Lord Kilgobbin Part 2

Kearney, dressed for an evening party, resplendent with jewellery, essenced and curled, was about to issue forth when Atlee, dusty and wayworn, entered and threw himself into a chair.

'What lark have you been on, Master Joe?' he said. 'I have not seen you for three days, if not four!'

'No; I've begun to train,' said he gravely. 'I want to see how long a fellow could hold on to life on three pipes of Cavendish per diem. I take it that the absorbents won't be more cruel than a man's creditors, and will not issue a distraint where there are no a.s.sets, so that probably by the time I shall have brought myself down to, let us say, seven stone weight, I shall have reached the goal.'

This speech he delivered slowly and calmly, as though enunciating a very grave proposition.

'What new nonsense is this? Don't you think health worth something?'

'Next to life, unquestionably; but one condition of health is to be alive, and I don't see how to manage that. Look here, d.i.c.k, I have just had a quarrel with my father; he is an excellent man and an impressive preacher, but he fails in the imaginative qualities. Nature has been a n.i.g.g.ard to him in inventiveness. He is the minister of a little parish called Aghadoe, in the North, where they give him two hundred and ten pounds per annum. There are eight in family, and he actually does not see his way to allow me one hundred and fifty out of it. That's the way they neglect arithmetic in our modern schools!'

'Has he reduced your allowance?'

'He has done more, he has extinguished it.'

'Have you provoked him to this?'

'I have provoked him to it.'

'But is it not possible to accommodate matters? It should not be very difficult, surely, to show him that once you are launched in life--'

'And when will that be, d.i.c.k?' broke in the other. 'I have been on the stocks these four years, and that launching process you talk of looks just as remote as ever. No, no; let us be fair; he has all the right on his side, all the wrong is on mine. Indeed, so far as conscience goes, I have always felt it so, but one's conscience, like one's boots, gets so pliant from wear, that it ceases to give pain. Still, on my honour, I never hip-hurraed to a toast that I did not feel: there goes broken boots to one of the boys, or, worse again, the cost of a cotton dress for one of the sisters. Whenever I took a sherry-cobbler I thought of suicide after it.

Self-indulgence and self-reproach got linked in my nature so inseparably, it was hopeless to summon one without the other, till at last I grew to believe it was very heroic in me to deny myself nothing, seeing how sorry I should be for it afterwards. But come, old fellow, don't lose your evening; we'll have time enough to talk over these things--where are you going?'

'To the Clancys'.'

'To be sure; what a fellow I am to forget it was Letty's birthday, and I was to have brought her a bouquet! d.i.c.k, be a good fellow and tell her some lie or other--that I was sick in bed, or away to see an aunt or a grandmother, and that I had a splendid bouquet for her, but wouldn't let it reach her through other hands than my own, but to-morrow--to-morrow she shall have it.'

'You know well enough you don't mean anything of the sort.'

'On my honour, I'll keep my promise. I've an old silver watch yonder--I think it knows the way to the p.a.w.n-office by itself. There, now be off, for if I begin to think of all the fun you're going to, I shall just dress and join you.'

'No, I'd not do that,' said d.i.c.k gravely, 'nor shall I stay long myself.

Don't go to bed, Joe, till I come back. Good-bye.'

'Say all good and sweet things to Letty for me. Tell her--' Kearney did not wait for his message, but hurried down the steps and drove off.

Joe sat down at the fire, filled his pipe, looked steadily at it, and then laid it on the mantel-piece. 'No, no, Master Joe. You must be thrifty now.

You have smoked twice since--I can afford to say--since dinner-time, for you haven't dined. It is strange, now that the sense of hunger has pa.s.sed off, what a sense of excitement I feel. Two hours back I could have been a cannibal. I believe I could have eaten the vice-provost--though I should have liked him strongly devilled--and now I feel stimulated. Hence it is, perhaps, that so little wine is enough to affect the heads of starving people--almost maddening them. Perhaps d.i.c.k suspected something of this, for he did not care that I should go along with him. Who knows but he may have thought the sight of a supper might have overcome me. If he knew but all. I'm much more disposed to make love to Letty Clancy than to go in for galantine and champagne. By the way, I wonder if the physiologists are aware of that? It is, perhaps, what const.i.tutes the ethereal condition of love. I'll write an essay on that, or, better still, I'll write a review of an imaginary French essay. Frenchmen are permitted to say so much more than we are, and I'll be rebukeful on the score of his excesses. The bitter way in which a Frenchman always visits his various incapacities--whether it be to know something, or to do something, or to be something--on the species he belongs to; the way in which he suggests that, had he been consulted on the matter, humanity had been a much more perfect organisation, and able to sustain a great deal more of wickedness without disturbance, is great fun. I'll certainly invent a Frenchman, and make him an author, and then demolish him. What if I make him die of hunger, having tasted nothing for eight days but the proof-sheets of his great work--the work I am then reviewing? For four days--but stay--if I starve him to death, I cannot tear his work to pieces. No; he shall be alive, living in splendour and honour, a frequenter of the Tuileries, a favoured guest at Compiegne.'

