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“He asked me to stop once, while his head reeled, and said, ‘In a minute I shall be myself again,’ and so he was, too; you should have seen him, Upton, as he rose to leave me. So much of dignity was there in his look that my heart misgave me; and I told him that still, as my son, he should never want a friend and a protector. He grew deadly pale, and caught at the bed for support. Another moment, and I ‘d not have answered for myself. I was already relenting; but I thought of her, and my resolution came back in all its force. Still, I dared not look on him. The sight of that wan cheek, those quivering lips and glassy eyes, would certainly have unmanned me. I turned away. When I looked round, he was gone!’ As he ceased to speak, a clammy perspiration burst forth over his face and forehead, and he made a sign to Upton to wet his lips.

“It is the last pang she is to cost me, Upton, but it is a sore one!” said he, in a low, hoarse whisper.

“My dear Glencore, this is all little short of madness; even as revenge it is a failure, since the heaviest share of the penalty recoils upon yourself.”

“How so?” cried he, impetuously.

“Is it thus that an ancient name is to go out forever? Is it in this wise that a house noble for centuries is to crumble into ruin? I will not again urge upon you the cruel wrong you are doing. Over that boy’s inheritance you have no more right than over mine, – you cannot rob him of the protection of the law. No power could ever give you the disposal of his destiny in this wise.”

“I have done it, and I will maintain it, sir,” cried Glencore; “and if the question is, as you vaguely hint, to be one of law – ”

“No, no, Glencore; do not mistake me.”

“Hear me out, sir,” said he, passionately. “If it is to be one of law, let Sir Horace Upton give his testimony, – tell all that he knows, – and let us see what it will avail him. You may – it is quite open to you – place us front to front as enemies. You may teach the boy to regard me as one who has robbed him of his birthright, and train him up to become my accuser in a court of justice. But my cause is a strong one, it cannot be shaken; and where you hope to brand me with tyranny, you will but visit bastardy upon him. Think twice, then, before you declare this combat. It is one where all your craft will not sustain you.”

“My dear Glencore, it is not in this spirit that we can speak profitably to each other. If you will not hear my reasons calmly and dispassionately, to what end am I here? You have long known me as one who lays claim to no more rigid morality than consists with the theory of a worldly man’s experiences. I affect no high-flown sentiments. I am as plain and practical as may be; and when I tell you that you are wrong in this affair, I mean to say that what you are about to do is not only bad, but impolitic. In your pursuit of a victim, you are immolating yourself.”

“Be it so; I go not alone to the stake; there is another to partake of the torture,” cried Glencore, wildly; and already his flushed cheek and flashing eyes betrayed the approach of a feverish access.

“If I am not to have any influence with you, then,” resumed Upton, “I am here to no purpose. If to all that I say – to arguments you cannot answer – you obstinately persist in opposing an insane thirst for revenge, I see not why you should desire my presence. You have resolved to do this great wrong?”

“It is already done, sir,” broke in Glencore.

“Wherein, then, can I be of any service to you?”

“I am coming to that. I had come to it before, had you not interrupted me. I want you to be guardian to the boy. I want you to replace me in all that regards authority over him. You know life well, Upton. You know it not alone in its paths of pleasure and success, but you understand thoroughly the rugged footway over which humble men toil wearily to fortune. None can better estimate a man’s chances of success, nor more surely point the road by which he is to attain it. The provision which I destine for him will be an humble one, and he will need to rely upon his own efforts. You will not refuse me this service, Upton. I ask it in the name of our old friendship.”

“There is but one objection I could possibly have, and yet that seems to be insurmountable.”

“And what may it be?” cried Glencore.

“Simply, that in acceding to your request, I make myself an accomplice in your plan, and thus aid and abet the very scheme I am repudiating.”

“What avails your repudiation if it will not turn me from my resolve? That it will not, I ‘ll swear to you as solemnly as ever an oath was taken. I tell you again, the thing is done. For the consequences which are to follow on it you have no responsibility; these are my concern.”

