shops were attacked; and in that instance the work was done by those who were undergoing no real suffering. At Clonmel, in Tipperary, the bread was one morning stripped away from the bakers' shops; but at that time, and in that place, there was nothing approaching to famine. The fault of the people was apathy. It was the feeling of the mult.i.tude that the world and all that was good in it was pa.s.sing away from them; that exertion was useless, and hope hopeless. "Ah, me!

your honour," said a man to me, "there'll never be a bit and a sup again in the county Cork! The life of the world is fairly gone!"

And it was very hard to repress this feeling. The energy of a man depends so much on the outward circ.u.mstances that enc.u.mber him! It is so hard to work when work seems hopeless--so hard to trust where the basis of our faith is so far removed from sight! When large tracts of land went out of cultivation, was it not natural to think that agriculture was receding from the country, leaving the green hills once more to be brown and barren, as hills once green have become in other countries? And when men were falling in the highways, and women would sit with their babes in their arms, listless till death should come to them, was it not natural to think that death was making a huge success--that he, the inexorable one, was now the inexorable indeed?

There were greatly trusting hearts that could withstand the weight of this terrible pressure, and thinking minds which saw that good would come out of this great evil; but such hearts and such minds were not to be looked for among the suffering poor; and were not, perhaps, often found even among those who were not poor or suffering. It was very hard to be thus trusting and thoughtful while everything around was full of awe and agony.

The people, however, were conscious of G.o.d's work, and were becoming dull and apathetic. They cl.u.s.tered about the roads, working lazily while their strength lasted them; and afterwards, when strength failed them for this, they cl.u.s.tered more largely in the poor-houses.

And in every town--in every a.s.semblage of houses which in England would be called a village, there was a poor-house. Any big barrack of a tenement that could be obtained at a moment's notice, whatever the rent, became a poor-house in the course of twelve hours;--in twelve, nay, in two hours. What was necessary but the bare walls, and a supply of yellow meal? Bad provision this for all a man's wants,--as was said often enough by irrational philanthropists; but better provision than no shelter and no yellow meal! It was bad that men should be locked up at night without any of the appliances of decency; bad that they should be herded together for day after day with no resource but the eating twice a day of enough unsavoury food to keep life and soul together;--very bad, ye philanthropical irrationalists! But is not a choice of evils all that is left to us in many a contingency? Was not even this better than that life and soul should be allowed to part, without any effort at preserving their union?

And thus life and soul were kept together, the government of the day having wisely seen what, at so short a notice, was possible for them to do, and what was absolutely impossible. It is in such emergencies as these that the watching and the wisdom of a government are necessary; and I shall always think--as I did think then--that the wisdom of its action and the wisdom of its abstinence from action were very good. And now again the fields in Ireland are green, and the markets are busy, and money is chucked to and fro like a weatherc.o.c.k which the players do not wish to have abiding with them; and the tardy speculator going over to look for a bit of land comes back muttering angrily that fancy prices are demanded. "They'll run you up to thirty-three years' purchase," says the tardy speculator, thinking, as it seems, that he is specially ill used. Agricultural wages have been nearly doubled in Ireland during the last fifteen years. Think of that, Master Brook. Work for which, at six s.h.i.+llings a week, there would be a hundred hungry claimants in 1845,--in the good old days before the famine, when repeal was so immediately expected--will now fetch ten s.h.i.+llings, the claimants being by no means numerous. In 1843 and 1844, I knew men to work for fourpence a day--something over the dole on which we are told, being mostly incredulous as we hear it, that a Coolie labourer can feed himself with rice in India;--not one man or two men, the broken down incapables of the parish, but the best labour of the country. One and twopence is now about the cheapest rate at which a man can be hired for agricultural purposes. While this is so, and while the prices are progressing, there is no cause for fear, let Bishops A and B, and Archbishops C and D fret and fume with never so great vexation touching the clipped honours of their father the Pope.

But again; Quo Musa tendis? I could write on this subject for a week were it not that Rhadamanthus awaits me, Rhadamanthus the critic; and Rhadamanthus is, of all things, impatient of an episode.

Life and soul were kept together in those terrible days;--that is, the Irish life and soul generally. There were many slips, in which the union was violently dissolved,--many cases in which the yellow meal allowed was not sufficient, or in which it did not reach the sufferer in time to prevent such dissolution,--cases which when numbered together amounted to thousands. And then the pestilence came, taking its victims by tens of thousands,--but that was after the time with which we shall have concern here; and immigration followed, taking those who were saved by hundreds of thousands.

But the millions are still there, a thriving people; for His mercy endureth for ever.

During this month, the month ensuing upon the death of Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, Herbert could of course pay no outward attention to the wants or relief of the people. He could make no offer of a.s.sistance, for nothing belonged to him; nor could he aid in the councils of the committees, for no one could have defined the position of the speaker. And during that month nothing was defined about Castle Richmond. Lady Fitzgerald was still always called by her t.i.tle. The people of the country, including the tradesmen of the neighbouring towns, addressed the owner of Hap House as Sir Owen; and gradually the name was working itself into common use, though he had taken no steps to make himself legally ent.i.tled to wear it. But no one spoke of Sir Herbert. The story was so generally known, that none were so ignorant as to suppose him to be his father's heir. The servants about the place still called him Mr. Herbert, orders to that effect having been specially given; and the peasants of the country, with that tact which graces them, and with that anxiety to abstain from giving pain which always accompanies them unless when angered, carefully called him by no name. They knew that he was not Sir Herbert; but they would not believe but what, perchance, he might be so yet on some future day. So they took off their old hats to him, and pa.s.sed him silently in his sorrow; or if they spoke to him, addressed his honour simply, omitting all mention of that Christian name, which the poor Irishman is generally so fond of using. "Mister Blake" sounds cold and unkindly in his ears. It is the "Masther,"

or "His honour," or if possible "Misther Thady." Or if there be any handle, that is used with avidity. Pat is a happy man when he can address his landlord as "Sir Patrick."

But now the "ould masther's son" could be called by no name. Men knew not what he was to be, though they knew well that he was not that which he ought to be. And there were some who attempted to wors.h.i.+p Owen as the rising sun; but for such of them as had never wors.h.i.+pped him before that game was rather hopeless. In those days he was not much seen, neither hunting nor entertaining company; but when seen he was rough enough with those who made any deep attempt to ingratiate themselves with his coming mightiness. And during this month he went over to London, having been specially invited so to do by Mr.

Prendergast; but very little came of his visit there, except that it was certified to him that he was beyond all doubt the baronet. "And there shall be no unnecessary delay, Sir Owen," said Mr. Prendergast, "in putting you into full possession of all your rights." In answer to which Owen had replied that he was not anxious to be put in possession of any rights. That as far as any active doing of his own was concerned, the t.i.tle might lie in abeyance, and that regarding the property he would make known his wish to Mr. Prendergast very quickly after his return to Ireland. But he intimated at the same time that there could be no ground for disturbing Lady Fitzgerald, as he had no intention under any circ.u.mstances of living at Castle Richmond.

"Had you not better tell Lady Fitzgerald that yourself?" said Mr.