Volume I Part 9 (2/2)
by St. Francis Xavier. There are marks all through them with my own pen; and be particular to observe the receipt for snow pancakes, and the prayers for a ”Plenary” after Candlemas.
It will be a comfort to your feelings to know that I am departing from this life in peace and charity with every one. Tell Mat I forgive him the fleece he stole out of the hayloft; and though he swears still he never laid hand on it, who else was there, Molly? You can give Kitty Hogan the old shoes in the closet, for, though she never wears any, she 'd like to have them for keepsakes! K. I. cared too little for my peace here to suppose that he will think of my repose hereafter, so that Father John can take the yearling calf and the two ewes out in ma.s.ses!
My feelings is overcoming me, Molly, and I can't go on!--breathing my last, as I am, in a far-away land, and sinking under the cruelty of a hard-hearted man!
I think it would only be a decent mark of respect to my family if the M'Carthy arms was hung up over the door, to show I was n't a Dodd. The crest is an angel sheltering a fox, or a beast like a fox, under his wing; but you 'll see it on the spoons. When you sell the piggs--maybe I ought n't to put two g's in them, but my head is wandering--pay old Judy Cobb two-and-sevenpence for the yarn, and say that I won't stop the ninepence out of Betty's wages. Maybe, when I 'm gone, they 'll begin to see what they 've lost, and maybe E. I. will feel it too, when he finds no b.u.t.tons on his s.h.i.+rts and the strings out of his waistcoat; and what's far worse, n.o.body to contradict him, and control his wilful nature! That's the very struggle that's killing me now! n.o.body knows, nor would believe, the opposition I 've given him for twenty years. But _he_ 'll feel it, Molly, and that before I'm six weeks in the grave.
I don't know my age to a day or a month, but you can put me down at thirty-nine, and maybe the ”Blast of Freedom” would say a word or two about my family. I 'd like that far better than to be ”deeply regretted,” or ”to the inexpressible grief of her bereaved relations.”
I have made it a last request that my remains are to be sent home, and as I know K. I. won't go to the expense, he'll have to bear all the disgrace of neglecting my dying entreaty. That's my legacy to him, Molly; and if it's not a very profitable one, the ”duty” will not be heavy.
Remember me affectionately to everybody, and say that to the last my heart was in my own country; and indeed, Molly, I never did hear so much good about Ireland as since we left it!
I have just taken a draught that has restored me wonderfully. It has a taste of curaoa, and evidently suits my const.i.tution. Maybe Providence, in his mercy, means to reserve me for more trials and misfortunes; for I feel stronger already, and am going to taste a bit of roast duck, with sage and onions. Betty has done it for me herself.
If I do recover, Molly, I promise you K. I. won't find me the poor submissive worm he has been trampling upon these more than twenty years!
I feel more like myself already; the ”mixture” is really doing me good.
You may write to me to this place, with directions to be opened by Mary Anne, if I 'm no more. The very thought of it overwhelms me. The idea of one's own death is the most terrible of all afflictions; and as for me, I don't think I could ever survive it.
I mean to send for K. I., to take leave of him, and forgive him, before I go. I 'm not sure that I 'd do so, Molly, if it wasn't for the opportunity of telling him my mind about all his cruelty to me, and that I know well what he's at, and that he'll be married again before six months. That's the treachery of men; but there's one comfort,--they are well paid off for it when they marry--as they always do--some young minx of nineteen or twenty. It's exactly what K. I. is capable of; and I mean to show him that I see it, and all the consequences besides.
The mixture is really of service to me, and I feel as if I could take a sleep. Mary Anne will seal this if I 'm not awake before post hour. #
LETTER XIII. FROM K. I. DODD TO THOMAS PURCELL, ESQ., OF THE GRANGE, BRUFF
Lige, Tuesday Evening.
My dear Tom,--Your reproaches are all just, but I really have not had courage to wield a pen these last three weeks, nor have I now patience to go back on the past. Perhaps when we meet--if ever that good time is to come round again--I may be able to tell you something of my final exit from Brussels; but now with the shame yet fresh, and the disgrace recent, I cannot find pluck for it.