“I should like a little time to think over it,” said Upton, with the air of one struggling with irresolution. “Let me have this evening to make up my mind; to-morrow you shall have my answer.”

“Be it so, then,” said Glencore; and, turning his face away, waved a cold farewell with his hand.

We do not purpose to follow Sir Horace as he retired, nor does our task require that we should pry into the secret recesses of his wily nature; enough if we say that in asking for time, his purpose was rather to afford another opportunity of reflection to Glencore than to give himself more space for deliberation. He had found, by the experience of his calling, that the delay we often crave for, to resolve a doubt, has sufficed to change the mind of him who originated the difficulty.

“I’ll give him some hours, at least,” thought he, “to ponder over what I have said. Who knows but the argument may seem better in memory than in action? Such things have happened before now.” And having finished this reflection, he turned to peruse the pamphlet of a quack doctor who pledged himself to cure all disorders of the circulation by attending to tidal influences, and made the moon herself enter into the materia medica. What Sir Horace believed, or did not believe, in the wild rhapsodies of the charlatan, is known only to himself. Whether his credulity was fed by the hope of obtaining relief, or whether his fancy only was aroused by the speculative images thus suggested, it is impossible to say. It is not altogether improbable that he perused these things as Charles Fox used to read all the trashiest novels of the Minerva Press, and find, in the very distorted and exaggerated pictures, a relief and a relaxation which more correct views of life had failed to impart. Hard-headed men require strange indulgences.

CHAPTER XIV. BILLY TRAYNOR AND THE COLONEL

It was a fine breezy morning as the Colonel set out with Billy Traynor for Belmullet. The bridle-path by which they travelled led through a wild and thinly inhabited tract, – now dipping down between grassy hills, now tracing its course along the cliffs over the sea. Tall ferns covered the slopes, protected from the west winds, and here and there little copses of stunted oak showed the traces of what once had been forest. It was, on the whole, a silent and dreary region, so that the travellers felt it even relief as they drew nigh the bright blue sea, and heard the sonorous booming of the waves as they broke along the shore.

“It cheers one to come up out of those dreary dells, and hear the pleasant plash of the sea,” said Harcourt; and his bright face showed that he felt the enjoyment.

“So it does, sir,” said Billy. “And yet Homer makes his hero go heavy-hearted as he hears the ever-sounding sea.”

“What does that signify, Doctor?” said Harcourt, impatiently. “Telling me what a character in a fiction feels affects me no more than telling me what he does. Why, man, the one is as unreal as the other. The fellow that created him fashioned his thoughts as well as his actions.”

“To be sure he did; but when the fellow is a janius, what he makes is as much a crayture as either you or myself.”

“Come, come, Doctor, no mystification.”

“I don’t mean any,” broke in Billy. “What I want to say is this, that as we read every character to elicit truth, – truth in the working of human motives, truth in passion, truth in all the struggles of our poor weak natures, – why would n’t a great janius like Homer, or Shakspeare, or Milton, be better able to show us this in some picture drawn by themselves, than you or I be able to find it out for ourselves?”

Harcourt shook his head doubtfully.

“Well, now,” said Billy, returning to the charge, “did you ever see a waxwork model of anatomy? Every nerve and siny of a nerve was there, – not a vein nor an artery wanting. The artist that made it all just wanted to show you where everything was; but he never wanted you to believe it was alive, or ever had been. But with janius it’s different. He just gives you some traits of a character, he points him out to you passing, – just as I would to a man going along the street, – and there he is alive for ever and ever; not like you and me, that will be dead and buried to-morrow or next day, and the most known of us three lines in a parish registhry, but he goes down to posterity an example, an illustration – or a warning, maybe – to thousands and thousands of living men. Don’t talk to me about fiction! What he thought and felt is truer than all that you and I and a score like us ever did or ever will do. The creations of janius are the landmarks of humanity; and well for us is it that we have such to guide us!”

“All this may be very fine,” said Harcourt, contemptuously, “but give me the sentiments of a living man, or one that has lived, in preference to all the imaginary characters that have ever adorned a story.”

