Part 33 (1/2)
”Blessed Father!” exclaimed another, ”did you see the brightness of her eyes while she was spakin?”
”No matther what she is,” said a young fellow beside them; ”the devil a purtier crature ever was made; be my soul, I only wish I had a thousand pounds, I wouldn't be long without a wife at any rate.”
The crowd having wrecked Skinadre's dwelling, and carried off and destroyed almost his whole stock of provisions, now proceeded in a different direction, with the intention of paying a similar visit to some similar character. Sarah and Darby--for he durst not venture, for the present, towards his own house--now took their way to the cabin of old Condy Dalton, where they arrived just in time to find the house surrounded by the officers of justice, and some military.
”Ah,” thought Sarah, on seeing them; ”it is done, then, an' you lost but little time about it. May G.o.d forgive you, father.”
They had scarcely entered, when one of the officers pulling out a paper, looked at it and asked, ”Isn't your name Condy or Cornelius Dalton?”--
”That is my name,” said the old man.
”I arrest you, then,” he continued, ”for the murder of one Bartholomew Sullivan.”
”It is the will of G.o.d,” replied the old man, while the tears flowed down his cheeks--”it's G.o.d's will, an' I won't consale it any longer; take me away--I'm guilty--I'm guilty.”
CHAPTEE XXI. -- Condy Datton goes to Prison.
The scene that presented itself in Condy Dalton's miserable cabin was one, indeed, which might well harrow any heart not utterly callous to human sympathy. The unhappy old man had been sitting in the armchair we have alluded to, his chin resting on his breast, and his mind apparently absorbed in deep and painful reflection, when the officers of justice entered. Many of our Landlord readers, and all, probably, of our Absentee ones, will, in the simplicity of their ignorance regarding the actual state of the lower cla.s.ses, most likely take it for granted that the picture we are about to draw exists nowhere but in our own imagination. Would to G.o.d that it were so! Gladly and willingly would we take to ourselves all the shame; acknowledge all the falsehood; pay the highest penalty for all the moral guilt of our misrepresentations, provided only any one acquainted with the country could prove to us that we are wrong, change our nature, or, in other words, falsify the evidence of our senses and obliterate our experience of the truths we are describing.
Old Dalton was sitting, as we have said, in the only memorial of his former respectability now left him--the old arm-chair--when the men bearing the warrant for his arrest presented themselves. The rain was pouring down in that close, dark, and incessant fall, which gives scarcely any hope of its ending, and throws the heart into that anxious and gloomy state which every one can feel and perhaps no one describe.
The cabin in which the Daltons now lived was of the poorest description.
When ejected from their large holding by d.i.c.k o' the Grange, or in other words, were auctioned out, they were unhappily at a loss where to find a place in which they could take a temporary refuge. A kind neighbor who happened to have the cabin in question lying unoccupied, or rather waste upon his hands, made them an offer of it; not, as he said, in the expectation that they could live in it for any length of time, but merely until they could provide themselves with a more comfortable and suitable abode.
”He wished,” he added, ”it was better for their sakes; and sorry he was to see such a family brought so low as to live in it at all!”
Alas! he knew not at the time how deeply the unfortunate family in question were steeped in distress and poverty. They accepted this miserable cabin; but in spite of every effort to improve their condition, days, weeks, and months pa.s.sed, and still found them unable to make a change for the better.
When Darby and Sarah entered, they found young Con, who had now relapsed, lying in one corner of the cabin, on a wretched shake-down bed of damp straw; while on another of the same description lay his amiable and affectionate sister Nancy. The cabin stood, as we have said, in a low, moist situation, the floor of it being actually lower--which is a common case--than the ground about it outside. It served, therefore, as a receptacle for the damp and under-water which the incessant down-pouring of rain during the whole season had occasioned. It was therefore, dangerous to tread upon the floor, it was so soft and slippery. The rain, which fell heavily, now came down through the roof in so many places that they were forced to put under it such vessels as they could spare, not even excepting the beds over each of which were placed old clothes, doubled up under dishes, pots, and little bowls, in order, if possible, to keep them dry. The house--if such it could be called--was almost dest.i.tute of furniture, nothing but a few pots, dishes, wooden noggins, some spoons, and some stools being their princ.i.p.al furniture, with the exception of one standing short-posted bed, in a corner, near the fire. There, then, in that low, damp, dark, pestilential kraal, without chimney or window, sat the old man, who, notwithstanding its squalid misery, could have looked upon it as a palace, had he been able to say to his own heart--I am not a murderer.
There, we say, he sat alone, surrounded by pestilence and famine in their most fearful shapes, listening to the moanings of his sick family, and the ceaseless dropping of the rain, which fell into the vessels that were placed to receive it. Mrs. Dalton was ”out,” a term which was used in the bitter misery of the period, to indicate that the person to whom it applied had been driven to the last resource of mendicancy; and his other daughter, Mary, had gone to a neighbor's house to beg a little fire.
As the old man uttered the words, no language could describe the misery which was depicted on his countenance.
”Take me,” he exclaimed; ”ah, no; for then what will become of these?”
pointing to his son and daughter, who were sick.
The very minions of the law felt for him; and the chief of them said, in a voice of kindness and compa.s.sion:
”It's a distressin' case; but if you'll be guided by me, you won't say anything that may be brought against yourself. I was never engaged,”
said he, looking towards Darby and Sarah, to whom he partly addressed his discourse, ”in anything so painful as this. A man of his age, now afther so many years! However--well--it can't be helped; we must do our duty.”
”Where is the rest of your family?” asked another of them; ”is this young woman a daughter of yours?”
”Not at all,” replied a third; ”this is a daughter of the Black Prophet himself; and, by j.a.pers, you hardened gipsey, it's a little too bad for you to come to see how your blasted ould father's work gets on. It's his evidence that's bringin' this dacent ould man from his family to a gaol, this miserable evenin'. Be off out o' this, I desire you; I wondher you're not ashamed to be present here, above all places in the world, you brazen devil.”
Sarah's whole soul, however, in all its best and n.o.blest sympathies, had pa.s.sed into and mingled with the scene of unparalleled misery which was then before her. She went rapidly to the bed in which young Con was I stretched; stooped down, and looking closely at him, perceived that he was in a broken and painful slumber. She then pa.s.sed to that in which his sister lay, and saw that she was also asleep. After a glance at each, she rubbed her hands with a kind of wild satisfaction, and going up to old Dalton, exclaimed--for she had not heard a syllable of the language used towards her by the officer of justice--