Without perceiving it, he had now taken his pipe, lighted it, and was smoking away. 'By the way, how those same Imperialists have played the game!--the two or three middle-aged men that Kinglake says, "put their heads together to plan for a livelihood." I wish they had taken me into the partners.h.i.+p. It's the sort of thing I'd have liked well; ay, and I could have done it, too! I wonder,' said he aloud--'I wonder if I were an emperor should I marry Letty Clancy? I suspect not. Letty would have been flippant as an empress, and her cousins would have made atrocious princes of the imperial family, though, for the matter of that--Hullo! Here have I been smoking without knowing it! Can any one tell us whether the sins we do inadvertently count as sins, or do we square them off by our inadvertent good actions? I trust I shall not be called on to catalogue mine. There, my courage is out!' As he said this he emptied the ashes of his pipe, and gazed sorrowfully at the empty bowl.

'Now, if I were the son of some good house, with a high-sounding name, and well-to-do relations, I'd soon bring them to terms if they dared to cast me off. I'd turn milk or m.u.f.fin man, and serve the street they lived in. I'd sweep the crossing in front of their windows, or I'd commit a small theft, and call on my high connections for a character--but being who and what I am, I might do any or all o these, and shock n.o.body.

'Next to take stock of my effects. Let me see what my a.s.sets will bring when reduced to cash, for this time it shall be a sale.' And he turned to a table where paper and pens were lying, and proceeded to write. 'Personal, sworn under, let us say, ten thousand pounds. Literature first. To divers worn copies of _Virgil_, _Tacitus_, _Juvenal_, and _Ovid_, Caesar's _Commentaries_, and _Catullus_; to ditto ditto of _Homer_, _Lucian_, _Aristophanes_, _Balzac_, _Anacreon_, Bacon's _Essays_, and Moore's _Melodies_; to Dwight's _Theology_--uncut copy, Heine's _Poems_--very much thumbed, _Saint Simon_--very ragged, two volumes of _Les Causes Celebres_, Tone's _Memoirs_, and Beranger's _Songs_; to Cuvier's _Comparative Anatomy_, Shroeder on _Shakespeare_, Newman's _Apology_, Archbold's _Criminal Law_ and _Songs of the Nation_; to Colenso, East's _Cases for the Crown_, Carte's _Ormonde_, and _Pickwick_. But why go on? Let us call it the small but well-selected library of a distressed gentleman, whose cultivated mind is reflected in the marginal notes with which these volumes abound. Will any gentleman say, "10 for the lot"? Why the very criticisms are worth--I mean to a man of literary tastes--five times the amount. No offer at 10? Who is it that says "five"? I trust my ears have deceived me.

You repeat the insulting proposal? Well, sir, on your own head be it! Mr.

Atlee's library--or the Atlee collection is better--was yesterday disposed of to a well-known collector of rare books, and, if we are rightly informed, for a mere fraction of its value. Never mind, sir, I bear you no ill-will! I was irritable, and to show you my honest animus in the matter, I beg to present you in addition with this, a handsomely-bound and gilt copy of a sermon by the Reverend Isaac Atlee, on the opening of the new meeting-house in Coleraine--a discourse that cost my father some sleepless nights, though I have heard the effect on the congregation was dissimilar.

'The pictures are few. Cardinal Cullen, I believe, is Kearney's; at all events, he is the worse for being made a target for pistol firing, and the archiepiscopal nose has been sorely damaged. Two views of Killarney in the weather of the period--that means July, and raining in torrents--and consequently the scene, for aught discoverable, might be the Gaboon.