“Just as I suppose that you’d say that a soldier in the Blues, or some big, hulking corporal in the Guards, is a finer model of the human form than ever Praxiteles chiselled.”

“I know which I ‘d rather have alongside of me in a charge, Doctor,” said Harcourt, laughing; and then, to change the topic, he pointed to a lone cabin on the sea-shore, miles away, as it seemed, from all other habitations.

“That’s Michel Cady’s, sir,” said Traynor; “he lives by birds, – hunting them saygulls and cormorants through the crevices of the rocks, and stealing the eggs. There isn’t a precipice that he won’t climb, not a cliff that he won’t face.”

“Well, if that be his home, the pursuit does not seem a profitable one.”

“‘Tis as good as breaking stones on the road for four-pence a day, or carrying sea-weed five miles on your back to manure the potatoes,” said Billy, mournfully.

“That’s exactly the very thing that puzzles me,” said Harcourt, “why, in a country so remarkable for fertility, every one should be so miserably poor!”

“And you never heard any explanation of it?”

“Never; at least, never one that satisfied me.”

“Nor ever will you,” said Billy, sententiously.

“And why so?”

“Because,” said he, drawing a long breath, as if preparing for a discourse, – “because there’s no man capable of going into the whole subject; for it’s not merely an economical question or a social one, but it is metaphysical, and religious, and political, and ethnological, and historical, – ay, and geographical too! You have to consider, first, who and what are the aborigines. A conquered people that never gave in they were conquered. Who are the rulers? A Saxon race that always felt that they were infarior to them they ruled over!”

“By Jove, Doctor, I must stop you there; I never heard any acknowledgment of this inferiority you speak of.”

“I’d like to get a goold medal for arguin’ it out with you,” said Billy.

“And, after all, I don’t see how it would resolve the original doubt,” said Harcourt. “I want to know why the people are so poor, and I don’t want to hear of the battle of Clontarf, or the Danes at Dundalk.”

“There it is, you’d like to narrow down a great question of race, language, traditions, and laws to a little miserable dispute about labor and wages. O Manchester, Manchester! how ye’re in the heart of every Englishman, rich or poor, gentle or simple! You say you never heard of any confession of inferiority. Of course you did n’t; but quite the reverse, – a very confident sense of being far better than the poor Irish; and I’ll tell you how, and why, just as you, yourself, after a discusshion with me, when you find yourself dead bate, and not a word to reply, you ‘ll go home to a good dinner and a bottle of wine, dry clothes and a bright fire; and no matter how hard my argument pushed you, you’ll remember that I’m in rags, in a dirty cabin, with potatoes to ate and water to drink, and you ‘ll say, at all events, ‘I ‘m better off than he is;’ and there’s your superiority, neither more or less, – there it is! And all the while, I’m saying the same thing to myself, – ‘Sorrow matter for his fine broadcloth, and his white linen, and his very best roast beef that he’s atin’, – I ‘m his master! In all that dignifies the spacies in them grand qualities that makes us poets, rhetoricians, and the like, in those elegant attributes that, as the poet says, —

 
“In all our pursuits
Lifts us high above brutes,’”
 

– in these, I say again, I ‘m his master!’”

As Billy finished his growing panegyric upon his country and himself, he burst out in a joyous laugh, and cried, “Did ye ever hear conceit like that? Did ye ever expect to see the day that a ragged poor blackguard like me would dare to say as much to one like you? And, after all, it’s the greatest compliment I could pay you.”

“How so, Billy? I don’t exactly see that.”

“Why, that if you weren’t a gentleman, – a raal gentleman, born and bred, – I could never have ventured to tell you what I said now. It is because, in your own refined feelings, you can pardon all the coarseness of mine, that I have my safety.”

“You’re as great a courtier as you are a scholar, Billy,” said Harcourt, laughing; “meanwhile, I’m not likely to be enlightened as to the cause of Irish poverty.”