Here we are at what they call the ”Pavilion,” having changed from the Hotel d'Angleterre yesterday. You must know, Tom, that this same city of Lige is the noisiest, most dinning, hammering, hissing, clanking, creaking, welding, smelting, and furnace-roaring town in Europe.
Something like a hundred thousand tinkers are at work every day; and from an egg saucepan to a steam-boiler there is something to be hammered at by every capacity!
You would say that tumult like this might satisfy the most craving appet.i.te for uproar; but not so: the Ligeois are regular gluttons for noise, and they insist upon having Verdi's new opera of ”Nabuchodonosor”
performed at their great theatre. Now, this same theatre is exactly in front of the Htel d'Angleterre, so that when, by dint of time, patience, and a partial dulness of the acoustic nerves, we were getting used to steam-factories and shot-foundries, down comes Verdi on us, with a din and clangor to which even the works of Seraing were like an _olian_ harp! Now, of all the Pretenders of these days of especial humbug, with our ”Long ranges,” Morison's pills and Louis Napoleons, I don't think you could show me a greater charlatan than this same Verdi.
I don't pretend to know a bit about music; I only knew two tunes all my life, ”G.o.d save the King” and ”Patrick's Day,” and these only because we used to stand up and take off our hats to them in the Dublin theatre; but modulated, soft sounds have always had their effect on me, and I never heard a country girl singing as she beetled her linen beside a river's bank, or listened to the deep bay of an old fox-hound of a clear winter's morning, without feeling that there was something inside of me somewhere that responded to the note. But this fellow is all marrow-bones and cleavers! Trumpets, drums, big fiddles, and ba.s.soons are the softest things he knows. I take it as a providential thing that his music cracks every voice after one season; for before long there will be n.o.body left in Europe to sing him, except it be the steam-whistle of an express-train!
But we live in strange times, Tom, that's the fact. The day was when our operas used to be taken from real life,--or what authors and poets thought was real life. We had the ”Maid of the Mill,” and the ”Duenna,”
and ”Love in a Village,” and a score more, pleasant and amusing enough; and except that there was nothing wrong or incomprehensible in them, perhaps they might have stood their ground. There was the great failure, Tom; everybody could understand them, and n.o.body need be shocked. Now, the taste is, puzzle a great many, and shock every one!
A grand opera now must be from the Old Testament. Not even drums and kettle-drums would save you, if you haven't Moses or Melchisedek to sit down in white raiment, and see some twenty damsels, with petticoats about as long as a lace ruffle, capering and att.i.tudinizing in a way that ought to make even a patriarch blush. Now, this is all wrong, Tom. The public might be amused without profanity, and even the most inveterate lover of dancing needn't ask David and Uriah for a _pas de deux_. And now, let me remark to you, that a great deal of that so-much-vaunted social liberty abroad is neither more nor less than this same lat.i.tude with respect to any and every thing. We at home were bred up to believe that good-breeding mainly consists in a certain reserve,--a cautious deference not alone for the feelings, but even the prejudices of others; that you have no right to offend your neighbor's sense of respect for fifty things that you held cheaply yourself. They reverse all this here. Everybody talks to you of yourself, ay, and of your wife and your mother, as frankly as though they were characters of the heathen mythology: they treat you like a third party in these discussions, and very likely it was a practice of this kind originally suggested the phrase of being ”beside oneself.”
You'll perhaps remark that my tone is very low and depressed, Tom; and I own to you I feel so. For a man that came abroad to enjoy himself, I am, to say the least, going a mighty strange way about it. The most rigid moralist couldn't accuse me of my epicurism, for I seem to be husbanding my Continental pleasures with a laudable degree of self-denial. Would you like a peep at us? Well, Mrs. D. is over there in No. 19, in bed with fourteen leeches on her temples, and a bottle as big as a black jack of camphor and sal-volatile beside her as a kind of table beverage; Mary Anne and Caroline are somewhere in the dim recesses of the same chamber, silent, if they 're not sobbing; James is under lock and key in No. 17, with Ollendorff's Method, and the Gospel of St. John in French; and here am I, trying to indite a few lines, with blast furnaces and bra.s.s instruments baying around me, and Paddy Byrne cleaning knives outside the door!
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