Portrait of Joe Atlee, _aetatis_ four years, with a villainous squint, and something that looks like a plug in the left jaw. A Skye terrier, painted, it is supposed, by himself; not to recite unframed prints of various celebrities of the ballet, in accustomed att.i.tudes, with the Reverend Paul Bloxham blessing some children--though from the gesture and the expression of the juveniles it might seem cuffing them--on the inauguration of the Sunday school at Kilmurry Macmacmahon.

'Lot three, interesting to anatomical lecturers and others, especially those engaged in palaeontology. The articulated skeleton of an Irish giant, representing a man who must have stood in his no-stockings eight feet four inches. This, I may add, will be warranted as authentic, in so far that I made him myself out of at least eighteen or twenty big specimens, with a few slight "divergencies" I may call them, such as putting in eight more dorsal vertebrae than the regulation, and that the right femur is two inches longer than the left. The inferior maxillary, too, was stolen from a "Pithacus Satyrus" in the Cork Museum by an old friend, since transported for Fenianism. These blemishes apart, he is an admirable giant, and fully as ornamental and useful as the species generally.

'As to my wardrobe, it is less costly than curious; an alpaca paletot of a neutral tint, which I have much affected of late, having indisposed me to other wear. For dinner and evening duty I usually wear Kearney's, though too tight across the chest, and short in the sleeves. These, with a silver watch which no p.a.w.nbroker--and I have tried eight--will ever advance more on than seven-and-six. I once got the figure up to nine s.h.i.+llings by supplementing an umbrella, which was d.i.c.k's, and which still remains, "unclaimed and unredeemed."

'Two o'clock, by all that is supperless! evidently Kearney is enjoying himself. Ah, youth, youth! I wish I could remember some of the spiteful things that are said of you--not but on the whole, I take it, you have the right end of the stick. Is it possible there is nothing to eat in this inhospitable mansion?' He arose and opened a sort of cupboard in the wall, scrutinising it closely with the candle. '"Give me but the superfluities of life," says Gavarni, "and I'll not trouble you for its necessaries." What would he say, however, to a fellow famis.h.i.+ng with hunger in presence of nothing but pickled mushrooms and Worcester sauce! Oh, here is a crust!

"Bread is the staff of life." On my oath, I believe so; for this eats devilish like a walking-stick.

'Hullo! back already?' cried he, as Kearney flung wide the door and entered. 'I suppose you hurried away back to join me at supper.'

'Thanks; but I have supped already, and at a more tempting banquet than this I see before you.'

'Was it pleasant? was it jolly? Were the girls looking lovely? Was the champagne-cup well iced? Was everybody charming? Tell me all about it. Let me have second-hand pleasure, since I can't afford the new article.'

'It was pretty much like every other small ball here, where the garrison get all the prettiest girls for partners, and take the mammas down to supper after.'

'Cunning dogs, who secure flirtation above stairs and food below! And what is stirring in the world? What are the gaieties in prospect? Are any of my old flames about to get married?'

'I didn't know you had any.'

'Have I not! I believe half the parish of St. Peter's might proceed against me for breach of promise; and if the law allowed me as many wives as Brigham Young, I'd be still disappointing a large and interesting section of society in the suburbs.'

'They have made a seizure on the office of the _Pike_, carried off the press and the whole issue, and are in eager pursuit after Madden, the editor.'

'What for? What is it all about?'

'A new ballad he has published; but which, for the matter of that, they were singing at every corner as I came along.'

'Was it good? Did you buy a copy?'

'Buy a copy? I should think not.'

'Couldn't your patriotism stand the test of a penny?'

'It might if I wanted the production, which I certainly did not; besides, there is a run upon this, and they were selling it at sixpence.'

'Hurrah! There's hope for Ireland after all! Shall I sing it for you, old fellow? Not that you deserve it. English corruption has damped the little Irish ardour that old rebellion once kindled in your heart; and if you could get rid of your brogue, you're ready to be loyal. You shall hear it, however, all the same.' And taking up a very damaged-looking guitar, he struck a few bold chords, and began:--

'Is there anything more we can fight or can hate for?

The "drop" and the famine have made our ranks thin.

In the name of endurance, then, what do we wait for?

Will n.o.body give us the word to begin?

'Some brothers have left us in sadness and sorrow, In despair of the cause they had sworn to win; They owned they were sick of that cry of "to-morrow"; Not a man would believe that we meant to begin.

'We've been ready for months--is there one can deny it?

Is there any one here thinks rebellion a sin?

We counted the cost--and we did not decry it, And we asked for no more than the word to begin?