“‘T is a whole volume I could write on the same subject,” said Billy; “for there’s so many causes in operation, com-binin’, and assistin’, and aggravatin’ each other. But if you want the head and front of the mischief in one word, it is this, that no Irishman ever gave his heart and sowl to his own business, but always was mindin’ something else that he had nothin’ to say to; and so, ye see, the priest does be thinkin’ of politics, the parson’s thinkin’ of the priest, the people are always on the watch for a crack at the agent or the tithe-proctor, and the landlord, instead of looking after his property, is up in Dublin dinin’ with the Lord-Leftinint and abusin’ his tenants. I don’t want to screen myself, nor say I’m better than my neighbors, for though I have a larned profession to live by, I ‘d rather be writin’ a ballad, and singin’ it too, down Thomas Street, than I ‘d be lecturin’ at the Surgeons’ Hall.”

“You are certainly a very strange people,” said Harcourt.

“And yet there’s another thing stranger still, which is, that your countrymen never took any advantage of our eccentricities, to rule us by; and if they had any wit in their heads, they ‘d have seen, easy enough, that all these traits are exactly the clews to a nation’s heart. That’s what Pitt meant when he said, ‘Let me make the songs of a people, and I don’t care who makes the laws.’ Look down now in that glen before you, as far as you can see. There’s Belmullet, and ain’t you glad to be so near your journey’s end? for you’re mighty tired of all this discoorsin’.”

“On the contrary, Billy, even when I disagree with what you say, I’m pleased to hear your reasons; at the same time, I ‘m glad we are drawing nigh to this poor boy, and I only trust we may not be too late.”

Billy muttered a pious concurrence in the wish, and they rode along for some time in silence. “There’s the Bay of Belmullet now under your feet,” cried Billy, as he pulled up short, and pointed with his whip seaward. “There’s five fathoms, and fine anchoring ground on every inch ye see there. There’s elegant shelter from tempestuous winds. There’s a coast rich in herrings, oysters, lobsters, and crabs; farther out there’s cod, and haddock, and mackerel in the sayson. There’s sea wrack for kelp, and every other con-vanience any one can require; and a poorer set of devils than ye ‘ll see when we get down there, there’s nowhere to be found. Well, well! ‘if idleness is bliss, it’s folly to work hard.’” And with this paraphrase, Billy made way for the Colonel, as the path had now become too narrow for two abreast, and in this way they descended to the shore.

CHAPTER XV. A SICK BED

Although the cabin in which the sick boy lay was one of the best in the village, its interior presented a picture of great poverty. It consisted of a single room, in the middle of which a mud wall of a few feet in height formed a sort of partition, abutting against which was the bed, – the one bed of the entire family, – now devoted to the guest. Two or three coarsely fashioned stools, a rickety table, and a still more rickety dresser comprised all the furniture. The floor was uneven and fissured, and the solitary window was mended with an old hat, – thus diminishing the faint light which struggled through the narrow aperture.

A large net, attached to the rafters, hung down in heavy festoons overhead, the corks and sinks dangling in dangerous proximity to the heads underneath. Several spars and oars littered one corner, and a newly painted buoy filled another; but, in spite of all these encumbrances, there was space around the fire for a goodly company of some eight or nine of all ages, who were pleasantly eating their supper from a large pot of potatoes that smoked and steamed in front of them.

“God save all here!” cried Billy, as he preceded the Colonel into the cabin.

“Save ye kindly,” was the courteous answer, in a chorus of voices; at the same time, seeing a gentleman at the door, the whole party arose at once to receive him. Nothing could have surpassed the perfect good-breeding with which the fisherman and his wife did the honors of their humble home; and Harcourt at once forgot the poverty-struck aspect of the scene in the general courtesy of the welcome.

“He ‘s no better, your honor, – no better at all,” said the man, as Harcourt drew nigh the sick bed. “He does be always ravin’, – ravin’ on, – beggin’ and implorin’ that we won’t take him back to the Castle; and if he falls asleep, the first thing he says when he wakes up is, ‘Where am I? – tell me I’m not at Glencore!’ and he keeps on screechin’, ‘Tell me, tell me so!’”

Harcourt bent down over the bed and gazed at him. Slowly and languidly the sick boy raised his heavy lids and returned the stare.

“You know me, Charley, boy, don’t you?” said he, softly.

“Yes,” muttered he, in a weak tone.

“Who am I, Charley? Tell me who is speaking to you.”

“Yes,” said he again.

“Poor fellow!” Bighed Harcourt, “he does not know me!”

“Where’s the pain?” asked Billy, suddenly.

The boy placed his hand on his forehead, and then on his temples.

“Look up! look at me!” said Billy. “Ay, there it is! the pupil does not contract, – there’s mischief in the brain. He wants to say something to you, sir,” said he to Harcourt; “he’s makin’ signs to you to stoop down.”

Harcourt put his ear close to the sick boy’s lips, and listened.

“No, my dear child, of course not,” said he, after a pause. “You shall remain here, and I will stay with you too. In a few days your father will come – ”

A wild yell, a shriek that made the cabin ring, now broke from the boy, followed by another, and then a third; and then with a spring he arose from the bed, and tried to escape. Weak and exhausted as he was, such was the strength supplied by fever, it was all that they could do to subdue him and replace him in the bed; violent convulsions followed this severe access, and it was not till after hours of intense suffering that he calmed down again and seemed to slumber.

“There’s more than we know of here, Colonel,” said Billy, as he drew him to one side. “There’s moral causes as well as malady at work.”

“There may be, but I know nothing of them,” said Harcourt; and in the frank air of the speaker the other did not hesitate to repose his trust.

“If we hope to save him, we ought to find out where the mischief lies,” said Billy; “for, if ye remark, his ravin’ is always upon one subject; he never wanders from that.”

“He has a dread of home. Some altercation with his father has, doubtless, impressed him with this notion.”

“Ah, that isn’t enough, we must go ‘deeper; we want a clew to the part of the brain engaged. Meanwhile, here’s at him, with the antiphlogistic touch;” and he opened his lancet-case, and tucked up his cuffs. “Houlde the basin, Biddy.”

“There, Harvey himself couldn’t do it nater than that. It’s an elegant study to be feelin’ a pulse while the blood is flowin’. It comes at first like a dammed-up cataract, a regular out-pouring, just as a young girl would tell her love, all wild and tumultuous; then, after a time, she gets more temperate, the feelings are relieved, and the ardor is moderated, till at last, wearied and worn out, the heart seems to ask for rest; and then ye’ll remark a settled faint smile coming over the lips, and a clammy coldness in the face.”

“He’s fainting, sir,” broke in Biddy.

“He is, ma’am, and it’s myself done it,” said Billy. “Oh, dear, oh, dear! If we could only do with the moral heart what we can with the raal physical one, what wonderful poets we ‘d be!”

“What hopes have you?” whispered Harcourt.

“The best, the very best. There ‘s youth and a fine constitution to work upon; and what more does a doctor want? As ould Marsden said, ‘You can’t destroy these in a fortnight, so the patient must live.’ But you must help me, Colonel, and you can help me.”

“Command me in any way, Doctor.”

“Here’s the modus, then. You must go back to the Castle and find out, if you can, what happened between his father and him. It does not signify now, nor will it for some days; but when he comes to the convalescent stage, it’s then we ‘ll need to know how to manage him, and what subjects to keep him away from. ‘T is the same with the brain as with a sprained ankle; you may exercise if you don’t twist it; but just come down once on the wrong spot, and maybe ye won’t yell out!”

“You ‘ll not quit him, then.”

“I’m a senthry on his post, waiting to get a shot at the enemy if he shows the top of his head. Ah, sir, if ye only knew physic, ye ‘d acknowledge there ‘s nothing as treacherous as dizaze. Ye hunt him out of the brain, and then he is in the lungs. Ye chase him out of that, and he skulks in the liver. At him there, and he takes to the fibrous membranes, and then it’s regular hide-and-go-seek all over the body. Trackin’ a bear is child’s play to it.” And so saying, Billy held the Colonel’s stirrup for him to mount, and giving his most courteous salutation, and his best wishes for a good journey, he turned and re-entered the cabin.